Description

Carl Craver is Full Professor in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program and the Department of Philosophy at Washington University in Saint Louis. Dr. Craver received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. After a two-year postdoc at the University of Maryland, College Park, he joined the Philosophy faculty at Florida International University, and he moved to Washington University in Saint Louis in 2001. Dr. Craver’s areas of specialization include philosophy of science, with particular emphasis on the philosophy of cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology; philosophy of mind, with particular emphasis on memory, self, personhood, and agency; history of neuroscience, with particular emphasis on neurophysiology and cognitive neuropsychology; and cognitive neuropsychology, with particular emphasis on autobiographical and episodic memory and its role in moral and economic decision-making. His 2007 book, Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience (Clarendon Press), develops a framework for thinking about the norms of scientific explanation in physiological sciences such as neuroscience.  His 2013 book with Lindley Darden, In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences (University of Chicago Press), develops a mechanistic view of discovery in biology. He is working with Shayna Rosenbaum, York University to study deficits in agency and moral reasoning in people with amnesia. Other research interests include general work on the nature of scientific explanation, the norms of progress for experimental instruments and techniques, and the difference between modeler's and maker's knowledge of the brain.