Stuart Glennan received his B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from Yale University in 1985. After a few years doing public policy work for the United States government, he enrolled in the philosophy program at the University of Chicago, receiving a master’s degree in 1989 and a PhD in 1992. Dr. Glennan has taught at Butler since that time, serving as chair of the philosophy and religion department from 1999-2007. Glennan’s research is centered in the philosophy of science. He has written chiefly on topics concerning causation, scientific explanation and the concept of mechanism. He has also written on science education and on the relation between science and religion. Additionally, Glennan is the co-author of Elements of Deductive Inference, a textbook for symbolic logic.
Articles
Mechanisms, Causes, and the Layered Model of the World, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2010)
Most philosophical accounts of causation take causal relations to obtain between individuals and events in...
Ephemeral Mechanisms and Historical Explanation, Erkenntnis (2009)
While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and...
Productivity, relevance and natural selection, Biology & Philosophy (2008)
Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether...
Whose Science and whose Religion? Reflections on the Relations between Scientific and Religious Worldviews, Science & Education (2007)
Arguments about the relationship between science and religion often proceed by identifying a set of...
The modeler in the crib, Philosophical Explorations (2005)
A number of developmental psychologists have argued for a theory they call the theory theory...
Books
Elements of deductive inference : an introduction to symbolic logic (with Joseph Bessie) (2000)
Elements of Deductive Inference is a introductory textbook in symbolic logic. Joe and I wrote...
Contributions to Books
Aspects of Human Historiographic Explanation: A View from the Philosophy of Science, Explanation in the Special Sciences - The Case of Biology and History (2013)
While some philosophers of history have argued that explanations in human history are of a...
Singular and General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective, Causality in the Sciences (2011)
My aim in this paper is to make a case for the singularist view from...
Mechanisms (Oxford), The Oxford Handbook of Causation (2010)
Mechanism is undoubtedly a causal concept, in the sense that ordinary definitions and philosophical analyses...
Mechanisms, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science (2008)
This book chapter contains an overview of recent work on mechanisms -- especially the work...
Explanation, The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia (2006)
This encyclopedia article provides an overview of developments in the theory of explanation from Hempel...