Lindley Darden
Visiting Fellow
Academic Year 1996-97
University of Maryland, USA

2009

Lindley Darden was the Clark-Way-Harrison Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, Jan-May, 2008, where she taught an advanced philosophy of biology course and worked on a book with Carl Craver, tentative title: In Search of Biological Mechanisms. She served as the Faculty Co-Organizer of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) Graduate Training Workshop, Future Directions in Genetics Studies, Washington University, St. Louis, August 6-10, 2008, where she coordinated a workshop on "Mechanisms in Hierarchical Context." During 2008, she presented talks on reasoning in mechanism discovery at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis University, and Georgia State University in Atlanta. She and Kevin Elliott co-organized a workshop on "Anomaly in Contemporary Philosophy of Science" for the Philosophy of Science Association Meeting, Pittsburgh, Nov. 6-9, 2008 and she presented a paper, "Reasoning in Anomaly Resolution for Biological Mechanisms." She enjoyed an invited book signing at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, in October 2008 for her book, Reasoning in Biological Discoveries (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She published "Thinking Again About Mechanisms," Philosophy of Science 75 (5) (2008): 958–969. At the University of Maryland, she served as faculty advisor to Ben Barros, whose paper won the PSA Graduate Student Essay Prize and was published: Barros, D. Benjamin (2008), "Natural Selection as a Mechanism," Philosophy of Science 75: 306-322. 

2011
Lindley Darden of the University of Maryland and Carl F. Craver of Washington University in St. Louis received a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant to support their joint work on  "In Search of Mechanisms:  Strategies from Biology."  Their goal is to complete a book manuscript on the topic, written for a general audience, by 2012. Lindley was a keynote speaker at the conference on Mechanisms and Causality in Philosophy of Biology and Economics at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in March 2011.  She and Roberta Millstein also traveled to National Chung Cheng University in Chia Yi City in southern Taiwan and presented a joint colloquium to the Department of Philosophy, debating the topic of whether natural selection is a mechanism.   Lindley published a review of James T. Costa's The Annotated Origin:  A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, with Introduction and Notes in Annals of Science (2011 online first).

2014

Recently published:

"Mechanisms versus Causes in Biology and Medicine," in Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen, and Roberta L. Millstein (eds.), Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics (Springer, 2013). She and Carl F. Craver published In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across the Life Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

2015

Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden's In Search of Mechanisms:  Discoveries Across the Life Sciences (University of Chicago Press, October 2013) was chosen as one of "Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014: Top 25 Books.”

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