Department of Philosophy: People: Core Faculty: Lindley Darden

Lindley Darden (PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor of Philosophy and in the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPaS) and in the Program in Behavior, Evolution, Ecology, and Systematics (BEES). She is a philosopher of science and a historian of biology. Her research focuses on reasoning strategies in scientific change, more specifically, reasoning in the discovery of biological mechanisms, strategies for evaluating mechanisms, and diagnosis and redesign of hypothesized mechanisms, given empirical anomalies. She uses biological cases from molecular biology, classical genetics, and evolutionary theory. Another interest is in computational scientific discovery. She is an Associate of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. In June 2006, she was a Visiting Professor in the Centre Cavailles for History and Philosophy of Science at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and the Clark-Way-Harrison Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. She was President of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, 2001-2003. She served as Program Chair of the 1996 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association and edited two special issues of the journal Philosophy of Science with the 1996 proceedings. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation (1999-2002, 1990-91; 1978-79), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976), the American Council of Learned Societies (1982) and the Mellon Foundation (1994). She serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Philosophy of Science, Biology & Philosophy, is a Contributing Editor to Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Biological Knowledge, a BioMed Central Open Access journal. She was designated a Distinguished Scholar/Teacher of the University of Maryland for 2006.

Email: darden at umd.edu

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Representative Publications

Reasoning in Biological Discoveries: Mechanisms, Interfield Relations, and Anomaly Resolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Theory Change in Science: Strategies from Mendelian Genetics. New York: Oxford University Press, Series in History and Philosophy of Biology, 1991.

"Mechanisms in Biology," Introduction. Special Issue: Mechanisms in Biology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological Sciences. vol. 36, Issue 2, June 2005. (Co-authored and guest edited with Carl F. Craver.)

"Relations Among Fields: Mendelian, Cytological and Molecular Mechanisms," in Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden (eds.) Special Issue: Mechanisms in Biology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological Sciences. vol. 36: 357-371, Issue 2, June 2005.

"Flow of Information in Molecular Biological Mechanisms," Biological Theory 1 (3): 280-287

"Anomaly Identification and Resolution for the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology," in Hans-Joerg Rheinberger and Soraya de Chadarevian (eds.), History and Epistemology of Molecular Biology and Beyond: Problems and Perspectives. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, pp. 127-139.

"Mechanisms and Models," in David L. Hull and Michael Ruse (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Biology. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139-159.

"Thinking Again About Mechanisms," Philosophy of Science 75 (5):958-969

"Molecular Biology," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/molecular-biology

"Reductionism in Biology," (2009), Invited and Refereed Keynote Article. Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd http://www.els.net