Carl F. Craver, a professor of philosophy and of philosophy-neuroscience-psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a grant of $282,603 from the National Science Foundation.
The NSF grant will fund a new project titled “Time and Episodic Memory: Neuropsychology Meets Philosophy.” This will build on Craver’s previous investigations with R. Shayna Rosenbaum of York University in Toronto into the diverse ways that episodic memory — the neurocognitive system that enables conscious recollection of previously experienced events — figures in our sense of time and its passing. Specifically, Craver will explore how recent case studies involving those with episodic amnesia might illuminate philosophical questions about memory in relation to time and self.
Craver is a leading figure in the field of new mechanical philosophy, which explores the philosophical assumptions underlying scientific explanation. He is author of “Explaining The Brain” (2007), which argues against reductionist frameworks to defend a multilevel and mechanistic view of explanation appropriate to the cognitive neurosciences; and “In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across the Life Sciences” (2013, with Lindley Darden), which builds a general theory of mechanism discovery in the life sciences, replete with examples from many areas of the biological and ecological sciences.
