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The New Mechanism is a framework in philosophy of science that has emerged within the last two decades. It aims to clarify the nature of explanation in the special sciences thus avoiding problems with either reductionist or higher-level models of scientific explanation. The received view to philosophy of science originates from logical positivism, an extreme form of empiricism that took physics as the prime example of scientific practice (Godfrey-Smith 2003). Logical positivists focused on epistemic features of science rather than on actual scientific practice and treated scientific explanations as logical arguments. However, scientific discovery seems less congenial to logical analysis. The development of the field of biology unveiled nature as hierarchically arranged. As a consequence, a sort of naturalistic turn occurred in philosophy of science that shifted the focus from thinking about laws to thinking about mechanisms, and from thinking about theories to thinking about models. Whereas traditional accounts of scientific explanation treat explanation as a form of inter-theoretic reduction, the mechanistic account is an integrative approach that assumes that adequate explanations span multiple levels of organization (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005; Bechtel 2008; Craver 2007; Glennan 2017). The aim of this seminar is to investigate whether the mechanistic program is able to provide an attainable and valuable alternative to traditional accounts of scientific explanation.
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