Stuart Glennan

 Stuart Glennan is the Harry Ice Professor of Philosophy and the director of Butler University’s Science, Technology and Environmental Studies  program. He has a B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from Yale University, and a MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago.  He has worked as a teacher, scholar and administrator at Butler University since 1992. 

Professor Glennan’s area of specialization is the philosophy of science, with particular attention to biology, psychology and neuroscience.  He has written about causation, explanation, and model building. He is chiefly known for his work on the nature of mechanisms and the role of mechanistic models and explanations across the sciences.  He is author of The New Mechanical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Causation: The Basics (Routledge,  2024) and he is the editor, with Phyllis
Illari, of the Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy (2018). He has also written on the topic of religion and science, and science education,and the philosophy of history.  Links to publications can be found on Butler’s archive and at Google scholar. 

  

For much of his time at Butler, Glennan has served in administrative positions, including seven years as chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and twelve years as associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has been instrumental in founding a number of Butler’s interdisciplinary programs, including Science, Technology and Society, Environmental Studies, Data Science, Neuroscience and Public Health. He currently serves on the steering committee for the new Neuroscience major. 

Professor Glennan has taught numerous courses in philosophy, and in support of Butler’s interdisciplinary programs, and he has contributed to many areas of Butler’s core curriculum – including the first-year seminar, text and ideas, analytical reasoning, and the social world. In recent years, Glennan’s teaching assignment have included philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, intro to science and technology studies, logic, as well as introductory philosophy courses and a seminar on causation.