Derek Turner teaches philosophy at Connecticut College where he is also the Karla Heurich Harrison ’28 Director of the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment.
A past winner of the John S. King Award for Excellence in Teaching, Turner is Associate Director of the College’s Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment. He was awarded the 2017 Nancy Batson Nisbet Rash Faculty Award for Excellence in Research.
Turner’s research focuses on philosophical issues in historical science, especially paleontology and the earth sciences. He is interested in understanding how scientists come to know things about the deep past. Some of his recent work explores the big ideas of macroevolutionary theory: historical contingency, evolutionary stasis, species selection, and the study of large-scale evolutionary trends. He is the author of Making Prehistory: Historical Science and the Scientific Realism Debate and Paleontology: A Philosophical Introduction.
He is also a founding editor and contributor to a new blog for philosophy of paleontology, Extinct.
