The purpose of this M. A. thesis is to describe the accounts of scientific explanation, with an emphasis on the mechanistic approach. I will provide an overview of the main accounts, beginning with the covering law account – the account that is usually a starting point for the contemporary scientific explanation debate. Following the covering law account, I will describe the causal-mechanical account – the account that has introduced new notions in the scientific explanation debate, namely the causality and mechanism concepts. Within the causal-mechanical theoretical framework, the new mechanistic approach will be addressed in detail; primarily through the analysis of case-studies in the life sciences. I will also explore the new mechanistic account and deliberate three basic definitions in the debate. Furthermore, I will put special emphasis on the link between the functional and mechanistic explanations because both of them share the same principle – the function is the foundation for finding mechanisms. In addition, I will address the approaches to the ways in which we represent mechanisms. Special focus will be put on the ontic/epistemic distinction and the abstraction/specification processes. In that regard, I will argue that the specification process has more explanatory power than the abstraction process. Moreover, I will present three steps in the explanatory process and argue that the second step (the extracting step) has more explanatory power than the first and third step. Furthermore, I will try to show, via the example of protein synthesis that detailed representations hold more explanatory power. The main reason for that lies in a greater level of detailing, which brings one closer to understanding mechanisms as found in nature. Finally, I will explore the issue of relevance criteria for the extracted data in the explanatory process.