2026

The College of Liberal Arts will launch a pilot Learning Community called The Art of Attention. CAIC has been involved from the outset and will help design and teach a new philosophy course of the same name. The course will equip students to navigate the modern attention economy, understand how attention shapes autonomy and identity.

2025

Established in July 2025, CAIC (pronounced “cake”) is co-directed by Philosophy Professors Daniel Kelly and Sarah Robins. The center serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research on foundational questions about cognition, agency, and intelligence, supporting projects that draw on philosophy, psychology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and related fields.

CAIC builds on the Purdue Philosophy Department’s significant expansion in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In addition to Kelly and Taylor Davis, the department now includes Eamon Duede, Javier Gomez-Lavin, Brett Karlan, Corey Maley, Sarah Robins, Maria Waggoner, and Evan Westra. Their research spans a wide range of topics, including:

  • computation in brains and machines
  • the epistemology of large language models and their impact on scientific practice
  • the nature and structure of memory
  • evolving conceptions of rationality and authenticity
  • moral emotions and the cognitive underpinnings of character
  • the psychology of social norms and their role in cooperation and information flow
  • social change and the relationship between individual agency and structural reform

This collective strength has been recognized nationally: Purdue is now ranked among the Top 10 PhD programs in the United States for studying philosophy of cognitive science.

The center joins a series of recent initiatives at Purdue including the BA in Artificial Intelligence, VRAI Lab established in 2023, and the BA in Cognitive Science which launches in fall 2026