Faculty Research Areas


Learn more about our faculty's research areas and scholarly expertise

Our department is one of the fastest-growing and fastest-rising departments in the country. With a backbone of strength in analytic metaphysics & epistemology, philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy (including Continental), we support strong research groups in cognitive science (including AI), philosophy of religion, and social & political philosophy.

Explore the tabs below to learn more about our faculty's research areas and scholarly expertise.

Research Areas

Faculty: 

Leonard Harris   

Harris has taught specialty courses that include Liberation Theory and the Nature of Philosophy.  The focus of these courses include works by 19th and 20th century philosophers such as John Rawls, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. 

Harris’s conception of philosophy is ‘philosophy’ as quintessentially ‘born of struggle,’; it offers a normative definition of philosophy and rejects the classical conception of philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom and use of critical reasoning skills.

 

Daniel Smith   

Daniel Smith is the author of Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh 2012), the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (2012, with Henry Somers Hall), and has translated, from the French, books by Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Essays Critical and Clinical), Pierre Klossowski (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle), Isabelle Stengers (The Invention of Modern Science), Michel Serres (Thumbelina), and Raymond Ruyer (Cybernetics and the Origin of Information). He is the co-director of “The Deleuze Seminars” project (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu), which is translating Deleuze’s seminar lectures and is supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is currently working on a book entitled "Technicity and Thought."

Christopher Yeomans

"I mainly work on figures in the German Continental tradition: Hegel, Heidegger, and Critical Theory.  Within that tradition I have broad interests running the gamut from political theory to the philosophy of nature and theories of space and time."

Ethics:   

Daniel Frank   

"I have teaching interests in ethics from Plato to the present.  I have published on Socratic and Platonic ethics, Aristotle’s virtue theory, medieval Islamic ethical theory, and Maimonides’s ethics and moral psychology."

Leonard Harris   

Harris has taught the graduate course Philosophy of the Social Sciences.  The course is an exploration of the nature of the concepts in the social sciences and a study of the ways in which they have been, and are, employed. The focus is of the course on the ontology of social action, particularly, competing concepts of group agency (structuralist, historical ontology, volitional, materialist) with a focus on racial and ethnic groups.  Works by Emile Durkheim, Auguste Comte, Georg Simmel, John S. Mill and Karl Marx are included required readings.

Patrick Kain

Patrick Kain’s interests in ethics include both the history of moral philosophy and recent work in ethics and metaethics. Kain is particularly interested in origins and nature of Kantian approaches to ethics, from the early modern period to contemporary debates, and ranging from foundational questions about value, dignity, and obligation, to the moral status of human beings and other animals, and to connections between moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and the human sciences. Kain is also active in thinking about the nature of academic freedom and the freedom of expression.   

JP Messina

"My work in ethics has largely centered on issues in applied ethics, particularly in the ethics of speech. What duties do we have as speakers and listeners? When is it appropriate to hold others accountable for violating these duties through practices of informal social punishment (e.g. through call-outs, naming and shaming, and dissociation)? When is it appropriate to hold others accountable through mechanisms of formal social punishment (e.g., firing or sanctioning an employee)? What principles guide the exercise of discretion in determining the shape of our associations? And how should intermediaries (publishers, broadcasters, social media platforms, and search engines) think about content-moderation and its relationship to free speech values? In addition to these issues, which are addressed in my forthcoming book, Private Censorship, I have developing interests in the ethics of data science and artificial  intelligence and am currently a core faculty member of Purdue’s interdisciplinary Governance and Responsible A.I. Lab."

Jacqueline Mariña

"My work in ethics is historically based. I focus on questions such as the ground of value, the value of the individual, freedom and determinism, and metaphysics of the will. I explore these issues in the context of my work on Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher."

 

Moral Psychology:   

Taylor Davis 

"I came to philosophy through psychology, and my research has always focused on scientific theories of the mind, with a focus on the role of evolutionary history. My current focus is on the evolution of norms, or cultural values, and on the theoretical problems raised by the many conflicting ways norms are represented across the social sciences. This includes concerns about the nature of norms in general, but also certain specific types of norms, such as moral norms, norms of sustainability and environmentalism, and norms of democracy. This focus on norms is a natural extension of earlier work on the evolution of religion, morality, and culture in general, some of which focuses on purely theoretical issues, and has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, while other work, published in Philosophical Psychology and Social Cognition, is empirical, using methods from experimental philosophy to measure folk intuitions about metaethics and the concept of morality. Finally, one strand of my research focuses on applying scientific theory, rather than developing it: I argue for climate solutions that focus on internalizing norms of sustainability and environmentalism, rather than merely complying with them as a means of avoiding punishment and gaining approval. Work on this topic has been published in Nature Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability Science, and Ecology and Society."  

Javier Gomez-Lavin   

"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. 

This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022).  Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures." 

Daniel Kelly   

"My work in ethics and moral theory is typically applied. It has explores how the insights of the cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences, especially the character of human moral psychology, can most fruitfully be applied to challenges like climate change, misinformation and polarization, and systemic injustice. I have done work on implicit social bias, social norms, and moral disgust."

Evan Westra

Evan Westra specializes in empirically informed moral psychology. He writes on topics such as virtue signaling, moral character, hypocrisy, moral development, and the relationship between social norms and moral progress.

Aesthetics:   

Javier Gomez-Lavin

"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. 

This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022).  Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures." 

Logic and Metalogic:

Dana Tulodziecki

Philosophy of Language:   

Jamin Asay   

 "Much of my work focuses on the nature of truth and truthmaking, and their connection to other areas in philosophy. My first book, The Primitivist Theory of Truth, defends the view that truth is an undefinable primitive concept. My second book, A Theory of Truthmaking, defends my novel approach to truthmaker theory, which is also the subject of my third book, Truthmaking. I have also published on the topics of deflationary truth, moral realism, scientific realism, Tarski, modality, theories of ontological commitment, presentism, and the liar paradox. I am currently researching the role of truth in political speech, psychological development, and the Chinese philosophical tradition."

Epistemology:   

Michael Bergmann

Bergmann’s research in epistemology covers the following topics: internalism, externalism, foundationalism, infinitism, proper function, disagreement, epistemic circularity, defeaters, commonsensism, skepticism, evidentialism, phenomenal conservatism, epistemic intuition, memory, a priori belief, and experimental philosophy.

Eamon Duede

Duede’s work in epistemology is concerned with scientific justification, joint-inquiry, collective knowledge, proof, and understanding. He studies the flow of knowledge and influence between communities of experts and other audiences and examines how these flows can be catalyzed or stymied by technological and institutional factors

Metaphysics:   

Jamin Asay   

"Much of my work focuses on the nature of truth and truthmaking, and their connection to other areas in philosophy. My first book, The Primitivist Theory of Truth, defends the view that truth is an undefinable primitive concept. My second book, A Theory of Truthmaking, defends my novel approach to truthmaker theory, which is also the subject of my third book, Truthmaking. I have also published on the topics of deflationary truth, moral realism, scientific realism, Tarski, modality, theories of ontological commitment, presentism, and the liar paradox. I am currently researching the role of truth in political speech, psychological development, and the Chinese philosophical tradition."

 

Michael Bergmann   

Bergmann’s research in metaphysics covers the following topics: free will, compatibilism, incompatibilism, agent causation, agent responsibility, presentism, actualism, and platonism.

 

Jeff Brower   

Brower research in metaphysics has focused on issues at the intersection of medieval and contemporary metaphysics--including the problem of universals, individuation, hylomorphism, material constitution, change, persistence, space, time, and motion.

 

Faculty:

Taylor Davis   

"I came to philosophy through psychology, and my research has always focused on scientific theories of the mind, with a focus on the role of evolutionary history. My current focus is on the evolution of norms, or cultural values, and on the theoretical problems raised by the many conflicting ways norms are represented across the social sciences. This includes concerns about the nature of norms in general, but also certain specific types of norms, such as moral norms, norms of sustainability and environmentalism, and norms of democracy. This focus on norms is a natural extension of earlier work on the evolution of religion, morality, and culture in general, some of which focuses on purely theoretical issues, and has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, while other work, published in Philosophical Psychology and Social Cognition, is empirical, using methods from experimental philosophy to measure folk intuitions about metaethics and the concept of morality. Finally, one strand of my research focuses on applying scientific theory, rather than developing it: I argue for climate solutions that focus on internalizing norms of sustainability and environmentalism, rather than merely complying with them as a means of avoiding punishment and gaining approval. Work on this topic has been published in Nature Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability Science, and Ecology and Society."

Brett Karlan

Daniel Kelly   

"My work in philosophy of mind is largely empirically informed, and seeks to understand the structure and functioning of our moral minds. Much of my recent work has been focused on social norms and norm psychology, and on how culture influences minds and behaviors."

Javier Gomez-Lavin   

"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research in experimental philosophy and aesthetics, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. Presently, we’re empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures."

Corey Maley

Corey’s research is focused on foundational questions regarding the nature of computation, particularly how to incorporate analog and other forms of non-digital computation into a coherent conceptual framework alongside digital computation. Part of the aim of this research is to understand how to unify the cognitive and neural computations posited by scientists to explain the nature of mentality with computation as it is understood in computer science. For example, neuroscientists routinely claim that certain parts of the brain literally perform computations, while researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning deploy computational systems to perform increasingly sophisticated cognitive tasks. However, it is unclear what unifies—and justifies—the idea that all of these are literal (and not just metaphorical) computations. This is where his research aims to shed some light.

Sarah Robins

Sarah Robins’ research focuses on memory, a topic through which she explores a range of issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. She is particularly interested in the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering. Through wok on the memory trace, she is also exploring questions about mental content, cognitive ontology and cognitive architecture, and the role of conceptual engineering in scientific inquiry.

Maria Waggoner

Evan Westra 

Evan Westra works on a number of topics in the philosophy of cognitive science, with a special focus on social cognition. He is particularly interested how we use concepts like knowledge and belief, the cognitive science and epistemology of character judgment, and the cognitive science of norms. He also has interests in the philosophy of animal minds and in debates about mental representation.

 

Philosophy of Religion:  

Michael Bergmann   

Bergmann’s research in philosophy of religion covers the following topics: the problem of evil, skeptical theism, divine hiddenness, Reformed epistemology, religious disagreement, evolutionary debunking arguments, theistic evolution, Biblical studies, middle knowledge, divine aseity, divine responsibility, and divine freedom.

Jeff Brower   

Brower's research in philosophy of religion has focused on the following topics: divine attributes (esp. aseity, simplicity, goodness, and omnipresence), nature of religious language (esp. the doctrine of analogy), and topics in philosophical theology (esp. Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, and Eucharist).

Taylor Davis 

"I came to philosophy through psychology, and my research has always focused on scientific theories of the mind, with a focus on the role of evolutionary history. My current focus is on the evolution of norms, or cultural values, and on the theoretical problems raised by the many conflicting ways norms are represented across the social sciences. This includes concerns about the nature of norms in general, but also certain specific types of norms, such as moral norms, norms of sustainability and environmentalism, and norms of democracy. This focus on norms is a natural extension of earlier work on the evolution of religion, morality, and culture in general, some of which focuses on purely theoretical issues, and has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, while other work, published in Philosophical Psychology and Social Cognition, is empirical, using methods from experimental philosophy to measure folk intuitions about metaethics and the concept of morality. Finally, one strand of my research focuses on applying scientific theory, rather than developing it: I argue for climate solutions that focus on internalizing norms of sustainability and environmentalism, rather than merely complying with them as a means of avoiding punishment and gaining approval. Work on this topic has been published in Nature Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability Science, and Ecology and Society."

Paul Draper   

"My philosophical work applies theories of evidence and probabilistic reasoning to problems in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science.  My work in philosophy of religion, which is my primary research specialization, focuses on evidential arguments for and against God’s existence, including cosmological arguments, design arguments, and arguments from evil.  My work in philosophy of science focuses primarily on probabilistic arguments for multiple universes and the requirement of total evidence, although I have also written on Darwinian gradualism.  In addition, I have combined my interests in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science to generate a couple articles on the relationship between science, religion, and naturalism.  Finally, my longstanding fascination with David Hume’s work on religion has led to a meager amount of work in the history of philosophy, while an emerging interest in the philosophy of mind and especially the hard problem of consciousness may or may not lead to something of value in the future."

Patrick Kain   

Patrick Kain’s interests in philosophy of religion include topics in Kant’s philosophy of religion, connections between moral and religious epistemology, and issues in philosophical theology about divine freedom, divine goodness, and the divine will.

Jacqueline Mariña

"My work in the philosophy of religion is mostly historical, focusing on the work of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher. I explore themes such as the relation between ethics and religion, the ground of value, the problem of evil, and theories of human transformation. More recently I’ve done some work on the problem of evil from an analytic perspective."

General Philosophy of Science:   

Jamin Asay   

 "Much of my work focuses on the nature of truth and truthmaking, and their connection to other areas in philosophy. My first book, The Primitivist Theory of Truth, defends the view that truth is an undefinable primitive concept. My second book, A Theory of Truthmaking, defends my novel approach to truthmaker theory, which is also the subject of my third book, Truthmaking. I have also published on the topics of deflationary truth, moral realism, scientific realism, Tarski, modality, theories of ontological commitment, presentism, and the liar paradox. I am currently researching the role of truth in political speech, psychological development, and the Chinese philosophical tradition."

Paul Draper   

 "My philosophical work applies theories of evidence and probabilistic reasoning to problems in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science.  My work in philosophy of religion, which is my primary research specialization, focuses on evidential arguments for and against God’s existence, including cosmological arguments, design arguments, and arguments from evil.  My work in philosophy of science focuses primarily on probabilistic arguments for multiple universes and the requirement of total evidence, although I have also written on Darwinian gradualism.  In addition, I have combined my interests in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science to generate a couple articles on the relationship between science, religion, and naturalism.  Finally, my longstanding fascination with David Hume’s work on religion has led to a meager amount of work in the history of philosophy, while an emerging interest in the philosophy of mind and especially the hard problem of consciousness may or may not lead to something of value in the future. "

Eamon Duede

Duede’s work in the philosophy of science is concerned with models, representations, computation, artificial intelligence, proof in mathematics, influence, discovery, and justification. Broadly, Duede’s focus is on understanding how norms, scientists, institutions, and technology interact to generate knowledge.

Leonard Harris   

Harris has taught the graduate course Philosophy of the Social Sciences.  The course is an exploration of the nature of the concepts in the social sciences and a study of the ways in which they have been, and are, employed. The focus is of the course on the ontology of social action, particularly, competing concepts of group agency (structuralist, historical ontology, volitional, materialist) with a focus on racial and ethnic groups.  Works by Emile Durkheim, Auguste Comte, Georg Simmel, John S. Mill and Karl Marx are included required readings.
 
 
Dana Tulodziecki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University and Affiliate Faculty in the Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI).  She holds degrees in Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science from the LSE and Columbia University.  Her current work falls into two main areas: first, questions related to scientific progress, theory-choice, and the question of what factors, besides the empirical evidence, make epistemic contributions to our scientific theories and hypotheses; second, the Philosophy of Space Science and Space Ethics and Policy.  She has written on these topics in journals such as The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, Synthese, and Nature Communications.  She is Chair of the Executive Board for the Committee for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science, an Associate Editor for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and on the Editorial Board for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and Purdue University Press.  She is also a member of several space-related ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications) Advisory Groups for DARPA. Her work has been featured on Science News, CNN, Washington Post, History Channel, Popular Mechanics, How Stuff Works, and other venues.  Her outreach also includes speaking for podcasts and radio, such as NPR and Radio France.

Philosophy of Biology:   

Taylor Davis   

"I came to philosophy through psychology, and my research has always focused on scientific theories of the mind, with a focus on the role of evolutionary history. My current focus is on the evolution of norms, or cultural values, and on the theoretical problems raised by the many conflicting ways norms are represented across the social sciences. This includes concerns about the nature of norms in general, but also certain specific types of norms, such as moral norms, norms of sustainability and environmentalism, and norms of democracy. This focus on norms is a natural extension of earlier work on the evolution of religion, morality, and culture in general, some of which focuses on purely theoretical issues, and has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, while other work, published in Philosophical Psychology and Social Cognition, is empirical, using methods from experimental philosophy to measure folk intuitions about metaethics and the concept of morality. Finally, one strand of my research focuses on applying scientific theory, rather than developing it: I argue for climate solutions that focus on internalizing norms of sustainability and environmentalism, rather than merely complying with them as a means of avoiding punishment and gaining approval. Work on this topic has been published in Nature Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability Science, and Ecology and Society."

 

Faculty:

Eamon Duede

Duede’s work in the philosophy of technology focuses on questions concerned with how emerging technologies (principally AI) are transforming science and society. Through his appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, Duede’s works closely with computer scientists, natural scientists, and applied artificial intelligence researchers to actively develop and evaluate frontier computational systems (currently, LLMs and computational agents) for science that are sensitive to the disciplinary aims and values of distinct scientific fields.

Javier Gomez-Lavin

"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. 

This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022).  Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures." 

Brett Karlan

Corey Maley

Corey’s research is focused on foundational questions regarding the nature of computation, particularly how to incorporate analog and other forms of non-digital computation into a coherent conceptual framework alongside digital computation. Part of the aim of this research is to understand how to unify the cognitive and neural computations posited by scientists to explain the nature of mentality with computation as it is understood in computer science. For example, neuroscientists routinely claim that certain parts of the brain literally perform computations, while researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning deploy computational systems to perform increasingly sophisticated cognitive tasks. However, it is unclear what unifies—and justifies—the idea that all of these are literal (and not just metaphorical) computations. This is where his research aims to shed some light.

JP Messina

Lynn Parrish   

Lynn Parrish is a philosopher with special interests in social and political theory, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of art and architecture. She teaches a wide variety of undergraduate courses in these areas.

Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith is the author of Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh 2012), the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (2012, with Henry Somers Hall), and has translated, from the French, books by Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Essays Critical and Clinical), Pierre Klossowski (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle), Isabelle Stengers (The Invention of Modern Science), Michel Serres (Thumbelina), and Raymond Ruyer (Cybernetics and the Origin of Information). He is the co-director of “The Deleuze Seminars” project (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu), which is translating Deleuze’s seminar lectures and is supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is currently working on a book entitled "Technicity and Thought."

Faculty:   

Dan Frank   

"I have teaching interests in the history of political thought from Plato to the present. Outside of the usual syllabus of authors, I have published on the Platonic political philosophical background to medieval conceptions of prophecy and on Spinoza’s political philosophy."

Javier Gomez-Lavin   

"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. 

This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022).  Presently in the PuNCs Lab we're empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships, with a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures." 

Leonard Harris   

Harris has taught the undergraduate Social and Political Philosophy course and related courses such as the Philosophy of Race. The course is a study of major social and political philosophers from Plato to contemporary authors. Issues such as justice, rights and freedom, community, and the "globalized" future will be considered.  The course explores the impact of racism as understood through the prism of competing philosophies and consider competing prescriptions and definitions.  Competing orientations offer incommensurable approaches.  The course critically examines interpretations, definitions, and justifications.  Classical authors such as Plato, J.J. Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John S. Mill as well as contemporary authors such as Angela Davis, Peter Singer and Charles Mills are included readings.
 

Dan Kelly

"My work in social and political philosophy seeks to continue finding ways to integrate individual oriented approaches to social change with structuralist approaches. Recently I have been especially concerned to develop our understanding of social norms and norm psychology in ways that guide efforts at social improvement."

JP Messina 

"My work in social and political philosophy focuses on free speech and censorship, theories of authority and legitimacy, and questions about the grounds of distributive and retributive justice. On the first front, my book, Private Censorship (to be published this fall with Oxford University Press) addresses recent concerns about censorship by non-state actors and considers a number of regulatory proposals to address them. On the second, I continue to wrestle with Kant’s freedom-based theory of legitimacy and authority, with a special interest in thinking about whether and how it differs from contemporary freedom-based theories and whether it can deliver on its promise to justify institutions like private property. Regarding distributive justice, I am particularly interested in the relationship (if there is one) between free and responsible human agency and our public accountability practices. How do institutions respond appropriately to us as agents, under various descriptions?" 

Lynn Parrish   

Lynn Parrish is a philosopher with special interests in social and political theory, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of art and architecture. She teaches a wide variety of undergraduate courses in these areas.

Christopher Yeomans

"With co-author Justin Litaker, I am currently at work on a monograph tentatively entitled A Critical Theory of Economic Agency, which attempts to provide a normative theory of banks, markets and firms to replace our outmoded normative concepts for economic activity. Only by abandoning the concepts of property and contract that were formed in the early modern period in response to feudalism can we come to an accurate theory of our current economic agency and thus determine what is valuable about it and ought to be protected in it."

Ancient Philosophy:   

Dan Frank   

"I have teaching and research interests in ancient philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.  I teach courses and seminars at all levels in ancient philosophy, and co-lead (with Lea Schroeder) the Greek philosophy reading group.  I have directed dissertations in the area, and published on Socratic ethics, Platonic ethics and metaphysics, Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics, and the Stoics."    

 

Medieval Philosophy:   

Jeffrey Brower   

Brower's research in medieval philosophy has focused on figures in the Latin West (esp. Anselm, Abelard, and Aquinas) and on topics at the intersection of medieval metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Brower is currently working on issues related to Aquinas's views about matter, place, time, and motion.

Dan Frank

"I have teaching and research interests in medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and the Greek philosophical tradition in the medieval period.  I teach advanced undergraduate and graduate courses and am prepared to direct dissertations in this area.  I have published widely on Islamic and Jewish philosophers from the 10th century on, such as Farabi, Saadia, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Maimonides."

Modern Philosophy:   

Michael Jacovides

Jacovides’ research has mostly been on early modern philosophy, and mostly on Locke and Hume. He wrote a book on Locke, Locke’s Image of the World, which is about Locke’s metaphysics and the ways that his scientific views affected his metaphysics. He is interested in the background to Locke’s discussion of personal identity, especially in how he borrowed views of Hobbes and reacted to views of Francis Mercury Van Helmont. Jacovides was given a grant to write a book on Hume which turned into three book projects, one on Hume’s views on laws and causes, one on his empirical arguments against believing in miracle stories, and one on his views on probable inference, which fits them into the associationist tradition in psychology. He has research interests in Descartes’s epistemology and in how he fits into the scientific revolution. He has research interests in Spinoza’s metaphysics and in his advice for living.  He is interested in the deep history of the concept of a law of nature and in the metaphysics (and philosophy of science) of laws, causes, and identity over time.   

Patrick Kain

Patrick Kain’s interests in the history of modern philosophy focus the origins, development, and significance of modern moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, anthropology, and metaphysics and epistemology, esp. in the work of Immanuel Kant. 

Kant and German Philosophy:   

Patrick Kain   

Jacqueline Mariña

My research focuses on Kant and his reception in the 19th century. I have done a good bit of work on Friedrich Schleiermacher, especially in the areas of ethics and philosophy of religion. My current research is focused on Kant. I finished a final draft of a book on Kant’s ethics now entitled Kant’s Metaphysics of the Will, which I have been working on for some time. I have two other book projects on Kant in differing stages of completion: one on the relation of Kant’s ethics to his understanding of religion, and another on the question of personal identity in Kant. I regularly teach 19th century philosophy.

I also have an interest in ancient philosophy. I regularly teach a section of the ancient philosophy, and early on in my career I published on Aristotle. 

JP Messina 

"My work in the history of philosophy focuses on Kant and his immediate intellectual context (including Achenwall, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Smith). I am particularly interested in the relationship between Kant’s notion of moral autonomy and his notion of political freedom. Whereas many commentators argue that the first does not provide direct justificatory support for the second, I argue that this is a mistake. Additionally, I have written on Kant’s justification of property rights, his (and Smith’s) ambivalence with respect to commercial society, and his theory of state legitimacy. On the latter front, I have argued that Kant accepts a “provisionality thesis,” holding that acquired rights are provisional until highly demanding conditions are met. Because these conditions are not realized in our world, Kant’s theory implies that such rights are provisional in our world. Because they are unlikely to be realized in the future, we should not expect this to change. Future work will continue to investigate whether a theory with such implications can offer guidance for thinking about our political obligations." 

Christopher Yeomans

I mainly work on classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel.  Most of my work has been on Hegel, where I defend an interpretation of his thought as pluralist, perspectivist and historicist.

American Philosophy:   

Leonard Harris (especially African American)