Anthony F. Beavers, PhD
Affiliated Faculty, Cognitive Science, Indiana University
Professor of Philosophy (Assistant, Associate, then Full)
The University of Evansville (1991 to 2021)
Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Information and Information Technology, Phenomenology, History of Philosophy, Metaethics
Available for work in higher education (cognitive science, informatics, and/or
philosophy) or funding to support The DAN Research Group.
Current and Upcoming Activity:
Director and Research Scientist, The DAN Research Group, which studies dynamic associative networks and conceptual implications relating to them. See the DRG project page for ongoing and recent activity.
Principal Investigator, Documenting the Decline of Philosophy in U.S. Institutions of Higher Education. Funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Co-PIs: Catherine Kemp, Corey McCall, Peter Suber, David Weinberger, and Mark Valenzuela.
Visiting Associate Researcher and Adjunct Professor, Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University Bloomington. COGS Q240: Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive and Information Sciences. (PDF of Course Syllabus).
Other Work in Progress:
Webinar Presentation and Article: Turing's Legacy and the Problem of Hyperreal Thinking: The Problem We Can't Know We Have. Webinar Series: Hyperrealisitc Large Language Models and Robots. The Society for the Philosophy of Technology, March, 2026. (Website).
Book Chapter with Paul Bello and Marcello Guarini: "Self-Control and Agency: Implications for Moral Machines" (working title). In progress.
Journal Article: "Between Angels and Animals: The Question of Robot Ethics, or Is Kantian Moral Agency Desirable?" American Philosophical Quarterly, accepted pending revisions, 2025.
Academic Biosketch: Highlights from My Educational Journey
I was a math and music student (saxophone and piano) in high school, with related hobbies in astronomy, electronic circuitry, and computer programming. I held a general class amateur radio license. After high school (1981), I declined college scholarships in aerospace engineering and music to enter the seminary, where I was educated in the Catholic intellectual tradition and introduced to philosophy. While doing so, I created the first digital catalog of paintings in the Connecticut Historical Society and did computer consulting for small business on the side, largely involving database design. I left the seminary in 1986 to pursue graduate studies in history of philosophy and phenomenology at Marquette University, a Jesuit Catholic institution. I started my philosophy teaching career at Marquette. Upon graduating, I was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. Subsequently, I taught for thirty years at the University of Evansville (UE), seven courses a year on average on a range of topics in history of philosophy, patristic theology, philosophy of technology, informatics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems.
In the mid 1990’s, I built the first emergent, peer-reviewed search engines on the Internet with then undergraduate Hiten Sonpal. At their peak, these engines were serving more than one million pages a week to academic communities. In 2001, I spearheaded efforts at my university to build an Interdisciplinary Program in Internet Technology in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, followed by the Cognitive Science Program in Arts and Sciences in 2004, which I directed until 2013. From 1997 on, I directed undergraduate experiential learning labs on topics relating to dynamic associative networks (DANs) and search with more than forty undergraduate students. I directed four senior projects in computer science, each of which won first place among their peers in a closing conference competition.
While at UE, I served in several roles for the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, including president and two terms as executive director. I was also the program director for four conferences, one at Carnegie Mellon University, another at Loyola University, and two at Indiana University, and I served on the planning committees of more than twenty other conferences. Also while at UE, I published more than thirty papers, wrote a book on Levinas and ethics, edited the Macmillan Handbook for the Philosophy of Technology, and edited six special collections for journals and professional associations, all on facets of the philosophy of information and information technology. Between 2009 and 2012, I was a member of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee, an international initiative to plan and execute events for the Alan Turing Year: A Centenary Celebration of the Life and Work of Alan Turing. In 2012, I won the World Technology Award in Ethics from the World Technology Network. In 2015, I was presented with UE's university-wide research award, followed by the university-wide teaching award in 2018. During this time, I also undertook fellowships funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities on networks and network analysis in the humanities at Indiana University and at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA that contributed to the DAN research program. The year after my experience at UCLA, I was a co-director and instructor at an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities also sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the topic of computer simulations in the humanities held at the Complex Systems Institute at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
I retired from the University of Evansville in 2021 to pursue more intensive AI-related research, first as a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where I worked on the possibility of a Machine Command Theory of Ethics and DAN models, and then as an affiliated faculty member in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, where I teach occasionally as an adjunct and run an active research group involving faculty from Indiana University and the University of Evansville, and several graduate and undergraduate students also from Indiana University, one undergrad from California Polytechnic, Humboldt, and a high school student in Bangalore, India. The focus of this research is still on dynamic associative networks, particularly with an eye toward addressing what might be causing several problems in modern AI and how new foundational models might solve them. I’m also studying DAN models for how they reconfigure our understanding of phenomenology and challenge cognitivist assumptions in cognitive science. Simultaneously, I am currently a visiting associate researcher at Indiana University on a MacArthur-funded project to document the decline of philosophy in U.S. institutions of higher education.