Javier Gomez-Lavin

Promoted to Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
jglavin@purdue.edu

Javier Gomez-Lavin’s research lies at the intersection of cognitive science, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind. He serves as the director of the new Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. Gomez-Lavin’s interdisciplinary work blends methods from experimental social psychology and analytical philosophy of science to help detail the multifaceted ways that cognition both shapes and is shaped by our social, aesthetic, and moral worlds.

Prior to coming to Purdue, Gomez-Lavin was a sessional assistant professor with the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program at York University in Toronto. From 2018 to 2021, Javier held a Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked with Professor Lisa Miracchi Titus and her MIRA lab group.

Gomez-Lavin earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 2018 where he wrote his dissertation disputing the usefulness of the psychological construct of “working memory” under the supervision of Professor Jesse Prinz. During his time at CUNY, he served as a co-PI on a two-and-a-half-year grant funded by the Templeton Foundation which used tools from experimental philosophy to extend new, moral theories of personal identity. Since 2016, Gomez-Lavin has held a role as a guest researcher with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, an interdisciplinary institute at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.