Announcing the Consortium for Advancing a Science of Purpose
The Consortium’s goal is to enhance the productivity and extend the reach of interdisciplinary research teams devoted to studying distinctive features of complex living systems—agency, cognition, development, function, and goal-directedness—across spatial and temporal scales.
With $8 million in funding, CASP is led by Professor Alan Love, a University of Minnesota Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. The Consortium strategically focuses on augmenting the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical resources of its members through community formation and the nurturing of diverse research projects and disciplinary approaches.
CASP builds on the successes of an earlier project, “Agency, Directionality, and Function: Foundations for a Science of Purpose” (2021-2024), which piloted new administrative and organizational structures to generate distinctive forms of interdisciplinary interaction among researchers.
Funded from a combination of individual private donors and the John Templeton Foundation, CASP will run for five years, from April 2026 to March 2031, and offers memberships to individuals and institutions. Membership involves capacity-building initiatives, from microgrants for new methods to networking opportunities, and diverse programmatic elements, including communication to a wider audience through podcasts and video shorts.
