Departmental Newsletter: February - March 2025

Please join us in congratulating Felipe De Brigard, who has been promoted to full Professor. Felipe is a recognized leader across multiple fields for his work on memory, remembering, and counterfactual thinking, and his current project on memory and forgiveness is of powerful social importance. He is a dedicated teacher, and a reliable and hard-working colleague. Plus, he’s lots of fun to have around in the department. 

Katherine Brading and Caleb Hazelwood were recognized by Dean Suzanne Barbour at the Dean's Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. Katherine was acknowledged for mentoring, and Caleb for teaching. 

Additionally, Caleb passed the defense of his doctoral dissertation, "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Models," on April 1st. He additionally passed the defense of his thesis for a Master's of Science in Biology. 

Please join us in congratulating Ben Sarbey on successfully defending his PhD dissertation. His dissertation is entitled, "Dying Well and the Role of Palliative Care."  His defense was conducted on March 28, 2025.

Gopal Sreenivasan was his advisor, and the rest of the committee was Owen Flanagan, Jennifer Hawkins, Wayne Norman, and David Wong.

Kexuan virtually presented their paper "Birthing into the Margin" (on feminist standpoint epistemology and Zhuangzi) at the 2025 U.S. Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy Conference this March. In April, Kexuan will travel to Texas to present another paper, "Cripistemology of Borderlands" at the philoSOPHIA: A Transcontinental Feminist Society conference. This presentation will focus on the artworks of three Asian/American diasporic and disabled artists—Lin Yo-Yo’s Re:collections and Wy Joung Kou & Jody Chan’s A Language of Limbs—exploring how disability and (Asian) diaspora are intimately twinned, particularly in relation to home and (un)belonging in their multivariate corporeal, material, and affective forms. (Huuuuge thanks to David for his help—so that this conference travel will be fully covered by the AADS travel grant and the Global Student Research conference presentation award.)

Alex Rosenberg has several projects coming to fruition! First, his paper, “What makes economics a separate science,” was accepted by the Journal of Economic Methodology. His book, Blunt Instrument, was published on March 18th by MIT Press. Finally, his most recent novel, Thurlow’s War, will be published on April 15th with Warpath Press. 

Katherine was in Amsterdam during spring break, where she gave a talk combining her work on Du Châtelet with ongoing research relating to her recent book project, Philosophical Mechanics in The Age of Reason. A review of this book by Mark Wilson appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Eric Schliesser began his review on his blog. Meanwhile, Katherine's review of Levitin's "The Kingdom of Darkness" appeared in History of European Ideas, with a none-too-delighted Levitin responding. Judge for yourselves!

Andrew Janiak's book, The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. In addition, Project Vox recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a conference. Current members and alumni gathered to give talks on their research and enjoy fellowship.

Younghyun Hwang is a rising senior majoring in philosophy. He has been awarded the DSRF ($5000 grant) for his research project ‘Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Role of Reason in History’. In this project, he will compare how Nietzsche and Hegel assess the role of reason in bringing modernity. For Nietzsche, the overvaluation of reason is a cause for the impoverishment of human life in modernity. For Hegel, reason is a force of reconciliation which leads to the modern state. Yet both exhibit ambivalences. Nietzsche acknowledges the power of reason, and Hegel does not provide a merely optimistic picture of how the modern state came to be. The purpose of this project is to come up with a rigorous analysis of such details. Younghyun plans to expand this project into a senior thesis, further exploring the philosophical theme of the role of reason.

Ask Tayfun, Or Don’t: The (Unsolicited™) Advice Column

This month I have some unsolicited advice for Caleb, our very own Darwinian Iteration of Citizen Kane, who will soon be off to faraway Wyoming to find his rosebud. Just like his Orson-Wellesian counterpart, he will leave behind a legacy of journalistic excellence shrouded in intrigue and mystery. He refused to turn this newsletter into a corporate venture, even though he could have made millions by now taking full-page ads from the lemur center. He continued to speak truth to power, even as rising printing costs meant he had to subsist only on boiled books and turtle soup. And he seldom used his monopoly over the free press to slander his many rivals or to further his biophilic schemes—even letting me do this column! But the question we are left with after all this is, why? At the end of the day not even Mario, his compatriot from the old country, could truly plumb the depths of the man, the media mogul, the organism. As Deleuze and Guattari say, “Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass.” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 5)—and that seems appropriate here, for who knows what they meant? What I do know is that your shenanigans will be sorely missed. And I know you like to rebuff my offers of counsel with your curious Epicurean maxim, “The only unsolicited advice I’ll heed is natural selection—and when that comes, I’ll be gone.” But if I were to offer some anyway, I would advise you to confez to your crimes against Ottoman fashion before it’s too late—for as I’ll demonstrate at your farewell party, I shall not be outfezzed so easily!

If you have a question for Tayfun for the next newsletter, please send it to tayfun.gur@duke.edu... though you may get some advice even if you don't.