Last year, Maya Kronfeld had the satisfaction of seeing Nicole Zuraitis’ How Love Begins, on which she played keyboards, win a GRAMMY Award for Best Vocal Jazz Album.Fast forward to Sunday night and the 2025 GRAMMY Awards. Once again, an album featuring Kronfeld as keyboardist – Taylor Eigsti’s Plot Armor – won for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. The recording also features jazz icons Terence Blanchard, Lisa Fischer and many others. Participating in two GRAMMY-winning albums in as many years is… read more about Literature Professor Has the Grammy Magic for Second Year in a Row »
Welcome, Amber!The Philosophy Department’s new Business Manager, Amber Murphy, started with us on Monday, November 18th. Amber has administrative experience in several humanities departments elsewhere, most recently as a departmental Business Manager at George Washington University. Her degree is in Public Relations and her experience includes budgeting and financial management (including working with grants), data analysis, and event planning. Please join us in welcoming Amber to Duke and to our department!Maya Kronfeld is… read more about Departmental Newsletter: December 2024 »
Tayfun Gur Who is/are your favorite philosopher(s)? Why?This question reminds me of that Baruch poll on the greatest philosophy texts of the 20th century, where the authors muse that asking philosophers about their favourite books might be like asking mathematicians to name their favourite integers. I suspect something similar can be true for favourite philosophers, but for what it’s worth I might name (in no particular order) Bernard Williams, Wittgenstein,… read more about Research Highlight »
The Department of Philosophy held a conference on October 3-5, 2024, to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary. We were incredibly pleased to welcome back many familiar faces from over the years: alumni, friends, and family came to Durham from all over the country to join the festivities. The conference began on Thursday with a tour of our history. This fall, Wenjin Liu and Wayne Norman have been exploring the department’s century-old family tree. They were glad to report that nothing… read more about Departmental Newsletter: September-October 2024 »
The Department of Philosophy held a conference on October 3-5, 2024, to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary. We were incredibly pleased to welcome back many familiar faces from over the years: alumni, friends, and family came to Durham from all over the country to join the festivities. The conference began on Thursday with a tour of our history. This fall, Wenjin Liu and Wayne Norman have been exploring the department’s century-old family tree. They were glad to report that nothing… read more about Centennial Philosophy Conference Report »
Ben Eva has been chosen to give one of four Langford Lectures this year. The Langford Lecture series is an annual lecture/luncheon series featuring four or five recently promoted or hired faculty. The awardees are selected based on the appeal of their research to an interdisciplinary faculty audience, as well as their embodiment of Langford’s dedication to teaching, research, and service. The series is designed to provide Duke’s faculty with an opportunity to hear about the ongoing scholarly activities of their recently… read more about Benjamin Eva Receives Thomas Langford Lectureship Award »
Recent books by our faculty showcase the richly interdisciplinary work of our department. Here are some examples: The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern PhilosophyAndrew Janiak Suppressed for centuries, the ideas of French philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet's are ever relevant today...Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major… read more about From the Enlightenment’s most dangerous woman to the morality of AI . . . »
In an election year, candidates, campaigns, political researchers and news organizations are all trying to figure out which groups of people are going to vote which way — and why.Young voters. Black people. Women. The working class. Groups of people, identified as categories, defined by qualifiers like age, race, gender or class.But how are social categories formed? What is the meaning of a social group? How do we make sense of our social world and interactions?These are the questions asked by… read more about Meet the Two Philosophers Creating a Global Center for Social Ontology at Duke »
Welcome back, Duke Philosophers (as well as our families, friends, and unaffiliated but loyal readers)! The wait is over. The long, dark night of radio silence has come to an end. A new day dawns on our department, and with it, a deluge of updates on our summer goings and doings. Please enjoy our first issue of the 2024-2025 academic year but remember to pace yourself... there won't be another issue for a month.A hearty welcome to our newest cohort of graduate students: Julia Banks received a BS in… read more about Departmental Newsletter: June-August 2024 »
On May 3rd and 4th, the Duke Philosophy Department hosted "Brandonfest: A Conference in Honor of Robert Brandon's Career." We brought back students from Robert's nearly 50-year career at Duke University to honor him, his work, and wish him a happy retirement. The speakers -- all of whom are either collaborators, students, or grand-students of Robert's -- included Caleb Hazelwood (Duke), Alex Rosenberg (Duke), Dan McShea (Duke), Brent Mishler (UC Berkeley), Sarah Sculco (Michigan), Fred Bouchard (Montreal), Chris Haufe (Case… read more about Departmental Newsletter: April - May 2024 »
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong had a great spring break in England! Laura Soter and Shanna Slank joined him for a workshop in London on comity at the beginning. Then Arielle Rothenberg and Ithika Senthilnathan (Duke undergrads) joined him for a workshop in Oxford on patient preference predictors at the end. Highlights included a trip to Darwin's house and talks with two Duke alumni groups. Ben Sarbey presented this month on “The Vulnerable Populations… read more about Departmental Newsletter: March 2024 »
A proposal by Ben Eva and Reuben Stern has been selected for funding through the Faculty Advancement Seed Grant Program in the Office for Faculty Advancement. The grant will provide support for the Duke Causation Group (DCG) – an interdisciplinary research group that meets regularly to discuss topics relating to causation and causal inference from a variety of perspectives. The group was started in fall 2022, and since then it’s helped to bring together local researchers from across the university with interests in… read more about Duke Causation Group »
Benjamin Eva, Shanna Slank, and Reuben Stern teamed up with Rush Stewart of KCL to publish their paper, "An Impossibility Theorem for Base Rate Tracking and Equalised Odds," in Analysis. Reuben also published his paper, "The Chances of Choices," in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Yuan gave a presentation, "When Player Authorship Trumps Prescribed Agency" at the AFK in FAU (The Second Annual Philosophy of Video Games… read more about Departmental Newsletter: February 2024 »
At our Holiday Party in December, we celebrated a year of research, with dozens of papers and several books published. We are very proud of the year we have had as a department -- full of exciting colloquia, productive contributions to the field, and strong intellectual community. We began the new year with an all-department meeting. The highlight was the announcement of the… read more about Department Newsletter: December 2023-January 2024 »
Professor Jennifer Jhun Who is/are your favorite philosopher(s)? Why? I never have a good answer to this question, so I will offer the answer to a different one. One philosopher I happen to be having a lot of fun reading these days is Thomas Hobbes. How would you describe your research program? My interests are a bit eclectic, but my main research program investigates how economists construct and use models. Themes like explanation, idealization… read more about Research Highlight »
Felipe De Brigard has published a book! His new Cambridge Element in Philosophy of Mind surveys research on three central and interrelated issues about the nature of memory and remembering. The first is about the nature of memory as a cognitive faculty. This part discusses different strategies to distinguish memory from other cognitive faculties as well as different proposed taxonomies to differentiate distinct kinds of memory. The second issue concerns what memory does,… read more about Departmental Newsletter: November 2023 »
Professor Benjamin Eva Who is/are your favorite philosopher(s)? Why? My answer to this changes pretty often, but Wittgenstein, MacIntyre, Hume, Russell, Carnap and Keynes are definitely near the top. Oh, and my colleague Reuben Stern is my favorite person to do philosophy with (I had to say that since he listed me). How would you describe your research program? Well, I like to work on a lot of different things, but here’s a quick description of two of my main research… read more about Research Highlight »