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 particularly embarrassing has turned up… so far!
On the contrary, we’ve learned that the department’s founding chair, William Ivey Cranford, had also been a founding member of the Trinity College football team that played the first official football game in the South in 1888.
We already knew that Katherine Gilbert, hired in 1930, was the first woman to be appointed full professor at Duke. But we hadn’t realized that she was also the only Duke philosopher ever to be elected President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Or that in the 1930s and 1940s the department included two of the most eminent Western scholars of Asian philosophy: Homer Dubs, who would later take up a chair at Oxford; and Alban Widgery, author of a dozen books on comparative philosophy and religion.
After our journey back in time, we all gathered in the auditorium at the Levine Science Research Center to hear a public lecture from Professor Felipe De Brigard on "Memory and Forgiveness."
Felipe noted that victims sometimes forgive the perpetrators of past wrongdoings, either to repair a relationship or simply to move on. After forgiving, however, victims typically still remember what happened, but the memory of the wrongdoing does not elicit the same affective and reactive attitudes it once did.
Felipe's research asks how forgiveness interacts with memory to bring about this emotional change. In his talk, he offered conceptual and empirical reasons to think of forgiveness as mollifying the affective contents of retrieved memories of past wrongdoings via a process of emotional reappraisal. He also summarized his current research, which is being conducted with victims of political violence in Colombia, and how it can have implications for peace and reconciliation strategies in post-conflict societies. To view a recording of Felipe's talk, click here.
After Felipe's talk, the faculty, graduate students, and alumni enjoyed dinner, drinks, and plenty of catching up at the Washington Duke Inn. The festivities continued into Friday and Saturday with talks from Thomas Polger, David Builes, Rachell Powell, Songyao Ren, Hagop Sarkissian, Katherine Brading, Qiu Lin, Jennifer Jhun, and Eddy Nahmias. The talks covered a wide range of topics, from metaphysics to economics and criminal responsibility, from color vision to the philosophy of "vibes." (Although it didn't take a degree in philosophy to see that this conference was full of good vibes!)
A big thank you from the department to everyone who made this conference such a success. We’re already looking forward to more reunions in the future.
For a copy of the program or a link to the abstracts of talks that were presented at this conference, please see below.
| 2:00 pm | Welcome | Katherine Brading |
| 2:15 pm – 3:00pm | A little department history | Wenjin Liu & Wayne Norman |
| 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | Color Vision and the Four-Color-Map Problem, Revisited | Thomas Polger University of Cincinnati |
| 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm | Public Lecture: Memory and Forgiveness | Felipe De Brigard |
| 10:00 am - 11:00 am | Nature Never Makes Leaps | David Builes Princeton |
| 11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Importing Biological Concepts into Bioethics: Three Problematic Cases (Death, Disease, Sex) | Rachell Powell Boston University |
| 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm | The Dual-Perspective Model of Resilience in the Zhuangzi | Songyao Ren University of Texas, Dallas |
| 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | Knowing Yourself, Knowing Your Vibe | Hagop Sarkissian The City University of New York, Baruch College |
| 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm | Du Châtelet on the epistemology and metaphysics of time | Katherine Brading |
| 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm | Moving Physics Forward: the Case of Du Châtelet's Foundations of Physics (1740 & 1742) | Qui Lin Simon Fraser University |
| 10:00 am - 11:00 am | The Autonomy of Economics | Jennifer Jhun |
| 11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Degrees of Criminal Responsibility | Eddy Nahmias Georgia State University |