Departmental Newsletter: April 2026
David Wong was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Congratulations, David!
Reuben Stern has been promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1. Congratulations, Reuben!
Nina Van Rooy has been awarded a Duke Institute for Brain Sciences PhD fellowship for the next academic year. Congratulations, Nina!
Felipe De Brigard's paper "Remembering as inverse causal inference" was published in Philosophical Psychology.
He was also featured in the most recent interview on "What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?".
The Harmony Humanities Lab hosted “Varieties of Harmony in Greek and Chinese Philosophy” at Duke on April 16–17, 2026. Organized by Wenjin Liu and David Wong, the workshop brought together scholars of ancient Greek philosophy and Classical Chinese philosophy for two days of interdisciplinary conversation on harmony as an ethical, social, and political theme. Papers explored harmony in relation to family life, friendship, civic cooperation, ethical cultivation, early education, and social and political relations, while also examining how Greek and Chinese traditions illuminate one another through comparison.
Speakers included Dimitri El Murr (École Normale Supérieure), Emily Fletcher (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Chris Fraser (University of Hong Kong), Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University), Jing Hu (Concordia University), Mitzi Lee (University of Colorado Boulder), Wenjin Liu (Duke University), James Miller (Duke Kunshan University), Justin Tiwald (University of Hong Kong), Hwa Yeong Wang (Duke Kunshan University), and David Wong (Duke University).
Beyond the speakers, the workshop drew 15 registered in-person participants and more than 40 virtual participants. Supported by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute’s Harmony Humanities Lab, the Duke Center for Comparative Philosophy, the Duke Department of Philosophy, and Duke Kunshan University’s Humanities Research Center, the event highlighted Duke’s growing role as a center for comparative work in ancient philosophy.
Yuan Dong presented her paper "When Player Creativity and Authorship Trumps Prescribed Agency" at the APA Pacific on the panel for the Society for the Philosophy of Creativity. She also gave comments at the conference's Daoism symposium.
Dylan Brown attended the Penn-Georgetown Digital Ethics Workshop in Philadelphia from April 2–5. He presented a paper titled “Can AI Disrupt the Moral Properties of Groups?” His commentator, Duke alumnus Paul Forrester, provided helpful feedback. Later, the two lamented Duke basketball’s shocking collapse in the Elite Eight over a pint.
Maya Kronfeld enjoyed the APA Pacific Symposium organized around her paper "The Indispensability of Form: A Kantian Approach to Philosophy and Literature." Big thanks to session chair Andreja Novakovic (UC Berkeley), and to Maya's commentators Joseph Kassman-Tod (CSU, Fullerton) and Katie Coyne (UC Berkeley) for a wonderful discussion!
The new volume of Kant and Literary Studies (Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy), which includes Maya's contributing chapter, has been reviewed in The Germanic Review.
Alex Rosenberg has been invited to give a series of lectures to the summer school in philosophy of biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
He is also giving the Paul Kurz Memorial Lecture at the University of Buffalo in September.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong received a small Open Academy grant to develop an AI-assisted introduction to ethics (applied and theoretical) this summer and another small grant to extend some of his work with Sam Murray on political polarization to Argentina and Colombia.
Juno is learning to floss her walrus. Dental hygiene is so important at an early age!
Katherine Brading has accepted a second term as department chair. Welcome back, Katherine!
Ask Tayfun, Or Don’t: The (Unsolicited™) Advice Column
“A horse is a familiar totality that does familiar things.”
- R. E. Hobart, “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It”, p. 3
“You condemn me to a great misfortune. Tell me: does this also apply to horses do you think? That all men improve them and one individual corrupts them?”
- Socrates, Apology 25b
“Is it superstition to think I see the horse galloping in the picture?—And does my visual impression gallop too?”
- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 202
“Little Hans is also irrational since not only were horses unlikely to bite him; if he was afraid that his father would castrate him, avoiding horses wouldn't help very much.”
- G. Gaus and J. Thrasher, in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Introduction, p. 12
This month I have some almost-parting advice for the Duke philosophy trivia team, “WOW! Signal (The Horse)”, and its nomenclator Jen Whyte. As in all things philosophical, names can harbour great power as well as great confusion. When first-time visitors to West Campus see the “Swift Bus”, do they not wonder why anyone would get on the slow one? And when Peter van Inwagen first saw the 1993 movie, could he have failed to ponder the problem of “Free Willy”, given the undeniable parallels between the captive orca and agent causation? And how can those dastardly “Turtles”, our eternal trivia arch-nemeses who are better off being made into soup with scallop and scallion, outrun our glorious galloping stallion? Not knowing the answers, I can only reflect on the analogies between horse-racing and advice-giving. Well-placed words of advice, much like well-chosen names, can spur others on, help them overcome hurdles, or harness their energies for self-improvement; but those hastily cobbled together can instead saddle people with burdens or engender thoroughbred confusion. Indeed, something similar is true for all speaking and writing. Aristotle observed long ago that bridle-making is subordinate to horsemanship (NE 1094a12), but few today note how idle-making is subordinate to penmanship. Being more a joker than a jockey, dealing in problems pedestrian rather than equestrian, I can merely echo here Russell’s praise of idleness, with the hope that you won’t get too lost in the race to appreciate the hoof and the racetrack.
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.