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 Western Reserve), Grant Ramsey (KU Leuven), Charles Pence (UC Louvain), Carlos Mariscal (Nevada, Reno), Philippe Huneman (Paris 1), and Rachell Powell (Boston University). Here are some highlights from the wonderful gathering:
Adrienne Duke was invited to speak to the Health & Wellness Hub at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) in Nacogdoches, TX (her hometown!). She gave a talk on the appropriateness of propranolol use for PTSD in soldiers to an audience of mental health clinicians, medical providers, and veterans resource staff.
Younghyun Hwang, a second-year Philosophy major at Duke, just published his paper "Nietzsche and the Birth of Joker" in 'Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal.' Younghyun's interests are in German Idealism, Existentialism, and Yam Phenomenology. He is currently working on an essay titled “What Is It Like to Be a Yam?” (Editor's note: Younghyun clearly has a talent for writing awesome paper titles.)
This summer, Nina Van Rooy will be presenting at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Purdue, and the European Society for Philosophy of Psychology in Grenoble, France, on her paper, 'Do Large Language Models have Theory of Mind?'. She will also present a poster at the Cognitive Science Society meeting in Rotterdam on joint empirical work on causal reasoning with Kevin and Kaylee from the IMC lab!
Yuan Dong gave an online presentation at the "Developing new skills in VR" conference at University of Bucharest, Romania. Her presentation was titled "Virtue Epistemology in Virtual Reality (VR)."
Michael Veldman received a Public Engagement Award from the British Society for the History of Philosophy for a workshop series with Project Vox.
Laura Soter's paper, "A defense of back-end doxastic voluntarism," was published in Nous. Congratulations, Laura!
Caleb Hazelwood's paper, "Beanbag Holobionts," was accepted for presentation at "Philosophy of Biology at the Mountains" in Salt Lake City, Utah (July 2024). He'll give another version of the same paper at "Philosophy and Biology Shop Talks" (yes, that's right, "PaBST") in June 2024. Caleb was also recently awarded the 2024 Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring. Here he is receiving the award, with thanks to Rachel Gilbert for taking the photo.
Below are some photos from our April Colloquia. We were very excited and honored to host Laura Guerrero (William & Mary), who gave a talk titled "A Defense of Buddhist Realism," and Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth), who discussed "Social Ontology and Social Language."
Duke Philosophy recently hosted its annual End of the Year Party. Pictured below are some of the festivities. We said goodbye to several important members of our community -- all of whom we will miss very much. We wish them all the best in their next adventures!
As thanks for your continued patronage, we’re ending term with a two-for-one special.
Wa, Botian’s wife, wants to know whether selling sunglasses to birds is a good business idea. I’d say it’s a brilliant idea idea, but as far as business goes, you might have a hard time getting money out of those stingy birds. It’s not that they don’t have the cash, but good luck getting those magpies to part with their shiny shiny coins. There might also be some technical kinks to iron out (e.g. straps for the ones for ostriches, so they don’t get lost in the sand).
Tzvetan asks: "How do I know I'm not Tayfun? And how does Tayfun know that he is not me?" This one’s a real brain teaser, and often gets me worked up when I look in the mirror (or is it Tzvetan’s mirror?). Leibniz’s Law will not help, and not because of some silly spheres in a symmetrical universe—our names sound the same, we both have long hair, came here via the UK, and were basically born in the same country (i.e. the Ottoman Empire). As Wittgenstein said in the Blue Book (p. 29): “A treatise on pomology may be called incomplete if there exist kinds of apples which it doesn’t mention.” A treatise on our similarities, in contrast, is incompletable because it would get longer the more you think about it. (In short: we can’t know.)
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.
Department of Philosophy