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 Conference at Florida Atlantic University).
Katherine travelled to Boulder, Colorado, to give a talk to the UC Philosophy Department on Emilie Du Châtelet’s metaphysics and epistemology of time.
Walter received a new grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation on "Building empathy for listening, learning, and depolarization in the US and Brazil" with Hannah Read (former Duke graduate student), Sam Murray (former member of MAD Lab), and Paulo Baggio (who will visit this fall). The grant will pay for a postdoc starting this year and will build a game app to reduce polarization and increase empathy across political divides.
Alex Rosenberg and two other members of the Duke Philosophy department are all on the program of the Stanford University spring colloquium on the philosophy of economics. Jennifer Jhun is the keynote speaker, and alumnus Kobi Finestone is a co-organizer.
Katherine’s book with Marius Stan, Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, was published with OUP. It’s almost a decade since they first started talking about a joint project, so it’s been quite a journey. An ACLS fellowship enabled them to get underway and the book itself took seven years to write. Some serious celebration was in order when they met up in Boston this month, just a few days after the book arrived in their mailboxes. The OUP description of the book begins: “From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the 18th century’s struggle for a theory of bodies.”
Andrew Janiak, Michael Veldman, and alumna Qiu Lin (Simon Fraser University) have had a symposium accepted for presentation at "HOPOS," the 15th Biennial Congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. The meeting will take place at the University of Vienna in July 2024.
Keep sending us your Duke Philosophy Centennial T-shirt photos. Here’s one from February 7 when Katherine took her son to the basketball game. (Duke defeated Notre Dame.)
This month I leave my corner to the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), a younger contemporary of Bentham, whose art may constitute advice for adherents of the hedonistic calculus:
I’ve heard tell of some learn’d British gentry
Who say pushpin’s as good as poetry
The quantity of pleasure being equal
Tho’ it seemst to me this quip calls for sequel
For those expressing such disdain for rhyme
Must needs never have read any of mine
Add, subtract, the math of happiness
More likely paves a path to nappiness
These weights and scales, pleasure-tools so dreary
Need grinding in mills of finer theory
Such time may come, and yet until that day,
Pushkin is better than pushpin, I say
(Complete Works: Volume 2, translated by V. I. Lenin)
Pushkin is no longer taking any questions, but 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.