Departmental Newsletter: January 2026
THE DUKE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT HISTORY PROJECT
“We Shone Brightly”: Robert Brandon and Alex Rosenberg
on the Philosophy of Biology at Duke
In 1979, the philosophy department was looking for a philosopher of physics. Instead, they had to settle for their second-choice candidate, a philosopher of biology named Robert Brandon.
At the time, Brandon says, philosophy of biology “barely existed” as a subdiscipline. But questions about foundational concepts like fitness and teleology had begun to pique some philosophers’ interest, as had confrontations among biologists over E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975).
In this nascent period for the field, Brandon worked to establish Duke’s presence. His efforts led to the hire of Greg Cooper (in 1999), Alex Rosenberg (in 2000), and Karen Neander (in 2006), and he forged relationships with Duke biologists like Dan McShea and Fred Nijhout.
Rosenberg and Brandon soon secured a four-year, $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund a Center for the Philosophy of Biology. The money supported graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, a reading group, and an annual research conference.
“That really put us on the map,” Rosenberg said.
By the mid-2000s, the department found itself tied for first place in the Leiter rankings for philosophy of biology, and in some cohorts, a majority of graduate students worked on philosophy of biology or mind.
“We went from being a good place to do philosophy of biology to being the best place to be,” Brandon said.
Recently, Wayne Norman and Lindsay Huth talked with Brandon and Rosenberg about their biggest successes, their infamous sparring, and how Brandon proved himself to a biologist by getting his hands dirty.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Wayne: If Lindsay’s going to do a newsletter write-up on the philosophy of biology era at Duke Philosophy, what is the lede?
Alex: The lede is: when I came to the philosophy department, the entire community of philosophy of biology was scandalized and outraged. The thought of Rosenberg and Brandon in the same department.
Wayne: Did you hate each other already at that point? Was it widely known?
Alex: Well, I remember when I was interviewed by the Dean of Graduate Study, Lewis Siegel, and Robert and I were sitting at the table and Siegel said to me, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well, whatever Brandon does, I do the exact opposite.” But then almost immediately we wrote a paper together for BJPS and realized that the diversity of our views on most topics was a huge benefit to the department.
Robert: And we taught philosophy of biology together. Which was interesting.
Alex: And then Robert started teaching it with Dan [McShea], and I started teaching it with Dan, which was another great thing. But people would ask me at conferences, “How do you get along with Brandon?” And I said, “Great!” And they were somewhat taken aback.
Wayne: What did you say, Robert, when they asked you the same question?
Robert: Uh, is Alex still online? [Laughs] No, it was a fruitful relationship, as Alex just said, and the fact that we didn’t agree on everything was actually a good thing. So that students could go back and forth, you know: “Alex said that.” And I said, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” They would go to Alex and say, “Robert said that.” And he would say, “That’s ridiculous.”
Alex: This was particularly worthwhile in the reading group. We’d come in having read the same thing and having different takes on it.
Robert: When the reading group was at its height, it was just this marvelous thing.
Alex: It was wonderful.
Wayne: It does seem like there was a living, growing, breathing, organic thing at the university that was kind of anchored here.
Alex: It was exciting to come into the office every day.
Alex: Let me say something about Robert before we go on. I think that the intellectually most important event in our period of flourishing was...
New Research Highlight: Adrienne Duke
This month, Adrienne Duke discusses her work in philosophy of psychiatry; her high school thesis arguing that the Bible does, in fact, err; and the hundreds (hundreds!) of students she has taught while in grad school.
Kevin Richardson's new book, The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees, has been published! If you are interested in social ontology, feminist philosophy, or social philosophy, consider picking it up today.
He's also organizing a two-day conference based on the book. It will be held April 17–18 at Duke University. The event will feature invited talks in social philosophy (e.g., philosophy of race, gender, and sexuality, feminist philosophy, trans studies, disability studies, etc) and a dedicated book symposium engaging the book. Invited speakers include Ásta, Sara Purinton, Tamsin Kimoto, Amy Marvin, Isobel Bess, and Joshua Falek. Registration is open through April 1. See www.kevinrichardson.org/conference for more details.
Andrew Janiak and Katherine Brading have signed a contract with Oxford University Press for an English translation and edition of Emilie Du Châtelet’s 1742 Institutions Physique. This will be the first ever complete English edition of Du Châtelet’s magnum opus. It will appear in the Oxford World's Classics series, making her work accessible and visible to a wide audience and putting her in the company of some of the best and most influential writers and thinkers in history.
Seeds of this collaboration were sown 15 years ago when Andrew and Katherine discovered their shared interest in Du Châtelet. With the dramatic growth in scholarship on Du Châtelet’s philosophy since then, OUP’s willingness to invest in this edition is both rewarding and encouraging. (Also, Andrew and Katherine both suspect that Du Châtelet herself would be quite pleased.)
Duke philosophers represented the department well at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January. Speakers included:
- Ásta (for the Linguistic Justice Society)
- Felipe De Brigard (for the Society for Philosophy and Neuroscience)
- Ting Fung Ho, “How to Look Inward to Know Oneself Deeply”
- Gus Law, "Is It Our Nature to Become Good? Conversation with Aristotle and Mengzi"
- Kevin Richardson, “Sexual Orientation: What Is It? What Do We Want It to Be?”
Commentators included Lindsay Huth, Maya Kronfeld, and Nina Van Rooy.
Felipe De Brigard and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong received generous grants from the Dana Foundation and from the Brown Foundation that will enable them to offer SSNAP (Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy) again in 2026 and 2027.
Nina Van Rooy spent the fall semester as a visiting student in Santa Barbara, working with Colin Allen at UCSB - and she got to see some humpback whales!
Above, she is pictured with Caitlin Mace (middle, fellow visiting student), Colin Allen, and Tavi (Colin and Adina's dog). Below, a humpback whale poses for a photo in the Santa Barbara Channel.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is looking forward to hosting Rene Weber (UCSB) for a visit to Duke on February 5-7. Anyone who wants to meet him while he is in town should let him know.
He has also had several new papers appear:
- Zoh, Y., Yu, H., Contreras-Huerta, L.S., Prosser, A.M.B, Apps, M.A.J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Chang, S. W. C., and Crockett, M.J. (2025). Instrumental harm and impartial beneficence distinctively frame cognitive representations of moral decision problems. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 154(11):3217-3232. doi: 10.1037/xge0001820
- Keswani, V., Cousins, C., Nguyễn, B., Conitzer, V., Heidari, H., Schaich Borg, J., and Sinnott- Armstrong, W. (forthcoming). Moral Change or Noise? On Problems of Aligning AI With Temporally Unstable Human Feedback. Alignment Track of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’26). https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10032
Above, Walter's granddaughter Juno shows off her backpack.
Several folks from the philosophy department met up to discuss Rich Eva's paper "Publishing Robots" and think together about whether AI-generated content has any place in academic philosophy. No consensus was reached, but it was a fun conversation!
Alex Rosenberg is giving a talk at the Department of Data and Decision Sciences at Emory University on February 9.
Ask Tayfun, Or Don’t: The (Unsolicited™) Advice Column
It is a little remembered etymological fact today that the word “dissertation” originated as a portmanteau of “disaster” and “assertion”. It is a fact I aspire to remind my committee soon, and my unsolicited advice this month is for my fellow cohort-mates Botian and Sally, the last of the so-called “Bad Seeds of 2019”, to join me in the glory and splendour. Skeptics might wonder what good might come of bad seeds, and some may even quip, quoting Roger Ames: “Clearly, seed corn cannot sprout pigs nor can piglets be raised to become fields of wheat.” (Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics, p. 154). Popping-corn, however, is a different matter. In Aristotelian terms, the material cause may be the kernel, and the efficient cause the stove, but the final cause, of course, is eudaimonia. I cannot deny that ontologically speaking, the half-popped kernel displays some isomorphism with the half-baked dissertation. But it is worth remembering that fossil evidence indicates the first corn was popped as early as 4,700 BCE in Peru, ~6645 years before Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery was published, and there’s reason to think Corn Poppers will exist long after that book is forgotten. So whether you’re sowing the seeds of discord or popping the kernel of happiness, my advice is to keep the flames going, just as Hume suggested at the end of the Enquiry.
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.