Departmental Newsletter: June - August 2025
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is very pleased to host two visitors this fall. Letícia Yumi Nakao Morello is a graduate student from Brazil who works on gender violence. She will visit Duke from August 15 through November 15. Federico Burdman is a philosophy professor in Chile who works on addiction and mental illness. He will be at Duke from September 8-22. Both are funded by prestigious grants. Please make them welcome.
Above is a photo of Walter's granddaughter, Juno, enjoying afternoon tea.
Ásta gave a keynote at WOGAP25 in June. Ásta cofounded WOGAP, or the Workshop on Gender and Philosophy, alongside Sally Haslanger, Ishani Maitra, and Nancy Bauer. Ásta also gave a talk entitled "The Social Construction of Sex" at Social Ontology 2025 in Dublin, where Kevin Richardson and Michael Veldman also gave talks.
Ásta will be in Iceland Fall 2025 but looks forward to seeing everyone in the Spring.
Nina Van Rooy attended the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in Scotland this summer and whilst there she got to swim alongside some seals! She will be a visiting student with Colin Allen and Adina Roskies at UC Santa Barbara this fall.
Jennifer Jhun and Kevin Hoover taught a week-long summer school in Vienna on the History and Epistemology of Econometrics. There, they enjoyed having cake for breakfast every day.
Wenjin Liu's article, “The Anatomy of Ignorance in Plato’s Republic,” has been accepted for publication in Phronesis. Her short monograph, Plato’s Medicinal Politics: Paideia, Illness, and the Decline of the Ideal City—which bridges Hippocratic medical theory and Plato’s political philosophy—is under contract with the Cambridge Elements series in Ancient Philosophy.
Reuben Stern and his family recently celebrated his 40th birthday with the Eva clan in the mountains. With that behind him, he's now working on his first book project, Choice and Intervention, under contract with Oxford University Press. Below is a brief precis:
It is clear to many that our beliefs about what causes what should inform our choices. But it is less clear exactly how these beliefs should inform our choices, as well as how decision-makers should go about inferring what causes what. These questions are the primary focus of this book. The approach taken here centrally involves developing a decision theory according to which the rationality of a decision-maker’s choice depends on their attitudes towards graphical causal models. This task is worth pursuing not just because it brings our understanding of rational choice into direct contact with our best understanding of causal inference, but also because it opens up new possibilities in philosophical decision theory.
Victor Crespo spent two months in Boston attending the AI and Data Ethics Summer School at Northeastern University, and it was a wonderful experience. He is deeply grateful to Katie Creel, John Basl, the amazing group of fellow PhD students he got to share the summer with, and all the speakers for all the engaging and inspiring discussions.
Maya Kronfeld's article entitled "Spontaneity" was published in the Literature Edition of the journal Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. She is very much looking forward to teaching "The Mind/Body Problem in Philosophy and Literature" this term.
Wayne Norman fled the continental United States to give a talk on the concept of systemic racism to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Business Ethics in Copenhagen. He was happy to attend sessions there by no fewer than six former mentees from four different universities he's taught at — including Duke Philosophy alums Aaron Ancell and Ewan Kingston.
The photo above captures a quick summit between Wayne Norman and Wayne Eastman.
Mary Purcell and Andrew Janiak attended The Center for Canon Expansion and Change (CCEC) summer program at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Andrew Janiak served as a guest early modern expert for the week. Mary completed the program with a draft of a syllabus for a Spring 2026 course on the Querelle des Femmes.
Alex Rosenberg published a new paper entitled “The Place of General Equilibrium in Economic Theory” in The Journal of Economic Methodology.
Matthew Alder—Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy, and Public Policy—is happy to say that his book, Risk, Death, and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation, was published by Oxford University Press.
Ask Tayfun, Or Don’t: The (Unsolicited™) Advice Column
This month I have some pro bono advice for Audrey about the phenomenology of dirty dishes. Nobody likes leaving food on their plates. As you read, millions are relishing that final piece of vegetable or sopping up that last bit of sauce with a piece of bread, showing taste as well as thrift. But if you’re like me, maybe you’ve also experienced the following. As the plate leaves the table and makes its way to the kitchen sink, its contents seem to undergo an abrupt change. Yummy morsels one moment, crummy “leftovers” the next. To the same mind which recognized them as eminently edible, now the suggestion seems incredible. Psychologists and Sufi mystics have long known that the lover’s hair is fair on their head but gross in your soup. Is some similar trick of context afoot here? As Anscombe observes, “not any action of taking a lot of potatoes to my house and leaving them there would be supplying me with them” (On Brute Facts, p. 70–1). Likewise, it seems, not any action of gobbling up perfectly good food would be cleaning your plate like a good egg. It all depends on your proximity to the kitchen sink.
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.