Departmental Newsletter: October 2025
THE DUKE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT HISTORY PROJECT: SPOOKY EDITION
When Wenjin Liu and Wayne Norman began digging into the department's past in the Duke Archives, they knew there was a risk of unearthing skeletons in our closet.
And also ghosts.
Owen Flanagan had been reminding people for years that the Philosophy department occupied the space in the West Duke Building that had once been home to the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory. The lab was created by a psychology professor John Rhine, who coined the term "extra-sensory perception" and its acronym ESP.
Rhine built the lab with the enthusiastic support of Duke’s first President, William Preston Few. Both men distrusted the materialist turn in early twentieth-century psychology. The lab’s mission was to use scientific methods to prove (hopefully) the existence of spirit-like forces that could not be explained by known physical mechanisms.
Rhine and his wife Louisa Rhine founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937. Initially published by Duke University Press, it continues publishing research that tests claims for ESP, telekinesis, and clairvoyance to this day.
Hundreds of Duke students took part in these studies during the lab’s nearly four decades of trying to catch vibes in West Duke. A favorite test involved an experimenter drawing one card at a time from a shuffled deck of cards that had one of five (or six) bold symbols on its face. The subject, who could not see the cards, would then guess which symbol the experimenter was looking at. From very early on, the Rhines were convinced that some of these students’ high scores could not be explained by chance… or materialistic science.
You may be shocked to discover that these results were not replicated when other psych labs ran the same experiments with stricter experimental designs and more robust statistical methods.
Undeterred, the lab continued to haunt West Duke until Rhine reached the mandatory retirement age in 1965. It then moved across Buchanan Street into a house in Trinity Park before eventually establishing itself nearby as the Rhine Research Center at 2741 Campus Walk Avenue, where it still pursues its stated mission of “Bridging the Gap between Science and Spirituality.”
So what does all this have to do with the history of our department? Rhine was a member of the psychology department, not philosophy, right? That is true. But it almost wasn’t.
In the few years before and after Trinity College became Duke University in 1924, the philosophy department was responsible for teaching psychology as well. A lot of psychology. Here are the requirements for a philosophy major, according to the Bulletin from Duke’s inaugural year:
“The work of the Sophomore and Junior years is devoted mainly to psychology, that of the Junior and Senior years to both psychology and philosophy.”
In 1926, President Few was eager for Duke to invest in psychology, so he sought to recruit a big-shot—one who, like Few, hated materialism and behaviorism and was receptive to the power of the "spirit." He found that in William McDougall, a "speculative psychologist" he poached from Harvard.
Here are the real skeletons: McDougall was a "scientific" racist (as evidenced by his speculations on race in his popular book, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology), an anti-Darwinian Lamarckian, and an enthusiast of paranormal research. It was he who hired Rhine, his former research assistant at Harvard. Luckily for us, in 1926, someone decided McDougall should lead his own psychology department, rather than roll his work into the philosophy department. Otherwise, McDougall, Rhine, and the Duke Parapsychology Lab might all be part of our legacy. Whew!
We may still be living with ghosts in West Duke, but at least our philosophy department won’t find these particularly embarrassing skeletons in its closet.
New Research Highlight: Botian Liu
This month, Botian Liu talks about his interest in virtue cultivation, the American political discussions that first got him hooked on philosophy, and his dream of using videos, podcasts, comics, and more to bring philosophy to the public.
This is the first in our series of Research Highlights that feature our job market candidates. More to come!
Yuan Dong's book chapter, "Neuroethical Considerations in the Gaming Communities," was published by Springer Nature in October.
Katherine Brading's paper, "Du Châtelet on the metaphysics and epistemology of time," came out in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. In it, she argues that Du Châtelet is making some interesting and novel moves in the debates that followed Newton's and Leibniz's arguments over absolute versus relative space and time. At first sight, Du Châtelet seems to be adopting familiar positions from Leibniz and Locke, but closer inspection reveals something very different and far more sophisticated.
Mary Purcell, Lindsay Huth, and Audrey Ledbetter traveled to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, to present the high school philosophy lessons they are developing for Project Vox at the Public Philosophy Network Conference. While in Canada, Lindsay and Mary also caught up with much-missed Duke friend Laura Soter.
On October 17, Gopal Sreenivasan presented a paper on wronging at an ethics workshop at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal.
In November, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is headed to São Paulo, Brazil, for one conference on Rethinking the Future III: Fostering Social Equality and then to Santiago, Chile, for another conference on Cognition and Agency in Mental Disorder.
Above, Walter's granddaughter, Juno, celebrates Halloween dressed as a bee.
Michael Bergdolt, Julia Banks, and Audrey Ledbetter spent two nights camping in Krzyzewskiville to enter the lottery for season basketball tickets and they all won! Special shoutout to Dylan Brown (fearless Head Usher) for organizing the whole campout.
The PBS series Closer to Truth is planning a retrospective of Peter van Inwagen's career and work. Eleven interviews of 15-20 minutes each are scheduled.
David Wong gave a paper, titled “Confucian and Daoist Attitudes toward Grief and Consolation,” at a conference at Cambridge University. He also visited a class and gave a public talk at Concordia University at the invitation of Duke alumna Jing Hu.
Alex Rosenberg appeared on The Dissenter podcast to discuss his new book, Blunt Instrument: Why Economic Theory Can't Get Any Better...Why We Need It Anyway.
The book has also been licensed for translation and publication in Chinese.
On October 2nd, Caleb Hazelwood gave a Philosophy Colloquium at the University of Nevada, Reno. His talk, "'Invasive microbial species' are neither invasive nor species," centered on work he is currently developing with Carlos Santana (UPenn). While at UNR, Caleb caught up with fellow Duke alumnus (and academic sibling) Carlos Mariscal!
The Duke Philosophy Department, the Center for Comparative Philosophy, and the Harmony Humanities Lab will host the Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought November 14-15.
Ask Tayfun, Or Don’t: The (Unsolicited™) Advice Column
This month I have some unneeded advice for Ben and Wenjin about Professional Development, aka “Profdev”, aka Developmental Professionalization. Both professionals and professors profess—but do they profess the same things? A professional theremin player can touch people’s hearts without even touching their instrument, and perhaps professional philosophers can achieve a similar feat. Not through some telepathic pedagogy left over from the Duke Parapsychology Lab, but because their instrument is the mind, which—as Elisabeth of Bohemia taught Descartes—is notoriously difficult to touch. How much more difficult, then, for one mind to touch another! How exactly that happens is also the central question, of course, in the philosophy of advice columns. I wouldn’t presume to teach anyone how to teach anyone how to teach, but I guess that’s what it would take. For as Aristotle nicely summed it up: “That is how the name 'comprehension' was attached to the comprehension that makes people have good comprehension.” (Nicomachean Ethics 1143a16, Irwin translation)
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.