Thank you to everyone who came to our start-of-year all-department meeting, where we reconnected with one another, welcomed our new graduates students, postdocs, and visitors, and looked ahead to a terrific line-up of speakers and a bunch of exciting graduate seminars. It was great to see you and to feel all the energy in the room.
I am partipating in a year-long series of events focussed on equity-centered academic leadership, alongside other faculty from Duke as well as several other universities (more here). I am hopeful that this will be useful for us in our work together. Most of the activities are being done online, but the group had a few days together in New York at the end of September (pictured below). Talking with the other department Chairs reminded me how lucky we are in our department to have such a wonderful group of people, and it reinforced my commitment to fostering community as my number one priority. While I was in New York, I also took the opportunity to give a talk on Du Châtelet to the SWIP group at NYU, so that was a lot of fun.
My main message for the year: The foundation of excellence is community. Together, we can do things in our research, teaching and service that are more extraordinary than anything any of us could have done alone. So my thanks to everyone who is investing in our department life. Have a great semester!
Anyone who knows Wayne Norman knows about his love for music and his penchant for record collecting. If you have ever gone to lunch with him on Ninth Street, you've likely had to take a quick detour to Hunky Dory so he can peruse the stacks. And if you've been to visit him in his office, you know what an impressive collection of records he showcases there in thematic exhibits. His office gallery was recently featured in Duke Magazine, as well as in a recent documentary by Leslie Gray Baker (below).
This month, we hosted the first Duke/UNC epistemology workshop (program available here, https://philosophy.duke.edu/events/dukeunc-epistemology-workshop). This was the first in what will hopefully be a long line of workshops that help to cultivate connections between the thriving epistemology communities at Duke and UNC. As well as 8 wonderful talks by leading epistemologists, there was lots of time for fruitful conversations and even some karaoke. (Editor's Note: tragically -- and, I'm tempted to add, unforgivably -- no one has provided any video evidence of these events. Therefore I can only speculate that, being an epistemology workshop, Laura Soter gave a rousing rendition of Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know," followed by Ben Eva's inspired adaptation of the Monkees' "I'm a [Justified True] Believer.")
On September 27th our Mahoney Visiting Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Philsophy, Calvin Normore, gave a public lecture on "Persons, Selves, and Us: Who are we anyway?" The room was full and the conversation lively.
Ben Sarbey had a paper accepted! "Rethinking Data Collection in Medical Aid in Dying: Quality Improvement as the North Star" (with Sean Riley). It will appear in the Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine. In the paper, Ben provides an overview of how data from aid in dying programs are collected across jurisdictions and provides recommendations for which data to collect.
Shanna Slank gave a colloquium titled "Keeping On or Quitting." Shanna discussed competing theories of when one should persist and when one should stop trying to pursue a goal that is unlikely to be achieved. Her view was that standard decision theory gives the best account, partly because it tells us not only when to keep going but also when to quit.
Caleb Hazelwood's paper, "An Emerging Dilemma for Reciprocal Causation," has been accepted for publication in Philosophy of Science. You can find a preprint of the paper here. Caleb is especially grateful to Alex Rosenberg, Robert Brandon, Dan McShea, Jennifer Jhun, and Ben Eva, as well as participants of the Duke Causation Group and the graduate student WIP series, all of whom gave incredibly helpful feedback on drafts of the manuscript.
Michael Veldman's paper, "Mathematizing Metaphysics: The Case of the Principle of Least Action," has been accepted for publication in Philosophy of Science. You can find his paper here. Michael wishes to acknowledge Katherine Brading, Andrew Janiak, and Jennifer Jhun for their valuable feedback, pointers to literature, and warm encouragement throughout this project.
Yuan asks how she can overcome her fear of butterflies. To respond to her query with another (as one does)—what will be left once all your fears are overcome? A phobia is just a regulative ideal waiting to be exploited, an anti-telos to structure your endeavours around (or away from, as it were). As my grandmother used to say, butter flies when you’re popping corn, and she’ll say it again if you want to hear it. She would then proceed to quote Pascal, who famously observed: “The hare itself would not save us from thinking about death and the miseries distracting us, but hunting it does so.” (Pensées VIII.136). So if you remain adamant about ridding yourself of your fears, I guess you need to become a butterfly hunter.
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