Departmental Newsletter: September 2025

A Trip to the Archives—and Back in Time

Introducing Our New Monthly Feature: 
The Duke Philosophy Department History Project

When Katherine Brading assumed her role as department chair after the pandemic, the department had weathered much change. We had lost our two oldest professors emeriti, Martin Golding and David Sanford, and, with them, much of the institutional memory of the department’s first half-century. Other faculty, staff, and graduate students had left, and new ones had arrived without a normal period of integration.

In her new role, Brading set about rebuilding our department's identity and culture. To do so, she launched a project digging into our past.

In 2022, Brading dispatched Wenjin Liu and Wayne Norman to the University Archives to find out whether anything stored there might give us some idea of who and what we were as a department before 1979, when our then-most-senior faculty member, Robert Brandon, was hired. Liu and Norman found a sparse physical record. A handful of photographs, not always labeled. A whole box of random memos from a chair in the 1980s. Almost no minutes from department meetings. 

But they also turned up some intriguing leads. Last fall, Liu and Norman worked with three undergraduate researchers to follow up on those leads and develop a broad picture of the department's past. Their project coincided with — and maybe received some funding from — Duke's Centennial celebration.

Here, we’ll pick up where that team left off, sharing some of the most interesting tidbits they uncovered over the course of this academic year. You'll learn about facts, figures events, trivia, personalities and publications from our department's largely undocumented by occasionally glorious past.

In the meantime, a couple fun facts to tide you over:

This Month (and Last Month) in Departmental History

• August 10, 1999 — Then-professor Alasdair MacIntyre publishes his book Dependent Rational Animals.

• August 1980 — Duke’s first Black philosopher, Benjamin Ward, arrives at Duke.

• September 1968 — Paul Welsh is named chair of the philosophy department. Welsh was known for his work on logic, and he published Introduction to Logic with Romane Clark in 1962. In April 1968, he was among the senior faculty members who backed a resolution demanding that Duke increase staff pay, engage in collective bargaining, and promote racial justice in Durham.

Welcome, Gus!

Gus Law joins us as a Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy as well as Associate Director at the Center for Comparative Philosophy. 

In the newest departmental Research Highlight, Gus discusses his fascination with ancient texts, his longstanding interest in philosophical dialogues, and the "interview" with Mengzi and Aristotle he's currently writing.

Read more here

Oxford University Press published a book containing the lectures David Wong delivered in Taiwan to National Chengchi University. The lectures and the book are titled "Metaphor and Analogy in Chinese Thought: Governance within the Person, State, and Society." The book also contains papers given by various speakers addressing either the lectures or other parts of his work, together with his replies to these papers. It is edited by Ellie Hua Wang and Kai Marchal.

Ask Tayfun, Or Don’t: The (Unsolicited™) Advice Column

This month I have some unsolicited badvice for Ásta about how to leverage the recent trends in federal government rebranding in their “Speech and Harm” seminar next term. Philosophers of pacifism may quip that “just war theory” sounds oxymoronic, but will calling it “just defense theory” solve the problem? My alternative proposal, which has the great merit of avoiding the costly enterprises of reprinting books and relabeling signs, is to simply shift the emphasis to the first term. Not only does this aptly revise the meaning to communicate that we will only be concerned with war, but is likely to share the commercial success of such effective slogans as “Just real orange juice” and “Just do it”. While we’re at it, we might give a shot to “asocial ontology,” “careless ethics,” and “effective egoism,” too. And of course, to make the greatness of philosophy visible again, we need to update some classics with big, beautiful names such as “the speed train problem,” “the Chinese skyscraper argument,” and Tolstoy’s War and War. I know I’ve missed a few, but as the influential epistemologist Donald Rumsfeld once said, “there are also unknown unknowns.” That renaming the seminar “Speechless and Harmless” would please some people in high places, though, is unfortunately a known known.

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.