Departmental Newsletter: September 2026
Felipe De Brigard was awarded the MacArthur 'Genius Grant'
Congratulations, Felipe!
Kevin Hoover's book (with James Wible), Peirce’s Science of Economics and Economics of Science, was published on September 16th. Here is the abstract:
Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) is most famous today as a philosopher, the founder of the philosophical school of Pragmatism, and as a logician. In his own day, he was better known as a bench scientist, astronomer, and metrologist, renowned in the international scientific community for his measurements of gravity. Peirce was, in fact, one of history's great polymaths: mathematician, a founder of semiotics and one of the earliest experimental psychologists, as well as a contributor to a number of other disciplines, lexicography, and for decades a scientific contributor to The Nation. Perhaps the least understood of Peirce's many contributions are his forays into economics. In the 1870s, no one in the world had a better understanding of mathematical economics or its applications to real-world problems. Peirce's Science of Economics and Economics of Science is a careful examination of his engagement with economics. It takes an interdisciplinary approach. As history of economics, it reconstructs how Peirce came to possess a cutting-edge knowledge of mathematical economics at the dawn of the so-called "marginalist revolution," how he used that knowledge in concrete applications, and how he understood the nature of economics as a science. As a wider history of science, it shows how Peirce created the economics of science out of a whole cloth as part of resolving methodological problems that arose in his work of measuring gravity. The book explores applications of Peirce's ideas about economics to some long-standing problems in the philosophy of science and shows how these ideas have implications for real-world science.
On September 19, 2026, Duke hosted the fourth annual Duke-UNC Philosophy Graduate Conference. This year’s theme was Knowledge and Society, and the conference brought together graduate students from Duke, UNC, Rutgers, Columbia, Oklahoma, Clemson, Georgia State, UCLA, Arizona State, Boston University, and University of Massachusetts. The team was also delighted to have Alex Worsnip (UNC) as keynote speaker, presenting “Deference to Experts and the Empirical-Normative Distinction.” On Duke's side, the conference was organized by Dylan Brown and Michael Bergdolt with the help of Joselu Cabrera Guillermo.
Wenjin Liu was an invited speaker at the Eleventh Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, Plato on Learning to be Good 1: Early Dialogues & the Republic, held at University College London on September 7–10, 2026. She presented her paper, “Moral (Mis)Education in Plato’s Protagoras,” as part of the four-day colloquium, which brought together scholars from the U.S., U.K., and Europe working on Plato’s accounts of moral education. The Keeling Colloquia are held every three to four years by UCL’s Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy in conjunction with the Department of Greek and Latin and have a longstanding association with major edited volumes in ancient philosophy.
Duke was well-represented at the Deep South Philosophy and Neuroscience at the Gulf IX Conference in Pensacola, Florida. Jorge Morales gave a keynote talk on mental imagery, and Nina Van Rooy gave a talk called "Individuating Episodic Memory Across Species: An Evolutionarily Informed Approach." Many Duke alumni, from both philosophy and psychology and neuroscience, were also there, including Maureen Ritchey, David Barack, Kathryn Maxson Jones and Joseph Neisser - all of them now postdocs or faculty elsewhere!
Jorge Morales gave another keynote talk on mental imagery at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow during the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aphantasia Conference.
Emily Kluge presented a paper, "Paradox in Laozi: Cultivating Dao-like Rulers," at the 2026 World Congress on Logic and Religion in Vancouver, Canada. It was part of a workshop on approaches to paradox in Indian and Chinese philosophies.
Katherine Brading was in Oxford were she gave a talk on Newton at a workshop on fictionalism, alongside Elaine Landry and Brad Armor-Garb, friends from many years ago when they were all in Oxford as grad students / postdocs.
Maya Kronfeld’s new entry on Immanuel Kant has just been published in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory.
It has three sections: 1) Critique and the limits of knowledge; 2) Freedom and the ambivalent status of the universal; 3) Aesthetics and critical agency.
Nina Van Rooy gave a talk at NC State, called 'Anthropocentric Bias in the Study of Animal Minds', which was invited by North Carolina Animal Advocates United (NCAAU). The talk was well-attended and they had a great and engaging discussion after!
In September, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and several MAD Lab members had tons of fun driving together to and from Cornell for the first meeting of the International Society for Moral Psychology, where he met many old friends, made several new ones, and listed to some inspiring talks. Walter's next trip was to São Paulo for Rethinking the Future 4 organized by my friend Paulo Boggio. One highlight was, as usual, karaoke including songs Walter rewrote to make them about AI. Looking ahead to October, Ron Mallon comes to Duke on October 16 to stay for 2 weeks, and then Chandra Sripada will be our honored visitor at MAD Lab's annual retreat, in the mountains of western North Carolina.
The department geared up for another successful fantasy football season with a draft on September 3 organized by John Sweeney. Good luck to all!
Now Soliciting: New Monthly Column
As you are all aware, our beloved advice columnist, Tayfun Gur, has sadly departed our department. No one can replace the particular artistry he brought to his monthly advice column. But if you have an idea for a monthly column you would like to write, please send a pitch to lindsay.huth@duke.edu for consideration.