The Department of Philosophy held a conference on October 3-5, 2024, to celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary. We were incredibly pleased to welcome back many familiar faces from over the years: alumni, friends, and family came to Durham from all over the country to join the festivities.
The conference began on Thursday with a tour of our history. This fall, Wenjin Liu and Wayne Norman have been exploring the department’s century-old family tree. They were glad to report that nothing particularly embarrassing has turned up… so far!
On the contrary, we’ve learned that the department’s founding chair, William Ivey Cranford, had also been a founding member of the Trinity College football team that played the first official football game in the South in 1888.
We already knew that Katherine Gilbert, hired in 1930, was the first woman to be appointed full professor at Duke. But we hadn’t realized that she was also the only Duke philosopher ever to be elected President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Or that in the 1930s and 1940s the department included two of the most eminent Western scholars of Asian philosophy: Homer Dubs, who would later take up a chair at Oxford; and Alban Widgery, author of a dozen books on comparative philosophy and religion.
After our journey back in time, we all gathered in the auditorium at the Levine Science Research Center to hear a public lecture from Professor Felipe De Brigard on "Memory and Forgiveness."
Felipe noted that victims sometimes forgive the perpetrators of past wrongdoings, either to repair a relationship or simply to move on. After forgiving, however, victims typically still remember what happened, but the memory of the wrongdoing does not elicit the same affective and reactive attitudes it once did.
Felipe's research asks how forgiveness interacts with memory to bring about this emotional change. In his talk, he offered conceptual and empirical reasons to think of forgiveness as mollifying the affective contents of retrieved memories of past wrongdoings via a process of emotional reappraisal. He also summarized his current research, which is being conducted with victims of political violence in Colombia, and how it can have implications for peace and reconciliation strategies in post-conflict societies. To view a recording of Felipe's talk, click here.
After Felipe's talk, the faculty, graduate students, and alumni enjoyed dinner, drinks, and plenty of catching up at the Washington Duke Inn. The festivities continued into Friday and Saturday with talks from Thomas Polger, David Builes, Rachell Powell, Songyao Ren, Hagop Sarkissian, Katherine Brading, Qiu Lin, Jennifer Jhun, and Eddy Nahmias. The talks covered a wide range of topics, from metaphysics to economics and criminal responsibility, from color vision to the philosophy of "vibes." (Although it didn't take a degree in philosophy to see that this conference was full of good vibes!)
A big thank you from the department to everyone who made this conference such a success. We’re already looking forward to more reunions in the future.
We are advertising for a senior colleague (at the rank of associate or full professor) in philosophy of mind/neuroscience/cognitive science. Full details of this position, and how to apply, can be found on AJO here. In addition to this, we are offering a three-year postdoctoral position in comparative philosophy. The postdoctoral scholar will serve as the Associate Director of the Duke Center for Comparative Philosophy on a part-time basis while also pursuing their own research (more details on AJO here). The Center was established in 2014 and is dedicated to teaching and research into the philosophies that animate different traditions. It brings distinguished scholars who work in comparative philosophy to Duke, holds seminars and roundtables, teaches classes in cross-cultural philosophy, and produces scholarship that advances cross-cultural philosophy. David and Wenjin, two co-directors of the Center, are also co-conveners of the Harmony Humanities Lab (HHL), along with James Miller (Professor and Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Duke Kunshan University). HHL is supported by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute: Congratulations to David, Wenjin and James on winning this two-year award! You can read more about HHL on the Center for Comparative Philosophy website.
On October 31st, Pat Bryan retired as the Philosophy Department Business Manager. She has served in this role for four and a half years, having joined the department in spring 2020 just before the University sent us all home due to the pandemic. We wish to thank her again and again for her dedicated and unstinting hard work for the department during this time. Much of what the Business Manager does is invisible to most of us, but utterly necessary to our smooth day-to-day running (becoming visible only if it doesn’t get done). We have seen Pat go above-and-beyond on our behalf time after time. We will gather to give her a proper send off at the end of the semester but, for now, please join us in thanking her for all she has done for the department over the last four and a half years.
Andrew Janiak's new book, The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy, has been getting some attention from the press! You can find reviews of his book in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.
Katherine is one of eight faculty members from diverse fields who will take part in a new professional development program aimed at promoting constructive collaboration and empowering local change. Organized by the Office for Faculty Advancement with key university partners, the Duke Faculty Academy is designed to help participants develop creative solutions to issues that impact the faculty experience. In its inaugural year, the Duke Faculty Academy will guide participants through a program to create innovative projects on the impact of generative AI on the faculty experience.
Yakut Gazi, vice provost for learning innovation and digital education, and Jon Reifschneider, executive director of the Master of Engineering in AI for Product Innovation Program, will advise the cohort members. A second focus area — promoting constructive engagement with difficult topics — will also be addressed during the inaugural year through a special seed grant awarded to Katherine Brading. Abbas Benmamoun, vice provost for faculty advancement, and Joseph Blocher, Lanty L. Smith Distinguished Professor of Law, will support Brading in this work.
Working collectively, cohort members will use principles of design thinking and intervention science to walk through the process of developing creative ideas for initiatives, tools and resources that can improve experiences in academic units. Participants will receive support to generate solutions that yield lasting and effective changes. The cohort began their work at the Emerging Pedagogies Summit, where they engaged with national experts who study aspects of generative AI. They will come together for regular meetings, with local leaders joining these discussions to help build the knowledge and skills required to develop successful initiatives at Duke. At the end of the academic year, the cohort will share projects with the Duke community during a capstone event.
Michael Bergdolt ran the "Run Durham" marathon! It was his first marathon, so also technically a personal best. He got 6th in his age group. Make sure to send him your congratulations on this awesome achievement!
Ásta has two new papers out! "Interstitial injustice" is published online at Social Epistemology, and "Social Ontology: Where Now?" can be found in the Journal of Social Ontology. She also delivered "The Social Construction of Sex" at Rutgers in October, taking on arguments by Alex Byrne and others.
Ben Sarbey Presented on “The Legal and Ethical Status of DNR Tattoos” at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities in St Louis, MO.
- from a North Carolina folk verse commemorating the failure of the Jobmarket Plot
This month I have some unsolicited advice for Victor concerning the music of the job market. It’s been many decades since ABBA’s Agnetha Fältskog failed to secure that postdoc position at Stockholm University with her research proposal on ‘Just Napoleonic War Theory’—yes, even after singing in her interview, “Hire me, higher you! It’s the best thing you can do!” (—and yes, yes, the position ultimately went to Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees for his ambitious project to reformulate the philosophy of language from scratch, ‘It’s Only Words’—we all know the story). It’s time to ask, what ears will your music fall on? Will they find your song, as Simon Blackburn once described Pavarotti, “transcendentally uncontemptible”? (Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 66, p. 290) Or will they call it, as my grandmother once described me when we were doing karaoke, “a demure-track speedtrain to unemployment”? I guess we all need to keep singing to find out.