If you practice, or are interested in practicing, any strain of empirically informed philosophy (e.g., experimental philosophy, philosophy of mind, neuroethics, naturalistic epistemology, etc.), the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab is an ideal place to receive your graduate training. In addition to gaining access to the excellent resources and faculty offered by the Duke Philosophy department, you will gain access to the equally excellent resources and faculty offered by the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS). 

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Your office will be located in our lab space in the CCN, putting you in immediate proximity to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty in psychology and neuroscience. You will have the opportunity to take classes on topics ranging from Chinese philosophy to functional magnetic resonance imaging, and everything in between. In addition to becoming an expert on your particular subfield of philosophy, you will also learn how to design, conduct, and analyze the results of behavioral and neuroimaging experiments. This will require you to become comfortable with statistical analysis and programming in languages such R, Python, and Matlab, and with data collection using programs like Qualtrics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and PsychToolbox. Such hands-on experience, in conjunction with attending weekly lab meetings and CCN journal clubs, will greatly improve your ability to critically interpret research in the behavioral and neural sciences. 

 

This unique training will earn you a certificate in Cognitive Neuroscience in addition to your Ph.D. in Philosophy. Further, the kind of training described above represents just the minimum amount of interdisciplinary work you can do as a Philosophy graduate student in the IMC Lab. We frequently collaborate with researchers in the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and have connections with a number of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers across the world. Additionally, it is commonplace for graduate students at Duke to work closely with other researchers at neighboring institutions in the Research Triangle. 

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Prospective graduate students should contact Felipe directly to express their interest prior to applying through the Duke Graduate Program. You can find some advice on how to craft such an email here. We look forward to hearing from you! 

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