An FHI Affiliated Center, PAL stands for The Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke University.  “Arts” includes theater, painting, film, music, and other arts.  PAL exists to encourage and promote work that places literature, theater, painting, film, and other arts in conversation with philosophy without reducing them to mere illustrations of philosophical paradigms. It seeks to foster conversation between writers and artists and scholars and critics.

PAL’s mission is to show that literature and the arts think as deeply as philosophy, and to encourage dialogue between literature and the arts, and philosophy in ways that don’t subordinate the former to the latter, but rather acknowledge them as equal contributors to human knowledge. Underpinning this mission is a vision of human language as use, action, and expression, and thus of every human utterance, including every work of art, literature and philosophy, as a specific intervention in time, and history.