The NEIU Philosophy Colloquium Series began in 2014 and has been a regular department-sponsored event since Spring 2018. Its purpose is to give the Northeastern community access to all of the richness and diversity of contemporary professional philosophy. The Colloquium Series also provides professional philosophers with the opportunity to experience Northeastern firsthand and meet our students and faculty in an academic setting. All of the talks are free and open to the public.
Spring 2025
Katherine Valde, Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago, "Beyond the Value Free Ideal in Law & Science?"
April 10, 2025 at 3 p.m BBH 102
Abstract: This paper draws an analogy between the value-free ideal (VFI) found in the domains
of science and law. In science, VFI states that non-epistemic values must play no role in the
internal/justificatory phases of scientific research. Recently, a consensus has emerged in the
philosophy of science which says that achieving most versions of VFI are impossible. In
contrast, the past few decades have seen the continued rise of originalism and textualism as the
dominant approach to legal interpretation and jurisprudence. The success of these frameworks
has depended significantly on their claims to allowing for judicial impartiality, or what we call
the 'legal value-free ideal.' This project argues that appreciating the similarities between these
misplaced ideals reinforces the arguments against the possibility of achieving the VFI in each
domain, and opens up new conceptual space within debates about the proper role(s) of values
within the practices of science and law alike. We argue that argue that law and jurisprudence,
rather than moral and political philosophy, may be more fertile ground for philosophers of
science to grapple with the proper role(s) of values within science.
Katherine Valde is an Assistant Teaching Professor of philosophy at Loyola University
Chicago. She got her PhD at Boston University in 2019 and served as an Assistant Professor of
philosophy at Wofford College from 2019-2024. Katherine’s research involves a combination of
philosophy of biology, philosophy of the historical sciences, and the philosophy of measurement,
as well as feminist philosophy of science. She has published on a wide range of topics from the
difficulties dating the origins of angiosperms (flowering plants), to the problems of
quantification in higher education, to the philosophy of Taylor Swift.
Upcoming Talks
- Next Year's Schedule Coming Soon!
Past Talks
2024-2025
- Stephen Engelmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, "Doing Oligarchy Better: On the Politics of Effective Altruism.”
- Stacey Goguen, Northeastern Illinois University, “Why Politics & Religion Belong in Science (and what we still get wrong about values and objectivity).”
- William French, Loyola University Chicago, "The Asymmetry in Threat Perception: Military Threats v. Ecological Threats."
- Nathan Wood, City Colleges of Chicago, "The Real Value of Anti-Realism."
2023-2024
- Maren Behrensen, University of Twente, Netherlands, “Political Eschatology and Gender: Information Warfare against Queer Communities.”
- Patrick O'Donnell, Oakton College, "Better Living through Pessimism."
- Ben Almassi, Governors State University, "The Fire Next Time: Prescribed Burns as Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Epistemic Reparations."
- Takunda Matose, Loyola University Chicago, "Justice and The Monty Hall Problem of Public Health."
- Will Behun, McHenry County Community College, "Not so much heretical as insane: myth in classical Gnosticism."
- Tom Carson, Loyola University Chicago, "The Problem of Misplaced Trust and Distrust."
2022-2023
- David Hilbert, University of Illinois at Chicago, "Berkeley's Political Metaphysics."
- Blake Dutton, Loyola University Chicago, "Extracting Gold from the Counterfeiter’s Bag: al-Ghazālī on the Tradition of Philosophy in Islam."
- Sophia Mihic, Northeastern Illinois University, "Freedom, Property, and Privacy: The Political Economy of Abortion and Reproduction After Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization."
- Raff Donelson, Chicago-Kent College of Law, "The Inherent Problem with Mass Incarceration."
- Tyler Zimmer, University of Chicago, "Do Billionaires Deserve Their Wealth?"
- Shireen Roshanravan, Northeastern Illinois University, "Pretending-to-be and Masterful Political Performance."
2019-2020
- B.R. George, Carnegie Mellon University, "Painfully Literal Dudes."
- Thirza Lagewaard, Free University, Amsterdam, “How Epistemic Injustice Can Deepen Disagreement.”
- Agnes Callard, University of Chicago, “Is There Such a Thing as being Good or Bad at Philosophy?"
- David Vessey, Grand Valley State University, "Collapsing Life and Art."
- Alex Adamson, Northeastern Illinois University, “Against a Single History: Luxemburg and a Decolonial Critique of Political Economy.”
2018-2019
- Jessica Gordon Roth, University of Minnesota, “Recovering Early Modern Women Writers: Some Tensions.”
- Jorge Montiel*, Marquette University, “ A Relational Analysis of Oppression: Group Injustice and Institutional Mediation.”
- Megan Hyska, Northwestern University, “Propaganda for Realists.”
- William Paris, Northwestern University, “What does it Mean to Have a Revolution in Culture? Frantz Fanon’s Speculative Method of Critique.”
- Seth Mayer, Manchester University, “Philosophy, Democracy, and Mass Incarceration.”
- David Godden, Michigan State University, “Theorizing Testimony in Argumentative Contexts.”
2017-2018
- Scott Aikin, Vanderbilt University, “The Antinomies of Meta-philosophy.”
- Desmond Jagmohan*, University of California, Berkeley, “Dominus before Domination: Harriet Jacobs and the Meaning of Slavery.”
2016-2017
- John Casey, Northeastern Illinois University, "Argument Pacifism."
2015-2016
- Morganna Lambeth, Northwestern University, "Does Everything have a Cause?"
- Raff Donelson, Northwestern University, "What is Punishment?"
2014-2015
- Scott Aikin, Vanderbilt University, "Why We Argue: A Deliberative Democratic Reply to Plato.”
*Denotes scholar as a graduate of Northeastern Illinois University
