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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.

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

• , University of Illinois at Chicago, "Doing Oligarchy Better: On the Politics of Effective Altruism.”
• Stacey Goguen, ��ݮ��Ƶ,  “Why Politics & Religion Belong in Science (and what we still get wrong about values and objectivity).”
• , 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

• University of Twente, Netherlands, “Political Eschatology and Gender: Information Warfare against Queer Communities.”
• , Oakton College, "Better Living through Pessimism."
• , Governors State University, "The Fire Next Time: Prescribed Burns as Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Epistemic Reparations."
• , 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."
• , Loyola University Chicago, "The Problem of Misplaced Trust and Distrust."

2022-2023

• , University of Illinois at Chicago, "Berkeley's Political Metaphysics."
• , Loyola University Chicago, "Extracting Gold from the Counterfeiter’s Bag: al-Ghazālī on the Tradition of Philosophy in Islam."
• Sophia Mihic, ��ݮ��Ƶ, "Freedom, Property, and Privacy: The Political Economy of Abortion and Reproduction After Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization."
• , Chicago-Kent College of Law, "The Inherent Problem with Mass Incarceration."
• , University of Chicago, "Do Billionaires Deserve Their Wealth?"
• Shireen Roshanravan, ��ݮ��Ƶ, "Pretending-to-be and Masterful Political Performance."

2019-2020

• , Carnegie Mellon University, "Painfully Literal Dudes."
• , Free University, Amsterdam, “How Epistemic Injustice Can Deepen Disagreement.”
• , University of Chicago, “Is There Such a Thing as being Good or Bad at Philosophy?"
• , Grand Valley State University, "Collapsing Life and Art."
• , ��ݮ��Ƶ, “Against a Single History: Luxemburg and a Decolonial Critique of Political Economy.”

2018-2019

• , University of Minnesota, “Recovering Early Modern Women Writers: Some Tensions.”
• *, Marquette University, “ A Relational Analysis of Oppression: Group Injustice and Institutional Mediation.”
• , Northwestern University, “Propaganda for Realists.”
• , Northwestern University, “What does it Mean to Have a Revolution in Culture? Frantz Fanon’s Speculative Method of Critique.”
• , Manchester University, “Philosophy, Democracy, and Mass Incarceration.”
• , Michigan State University, “Theorizing Testimony in Argumentative Contexts.”

2017-2018

• , Vanderbilt University, “The Antinomies of Meta-philosophy.”
• *, University of California, Berkeley, “Dominus before Domination: Harriet Jacobs and the Meaning of Slavery.” 

2016-2017

• John Casey, ��ݮ��Ƶ, "Argument Pacifism."

2015-2016

• , Northwestern University, "Does Everything have a Cause?"
• , Northwestern University, "What is Punishment?"

2014-2015

• , Vanderbilt University, "Why We Argue: A Deliberative Democratic Reply to Plato.”

*Denotes scholar as a graduate of ��ݮ��Ƶ