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The ����vlog���Bվ 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.

Upcoming Talks

"Being Free, Becoming Free: Spinoza's Model of Human Freedom."

John Grey, Ph.D., Michigan State University
November 5, 2026 3:00 p.m. Bernard Brommel Hall 102

Though Spinoza is a free will skeptic, he argues that we can nevertheless attain a kind of human freedom—namely, the power and autonomy that we acquire when we live according to the dictates of reason. Spinoza even invites us to conceive of a human being that is perfectly free and rational in this sense: homo liber, the free man or free person. Many philosophers have interpreted Spinoza’s homo liber as a model that he intended us to emulate. But does it make sense for us to try to emulate an ideal, perfectly free human being? I will argue that it does not. What it is rational for us to do often depends upon the fact that we ourselves are not perfectly rational. For this reason, it is often rational for us to do things that a perfectly free person simply would not do. I conclude by proposing some other practical roles that Spinoza might have intended the model homo liber to perform.

is a lecturer in Philosophy at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the history of modern philosophy, though he has also published articles on contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science. His historical work examines the efforts of early modern authors to provide systematic metaphysical foundations for psychology, ethics, and politics.

Past Talks

2026-2027

• , University of Chicago and , Northwestern University, "Scalpels and Scaffolding."
• , Illinois Institute of Technology, "Moving Beyond Irrationality: Mental Illness, Well-Being, and Ulysses Contracts."

2025-2026

• , Harper College, "On Tact."
• , Siskel/Jacobs Productions, "The Here Now Project."
• , Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, "Global Retail, Local Morality: The Social Life of Unsold Food in Japanese Convenience Stores."
• . Union College, "José Martí's Defense of Democracy."
• Mohamed Mehdi, Oakton College,“Backstage with the Hypocrites: The Demand for Consistency in our Political Commitments.”
• , School of the Art Institute of Chicago, "The Ethics of Looksism."

2024-2025

• , Loyola University Chicago, "Beyond the Value Free Ideal in Law & Science?"
• , University of Illinois at Chicago, "Doing Oligarchy Better: On the Politics of Effective Altruism.”
• Stacey Goguen, ����vlog���Bվ, “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, ����vlog���Bվ, "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, ����vlog���Bվ, "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."
• , ����vlog���Bվ, “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, ����vlog���Bվ, "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 ����vlog���Bվ