2025-26 Speaker Series

Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.

Upcoming speaker:   

Thursday, November 13, 2025
4:30 p.m. EST

STVH 3165

Dr. Lambert Zuidervaart

Resident Fellow
Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, ICS and University of Toronto

The Best Defense…:
Rescuing Scientific Truth from Authoritarian Attacks and Academic Neglect

speaker poster

The American academy is under attack. Authoritarian populists dismiss academic expertise, and they oppose the values that universities have traditionally upheld. Central among these is the idea of truth. The issues at stake are older than the current political struggle, however. Indeed, academics have planted some of their seeds. For we have lost sight of the central task of the sciences in society, and we have become inarticulate about the academy’s highest values.
This lecture will introduce a new way to think about truth, a conception I call holistic alethic pluralism. I’ll talk about science—in a broad sense that includes all academic disciplines—as one specific social domain of truth alongside other domains of truth. And I’ll show how this conception of scientific truth can help explain the social legitimacy of science, reestablish its societal autonomy, and transform our universities.

 

Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube

Past Speakers:

Dr. Peter Szendy
Pneumatopolitics: Respiring and Conspiring
October 21, 2025

Dr. David Marriott
Without Truth: Fanon’s concept of confession
February 13, 2025

Dr. Wayne Hope
The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Epochal Crises of Time
January 10, 2025

Dr. Adam Rosenthal
Life as Lineage, or: Literary Apocalypse and the Text of Evolution
October 25, 2024

Dr. David Roden
Nietzschean Hyperagents
September 18, 2024

Dr. Alenka Zupančič
The Logic of Fantasy
May 3, 2024