Department of Philosophy

October 24, 2025

Kirun Sankaran is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Economy Project and Lecturer in Philosophy at Dartmouth College. his talk is titled:

Alienation Arguments

"It's fashionable to argue that capitalism is alienating, because markets' reliance on extrinsic incentives, instrumental valuation, and commodity exchange make our social and political order confront us as something hostile or out of step with important ethical values. The problem is that these arguments overgeneralize. The alienating features of markets allow them to overcome the information costs and free-rider problems that undermine large-scale cooperation. This is also true of bureaucracy, which is both historically and theoretically the most common alternative to market organization. In both cases, scalability explains alienation. Often, alienation theorists turn to democracy as a paradigmatically non-alienating governance mechanism. However, the features that make democracy non-alienating also leave it vulnerable to information costs and free-rider problems. Alienation theorists thus face a challenge. They must describe a non-alienated social relation that can overcome the problems that undermine large-scale cooperation. The prospects seem dim. Some amount of alienation may just be an inevitable drawback of our political arrangements."

December 5, 2025

Ned Markosian is a member of the Department of Philosophy at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an Associate Member of LanCog, a research group in the Centre of Philosophy at The University of Lisbon. He works mainly in metaphysics, but also has research interests in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of art, and various other areas of philosophy.

January 23, 2026

Aliosha Barranco Lopez is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College. For the academic year 25-26 she is visiting MIT. She writes,

"I received my Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Ram Neta and Alex Worsnip. I work in traditional epistemology, as well as its intersection with philosophy of technology.  

I am a dedicated teacher. I care about my students’ growth not only as learners but also as human beings. And nothing makes me happier than when my students tell me that my class made them fall in love with philosophy."

March 27, 2026

Katie Creel is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, cross appointed between the Department of Philosophy and Religion and Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
Her current research explores the moral, political, and epistemic implications of machine learning as it is used in non-state automated decision making and in science. She has other ongoing projects on early modern philosophy and general philosophy of science.