CFP: Science, values, and society: themes from Helen Longino

On the occasion of Helen Longino’s talk at the University of Iceland on the 8th of October 2025, we are organising a mini-workshop on themes from Longino’s philosophical work on the 10th of October 2025. This will be a half-day workshop, with lunch, and Professor Longino will be in attendance.

Helen Longino has been one of the most influential contributors to discussions of the role of values in science, the nature of objectivity in science, and the social nature of scientific knowledge. Through classic works like Science as Social Knowledge (1990) and The Fate of Knowledge (2002), to more recent work on behavioural sciences, Longino has brought to the fore the positive and negative ways in which values influence, contribute to, and constrain scientific inquiry. Science is inherently social and the values that shape scientific inquiry are not to be neglected, playing an important role in the very possibility of objectivity in science. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on and drawing from the work of Helen Longino in their own work.

We invite contributions on any topics that significantly interact with Longino’s work, including the following:

- Values in science.

- The nature of and obstacles to scientific objectivity.

- Social accounts of knowledge.

- Relationships between philosophy of science and history and sociology of science

- Groups, interaction, and individuals in science.

- Feminist philosophy of science.

- Local epistemologies.

- The roles of criticism and uptake in science.

- The nature of critical contextual empiricism.

- Situating Longino’s work in broader philosophical traditions.

Most importantly, we wish to see how to take Longino’s seminal work further in contemporary philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.

Please submit an anonymised abstract of 300-500 words by August 24th through the following form: https://forms.gle/s74ZAgbace9cCc65A 

Acceptances will be notified by August 31st. Spaces are limited, so we can only accept a few submissions for talks.

Any questions can be directed to Oscar Westerblad, [email protected]