Agnes Callard
Agnes Gellen Callard is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Philosophy. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.
Agnes is writing a book called Remoralizing Weakness of Will. In it, she argues that the problems and paradoxes associated with weakness of will stem from failure to treat it as a moral phenomenon; on her view, weak-willed agents are those who try and fail to be moral. By reconnecting weakness of the will with morality she aims to shed light not only on the former but also the latter—in particular, she shows that a novel characterization of morality is available once we come to see it as the proper object of the kind of striving that weakness of will is. Click here for an overview of the book.
CV (doc)
Agnes Callard's recorded Lectures
Agnes Callard on Elucidations (Dept of Philospohy podcast)
Contact
office: Stuart Hall 231-A
office hours: On leave Spring Quarter
office phone: 773/702-4370
email: agcallard@uchicago.edu
Recent News
- Agnes Callard will give the Human Being and Citizen Autumn Quarter Lecture on November 27, 2012,"What is Courage?". Link
Selected Writings
""The Paradox of Refutation" - docx
"The Reason to be Angry Forever" - PDF
Recent Courses
25000. History of Philosophy I: Ancient Philosophy. (=CLCV 22700) PQ: Completion of the general education requirement in humanities. This is a course in Ancient Greek Philosophy. We will study major works by Plato and Aristotle, ones that introduced the philosophical questions we struggle with to this day: What are the goals of a life well-lived? Why should we have friends? How do we explain weakness of will? What makes living things different from nonliving things? What is the difference between knowledge and belief? What is definition and what is capable of being defined? Autumn 2010
20110. Plato's Theaetetus. (=FNDL 21713) Plato’s Theaetetus is the first systematic treatment of the question: what is it to know anything at all? This class is a close reading of the dialogue; and an exploration of the nature of human knowledge. Examples of questions we will think about are: What is it to define something? What is the relationship between knowledge and perception? What would it mean for a belief to be justified, over and above its being true? How is false belief possible—and why would anyone think there is a problem about it’s being possible? No Greek required.(B) Winter 2010
53710: Aristotle's Theory of Action. This class examines Aristotle's account of the nature of human action. Topics: choice and virtue and 'for its own sake'; voluntariness and responsibility; process, action, activity, capacity and product; nature, habit, ‘second nature’ and norm; desire, perception, and the cause of animal movement; teleology (purpose) in action as compared to natural teleology. Readings will center on Aristotles’s Nicomachean Ethics, with additional readings from his Eudemian Ethics, Physics, De Motu Animalium, De Anima, and Metaphysics. Secondary literature by J.L. Ackrill, H. Segvic, S. Broadie, D. Charles, J.M. Cooper, J. Whiting, G. Lear, V. Caston, A. Kosman, J. Richardson & others. We’ll end with a look at contemporary “neo-Aristotelian” accounts of action-theory, e.g. G.E.M. Anscombe, Michael Thompson, and others and try to assess how Aristotelian they really are. All students (including auditors) will do at least one presentation. Winter 2010. Syllabus
History of Philosophy I: Ancient Philosophy. PQ: Completion of the general education requirement in humanities. This course in ancient Greek philosophy studies major works by Plato and Aristotle that introduced the philosophical questions we struggle with to this day: What are the goals of a life well-lived? Why should we have friends? How do we explain weakness of will? What makes living things different from nonliving things? What is the difference between knowledge and belief? What is definition and what is capable of being defined? Autumn 2009.
Plato on Desire. PQ: Consent of instructor. Class limited to twenty students. What is it about us, or about the world, that makes us prone to initiating changes in it? The question of why we do anything at all is a question about the nature of desire, a subject on which Plato had a lot to say. In this seminar, we try to think, with Plato and Socrates, about the relationship between desire, pleasure, goodness, and action. Readings come from Plato’s Philebus, Symposium, Gorgias, Republic, and Protagoras.
Weakness of the Will. Sometimes we do something bad, even though we know better: we over-eat, or under-tip, or let our curiosity get the better of us. This phenomenon, known as “weakness of the will”, raises the following question: why would someone knowingly do what’s worse, when he’s fully capable of doing what’s better? Socrates found this kind of action so puzzling that he concluded it was impossible. Was he right? If not, then we need an account of such action; and such an account turns out to be surprisingly hard to give. But what may be even more suprising is that there is anything to puzzle over here: what could be less remarkable than the fact that sometimes we don’t behave the way we’re supposed to? Apart from this apparent lack of problematicity, weakness of will might seem too small a target for any systematic investigation. But from a philosophical point of view it makes up in location what it lacks in size and splendor; poised at the crucial spot where ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind intersect, weakness of the will forces us to re-ask questions fundamental to each area, among them: what is it to know the right course of action? Is such knowledge desirable, if it doesn’t issue in action? If I want something, do I have to see that thing as (in some way) good? Is there more than one way to be moved to act? Do souls have parts? (I) Winter 2010. Syllabus