Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy. She received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.
Selected Publications
Aspiration (2017); (i) reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Adam Bales; (ii) Reviewed in On Riding the Dragon by Katherine October Matthews; (iii) Reviewed in Philosophical Quarterly by Robert J. Hartman; (iv) reviewed in the New Yorker by Joshua Rothman; (v) reviewed in Essays in Philosophy by Krista Karbowski Thomason
“Transformative Activity in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend,” forthcoming in Transformative Experience, ed. John Schwenkler and Enoch Lambert (Oxford University Press)
Ignorance and Akrasia-Denial in the Protagoras (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy vol. 47)
"Enkratēs Phronimos" (Archiv für Geschichte Der Philosophie 99, no. 1, 2017)
"Everyone Desires the Good: Socrates' Protreptic Theory of Desire," Review of Metaphysics 70, no. 4 (2017)
"Aristotle on Deliberation," forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, ed. Ruth Chang and Kurt Sylvan
"The Reason to Be Angry Forever," forthcoming in The Moral Psychology of Anger, ed. Owen Flanagan and Myisha Cherry (part of Rowman and Littlefield's Moral Psychology of the Emotions series, series editor Mark Alfano)
"Proleptic Reasons" (Oxford Studies in Meta-Ethics, vol. 11)
"The Weaker Reason" (Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 22)
"Liberal Education and the Possibility of Valuational Progress," Social Philosophy and Policy 34, no. 2 (2017)
Public Philosophy
(1) The Point Magazine (monthly column)
(3) Miscellaneous: Interview1, Interview2, On Meritocracy, On Utilitarianism, On Feminism, On Overthinking, On Progress in Philosophy.
Media
Agnes Callard's lectures and podcasts
Recent Courses
PHIL 29902 Senior Seminar II
Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
PHIL 29901 Senior Seminar I
Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
PHIL 55502 Socratic Intellectualism
We will read selections from, and secondary literature on, some early Socratic dialogues in order to engage with a set of Socratic theses on desire, motivation, and value: (1) Everyone desires the good (or: what he believes to be good?) (Meno, Gorgias, Lysis) ; (2) Everyone does what he believes (or knows?) to be best (Protagoras, Apology) (3) It is better to be wronged than to do wrong (Gorgias, Apology) (4) Only good men do wrong voluntarily (Hippias Minor) (5) Courage/Moderation is Wisdom (Laches, Protagoras, Charmides). We will want to examine these views both for consistency; for their individual merits; and in order to see whether we can put them together into a distinctively Socratic ethical point of view. (III)
PHIL 26200 Intensive History of Philosophy, Part II: Aristotle
In this class, we will read selections from Aristotle's major works in metaphysics, logic, psychology and ethics. We will attempt to understand the import of his distinct contributions in all of these central areas of philosophy, and we will also work towards a synoptic view of his system as a whole. There are three questions we will keep in mind and seek to answer as readers of his treatises: (1) What questions is this passage/chapter trying to answer? (2) What is Aristotle's answer? (3) What is his argument that his answer is the correct one?
(a) If students wish to use Intensive History of Plato/Aristotle to fulfill history requirement, they must take BOTH Plato and Aristotle, and those will count only for ONE quarter of the history requirement (though they will count for 2 philosophy courses as far as the major is concerned, e.g. as electives).
(b) Students are not intending to use the courses to fulfill the history requirement, they may take Plato without Aristotle or vice versa.
PHIL 29902 Senior Seminar II
Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
PHIL 25200 Intensive History of Philosophy, Part I: Plato
In this class, we will read a number of Platonic dialogues and use them to investigate the questions with which Socrates and Plato opened the door to the practice of philosophy. Here are some examples: What does a definition consist in? What is knowledge and how can it be acquired? Why do people sometimes do and want what is bad? Is the world we sense with our five senses the real world? What is courage and how is it connected to fear? Is the soul immortal? We will devote much of our time to clearly laying out the premises of Socrates' various arguments in order to evaluate the arguments for validity.
(a) If students wish to use Intensive History of Plato/Aristotle to fulfill history requirement, they must take BOTH Plato and Aristotle, and those will count only for ONE quarter of the history requirement (though they will count for 2 philosophy courses as far as the major is concerned, e.g. as electives).
(b) Students are not intending to use the courses to fulfill the history requirement, they may take Plato without Aristotle or vice versa.
PHIL 29901 Senior Seminar I
Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
PHIL 21834 Self-Creation as a Literary and Philosophical Problem
Can we choose who to be? We tend to feel that we have some ability to influence the kind of people we will become; but the phenomenon of 'self-creation' is fraught with paradox: creation ex nihilo, vicious circularity, infinite regress. In this class, we will read philosophical texts addressing these paradoxes against novels offering illustrations of self-creation. (A)
PHIL 29902 Senior Seminar II
Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
PHIL 23210/33210 The Chicago School
Before there was a “Chicago School” of neo-classical economics, the School of Chicago referred to a wide-ranging set of philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical doctrines produced, in collaboration, by such prominent members of the University’s faculty as the philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and the psychologist and educator James Angell. In a 1904 entry in the Psychological Bulletin, William James announced the entrance of the Chicago School onto the American intellectual scene, proclaiming: “Chicago has a School of Thought! a school of thought which, it is safe to predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for years to come… Professor John Dewey, and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many cooperating minds, of a view of the world, both theoretical and practical, which is so simple, massive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy.”
At the core of this system was the simple idea that all thinking, in even its most theoretical guise, must ultimately be viewed a form of practical activity. The abstract theories that are the end products of such thought, are, accordingly, nothing more than cognitive tools deriving their significance entirely from the instrumental role that they play in addressing the concrete needs for which they were devised. Behind this simple conceit lay a more elaborate conception of functionalist psychology and the logic of inquiry, according to which theory and practice, thinking and doing, are not to be viewed as separate spheres of human life. Each is instead to be understood with reference to the service it renders the other so as to effect a “continuous, uninterrupted, free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking… [One in which] observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods pass to use in description of the particular; inference passes into action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular task in question.” Upon such psychological and philosophical foundations, the theorists of the Chicago School attempted to erect a far-reaching campaign of educational reform, in which the purpose of a university education was not to be conceived as the transmission of knowledge to students, but rather as the sharing of communal social experiences through which young people could be successfully integrated into a deliberative democratic society.
In this course, we will undertake a critical examination of the psychological, philosophical, and pedagogical writings comprising the work of the Chicago School. The central text for the course will be Studies in Logical Theory, originally published in 1903, which collects together a number essays written by the original members of the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. (B)
PHIL 29901 Senior Seminar I
Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
PHIL 59109 Plato
This will be a course on Plato's Gorgias. (IV)
For full list of Agnes Callard's courses back to the 2012-13 academic year, see our searchable course database.