User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Agnes Callard

Agnes Callard is "an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018).

Career
Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018)

Themes
Callard's "primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics." Themes she has developed include "the problem of our future selves, the distinction between hedonism and desire-satisfaction,the practice of Socratic protreptic, why aspiration is not the same as ambition, why adventures aren’t aspirational, akrasia (weakness of will), how aspiration helps us overcome old points of view, whether we’re responsible for the people we become, and should we work on becoming the future person, whether her view denies free-will and choice, how aspiration helps avoid two evils of liberal education and whether she’s an Aristotelian or Humean about all this."

Humean or Aristotelianism
<!Economist Diane Coyle asks "Are you a Humean or an Aristotelian?" contrasting David Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) (Hume is considered to be a classical liberal. Both Aristotle and Hume are empiricists.)!> ""Humeanism about deliberation is the theory that we deliberate in order to pick the best one among our options. We calculate the causal upshot of each option, and select the one we predict will best satisfy our desires. Aristotelianism about deliberation is the theory that we deliberate in order to generate an option. Deliberation begins from a conception of the desired end, and reasons backwards to something in our power—which, as soon as we arrive at it, we immediately perform....Do I think of deliberation as picking the best among one’s options or as deriving an option from an end? I think I’m a Humean, but that’s a matter of practice more than theory. I’ve inherited the modern world just as much as the next gal, and I frame my practical situations accordingly: Which kind of cereal should I buy? Which form of transportation should I take downtown? Where should I send my kids to school? My practical life shows up to me as a series of problems calling for a Humean solution...Reading Aristotle gives you a sense of what it would be like not to see the world as fundamentally friendly to one’s projects and purposes: Aristotle saw deliberation as carving out a single handhold in the stone wall of life, whereas we are asking ourselves which stairway to take.""

- Callard 3AM 2018

Aspirational
In her 2018 publication entitled Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming

In an interview for 3 AM magazine with Richard Marshall, he asked her to recommend five books that underpin her philosophical view of the aspirational. She suggested Plato's Alcibiades in which "Socrates’ analysis of Alcibiades’ ambition is the birthplace of [her] theory of proleptic reasons: securing political office is merely the proximate face of Alcibiadean desire, the distal face of which must be supplied by the only thing that could ultimately satisfy the person he's longing to be: wisdom." Callard says that Augustine’s question in On The Free Choice of the Will De libero arbitrio, — "why does God allow us to sin" — is relevant in current conversations about the aspirational. Are actions done under the 'guise of the good’? How is it "possible to act against one's better judgment." Callard traces Parmenides' question on how can we make sense of change without contradicting ourselves, through Plato's distinction between realities that are unchanging and appearances to Aristotle's solution proposed in Physics, Physica, or Naturalis Auscultationes, in the concept of hylomorphism "a theory of nature, chance and determinism, change (including coming into being), locomotion (and its attendant paradoxes, due to Zeno), and the organization of the universe as a whole (including God)."

In her opinion piece in The Stone, she discusses Blaise Pascal's wager in terms of aspirational faith. She cites John Hughes's classic movie The Breakfast Club (1985) as an example of five teenagers who bond deeply together for a short period despite their differences, who then reflect on whether they will will choose to greet one another. They can "have aspirational faith — try to believe — that they will do so." She challenges Pascal's statement "the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know" by asking, "Because suppose that Pascal is right, and someone’s heart has reasons that her reason does not know. Do things have to stay that way? Couldn’t her reason learn those reasons? And wouldn’t that, in turn, be her heart’s opportunity to grow?" Callard considers Elena Ferrante's book My Brilliant Friend (2012) in the four part series Neapolitan Novels, a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, to be a "case study in the nitty gritty reality of aspiration."

Public philosophy
In her article in The Point Magazine, Callard described public philosophy as an aspirational form of philosophy that attempts to "put philosophy into action" by liberating" the "subject from its academic confines". Callard, using the example of Plato's cave, says that philosophy "does not put sight into blind eyes...it turns the soul around to face the light...It doesn’t make you feel smarter, it makes you feel stupider: doing philosophy, you discover you don’t even know the most basic things." Callard engages in public philosophy to "think through the most important questions in the best way human beings have come up with: together. Perhaps my ideal interlocutor is hidden amongst you."

Publications
Her work has been included in both the 2015 and 2017 readers by The Stone, collections curated by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley. edited  include Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,