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Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds | The New Yorker

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Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard’s office hours every week to talk about Aristotle. At the last session of the quarter, in the spring of 2011, they discussed Aristotle’s treatise Metaphysics, and what it means to be one—as opposed to more than one. “It was the sort of question where I felt it would be reasonable to feel ecstatic if you made some kind of progress,” Arnold told me. Agnes was the only person he’d ever met who seemed to feel the same way. Agnes specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics, but she is also a public philosopher, writing popular essays about experiences—such as jealousy, parenting, and anger—that feel to her like “dissociated matter,” falling outside the realm of existing theories. She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. “How has

Save this story Save this story Published in the March 13, 2023 Issue Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard’s office hours every week to talk about Aristotle. At the last session of the quarter, in the spring of 2011, they discussed Aristotle’s treatise Metaphysics, and what it means to be one—as opposed to more than one. “It was the sort of question where I felt it would be reasonable to feel ecstatic if you made some kind of progress,” Arnold told me. Agnes was the only person he’d ever met who seemed to feel the same way. Agnes specializes in

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