About Agnes Callard
Agnes Callard is a Hungarian-American philosopher who teaches at the University of Chicago, where she has been on the faculty since 2008 and became an associate professor of philosophy in 2017. Her academic specialties are ancient philosophy and ethics. She is also one of the more visible philosophers writing for a general audience, known for taking everyday questions seriously and following an argument wherever it leads.
Callard was born in Budapest in 1976 and moved to the United States as a child. She earned her BA at the University of Chicago in the Fundamentals program, studied classics at the University of California, Berkeley, spent time in Princeton's philosophy program, and completed a PhD in philosophy at Berkeley. Her academic honors include the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for teaching (2017), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and, with L. A. Paul, the 2020 Lebowitz Prize from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa.
Her first book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford University Press), develops a theory of how people deliberately come to hold values they do not yet have, such as learning to love music or becoming a parent. She is credited as editor of On Anger (2020), a Boston Review forum book that opens with her lead essay on the moral standing of anger, followed by responses from other writers. Her 2025 book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, published by Norton in the US and Penguin in the UK, argues that Socrates' method is a way of answering life's most important questions with the help of another person.
Outside academic journals, Callard has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Boston Review, and wrote a column on public philosophy for The Point. Her New Yorker essays include the 2023 Weekend Essay "The Case Against Travel." She started the Night Owls public debate series in Chicago in 2017, co-hosts the podcast Minds Almost Meeting with the economist Robin Hanson, and publishes a newsletter on Substack.
What Agnes Callard is known for
- Philosophy professor at the University of Chicago
- Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (2025)
- Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming
- Public philosophy essays in The New Yorker and The Point
- "The Case Against Travel" (2023)
Works by Agnes Callard
1 essay to practice
More notable works
The Case Against Travel (opens in a new tab)
Essay · 2023
A New Yorker Weekend Essay arguing, with help from Emerson, Pessoa and Chesterton, that tourism does less for us than its admirers claim and can bring out our worst.
A book-length reading of Socrates that presents his method as a practical way to think about love, politics and death.
Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming
Book · 2018
Her academic monograph on how people come to acquire new values through a process she calls aspiration.
On Anger
Book · 2020
A Boston Review forum book that opens with her lead essay on anger, followed by responses from philosophers and critics.
Her newsletter of essays and philosophical commentary.
Agnes Callard’s writing style
Callard combines academic philosophy with practical relevance. Her writing is characterized by careful analysis of common experiences through philosophical lenses. She excels at making abstract concepts concrete through everyday examples.
- Arguments that start from the ordinary
- She picks familiar activities, like travel or anger, and asks what they are really for, then reasons from a precise definition rather than from received opinion.
- Willingness to be contrarian
- Her essays often defend a position most readers resist at first and anticipate that reaction directly, as when she asks readers of her travel essay not to dismiss it as mere contrarianism.
- Classical companions
- Socrates, Plato and Aristotle sit alongside writers like Emerson, Samuel Johnson and Pessoa, quoted briefly and used as fellow arguers rather than as decoration.
- Named concepts
- She coins short labels for the patterns she identifies, such as "the traveller's delusion," which give the reader something to hold on to as the argument moves.
- Direct, second-person address
- She talks to the reader directly, asking them to test a claim against their own habits, turning abstract philosophy into an exercise the reader can run on their own life.
How to write like Agnes Callard
Pick a common practice or feeling that people rarely question and ask a blunt question about it: what is it for, and does it deliver? Define your key term carefully before arguing about it, because Callard's essays usually turn on a definition that the rest of the piece tests. Then state the position you actually hold, even if it is unpopular, and meet the reader's likely objection head-on rather than softening the claim.
Bring in one or two older thinkers as conversation partners, quoting a line rather than a paragraph, and give the pattern you are describing a memorable name. Keep the prose conversational and in the present tense, address the reader as "you" when you want them to test an idea on themselves, and end by showing what changes if the argument is right.
The quickest way to absorb these habits is to retype one of Agnes Callard’s essays above, word for word, then write a paragraph of your own in the same voice. New to this? Read what copywork is and how to do it.
Frequently asked questions about Agnes Callard
- Who is Agnes Callard?
- Agnes Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago who specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics. She is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming and Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, and she writes for general readers in outlets such as The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Point. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.
- What is Open Socrates about?
- Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (2025) argues that Socrates discovered we cannot answer the most important questions about how to live on our own, because desire and social pressure answer them for us first. Callard presents the Socratic method as a way of thinking with another person, and applies it to love, politics and death.
- Where does Agnes Callard publish her essays?
- Her public essays have appeared in The New Yorker, including the 2023 Weekend Essay "The Case Against Travel," as well as The New York Times and Boston Review. She wrote a column on public philosophy for The Point magazine and publishes a newsletter on Substack. She also co-hosts the podcast Minds Almost Meeting with economist Robin Hanson.
- What is Agnes Callard's writing style?
- Her style is argumentative and conversational at once. She takes an everyday topic, defines it precisely, and defends a clear and often unpopular thesis about it, anticipating objections as she goes. She quotes classical and literary thinkers briefly, coins short names for the ideas she identifies, and speaks to the reader directly.