Agnes Callard
The Philosopher Who Refuses to Stop Becoming
Born Agnes Gellen on 6 January 1976 in Budapest, Hungary, Agnes Callard is a University of Chicago philosopher best known for Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming and Open Socrates — and for doing philosophy in public, through essays, the Night Owls debates and the podcast Minds Almost Meeting.
- 16 min listen
- Philosopher
- Ancient philosophy
- Public intellectual
Agnes Callard’s full 16 min audio biography, The Philosopher Who Refuses to Stop Becoming, is available on Lyfestori for iOS. Listen to a free preview below.
A life in brief
Agnes Callard: life and timeline.
At five she left communist Hungary with her family on what was meant to look like a holiday to Vienna. They never went back. Agnes Callard grew up in New York, bought six philosophy books in a Barnes & Noble as a teenager, and by her final year at the University of Chicago was stopping strangers on the Art Institute steps to talk about the meaning of life. She now teaches there, and her work asks a question her own life keeps testing: how do you become someone with values you don't yet have?
- 1976
Born in Budapest
Born Agnes Gellen on 6 January into a Jewish family; both sets of grandparents survived the Holocaust. Her mother, Judit, would become a haematologist and oncologist.
- 1981
Leaving Hungary
At five, she leaves with her family on what is presented as a trip to Vienna. After about a year in Rome they reach New York, where her father, trained in law, starts again selling carpets.
- 1997
Graduates from Chicago
Completes a BA in the University of Chicago's Fundamentals: Issues and Texts programme, mentored by Amy and Leon Kass, having arrived intending to study physics.
- 2003
Marries Ben Callard
Marries the philosopher Ben Callard while in graduate school. They have two children.
- 2008
PhD and a Chicago post
After an MA in classics at Berkeley and time at Princeton, she completes a Berkeley PhD on akrasia — acting against your own better judgement — and joins the University of Chicago faculty.
- 2011
A confession in office hours
Her graduate student Arnold Brooks tells her he has feelings for her. She tells her department chair, ends her marriage, and marries Brooks about a year later.
- 2017
Night Owls and tenure
Becomes associate professor, wins the Quantrell Award for undergraduate teaching, and starts Night Owls, late-night public philosophy debates in Hyde Park.
- 2018
Aspiration
Oxford University Press publishes Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, her account of how people rationally work towards values they do not yet hold.
- 2020
Lebowitz Prize
Shares the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement with L. A. Paul, a year after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship.
- 2023
The New Yorker
Rachel Aviv's profile describes her household, shared with both her current and former husbands, and draws intense reaction. Her essay The Case Against Travel appears in the same magazine that June.
- 2025
Open Socrates
W. W. Norton publishes Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian. She serves as director of undergraduate studies in philosophy for 2025–26.
Major achievements
Agnes Callard: major achievements.
- 01
A theory of aspiration
Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) argues that people can rationally acquire new values, guided by imperfect "proleptic" reasons that stand in for the ones they hope to have. It became the subject of a journal symposium.
- 02
Lebowitz Prize
In 2020 the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa awarded her the Lebowitz Prize, shared with L. A. Paul, whose work on transformative experience runs close to her own.
- 03
Open Socrates
Her 2025 book makes the case that Socrates discovered something about the human condition — that we do not know how to ask ourselves the most important questions — and that a philosophical life starts by admitting it.
- 04
Philosophy in public
She founded the Night Owls debate series in 2017, co-hosts the podcast Minds Almost Meeting with economist Robin Hanson, and writes widely read magazine essays, including The Case Against Travel.
- 05
Award-winning teacher
The University of Chicago gave her the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2017, one of the oldest teaching prizes in the United States.
Turning points
Agnes Callard: defining moments.
- Teenage years
Six books from Barnes & Noble
A debate team sent her to buy Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Mill, Kant, Rawls and Nozick. She read them all and decided Kant had won, and was puzzled that philosophy had carried on after him.
- Graduate school
From weakness of will to aspiration
Her dissertation was on akrasia, why people act against their own judgement. Criticism from other philosophers, including Kate Manne, pushed her towards a different question — how a person comes to value something new — which became her first book.
- 2011
Living the theory
When her doctoral student said he was a little in love with her, she said she felt the same. She informed her chair, ended her marriage, and later moved with Arnold Brooks into her former husband's apartment so the children would not have to move between homes.
- 2023
Under public scrutiny
The New Yorker profile made her domestic life a national talking point, and some critics argued her ideas could be used to justify treating other people as instruments of self-change. She kept arguing that philosophy should examine one's own life, in public if necessary.
What you’ll take away
Lessons from Agnes Callard’s life.
- 01
Bad reasons can lead to good ones
Her music-class example: you may start because you want to seem cultured, and end up loving music for its own sake. On her account the imperfect reason isn't a fraud — it's how anyone gets to a value they don't yet have.
- 02
Ask questions that have no answer key
She liked maths and physics because there were answers. Amy Kass showed her there were truth-directed questions outside them, and she has spent her career on those.
- 03
Disagreement is a form of cooperation
Night Owls, the podcast and her Socratic writing all treat argument as a way of finding out who is right, not a fight to win. She defended crossing a 2019 picket line on those terms, and accepted the criticism that came with it.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions about Agnes Callard.
Who is Agnes Callard?
An American philosopher at the University of Chicago, where she is an associate professor specialising in ancient philosophy and ethics. She is known for her books Aspiration and Open Socrates, her magazine essays and the Night Owls public debates.
How old is Agnes Callard?
She is fifty. Agnes Callard was born on 6 January 1976 in Budapest, Hungary, and came to the United States with her family as a child.
Where is Agnes Callard from?
Budapest, Hungary. Her family left communist Hungary when she was five, spent about a year in Rome, and settled in New York City, where she attended an Orthodox Jewish day school.
What is Agnes Callard's book Aspiration about?
How people become someone new. Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford University Press, 2018) argues that we can rationally work towards acquiring values we do not yet hold, and distinguishes this from ambition, which pursues values we already have.
What is Open Socrates about?
The case for living philosophically. Published by W. W. Norton in 2025, it argues that Socrates' real discovery was that we do not know how to ask ourselves the most important questions about how to live — and that admitting this is where wisdom begins.
What is Agnes Callard's The Case Against Travel?
An essay arguing that tourism tends to make people no better and sometimes worse. It appeared in The New Yorker in June 2023, drew wide debate, and was reissued as a short pamphlet by Eris in 2024.
Who is Agnes Callard's husband?
Arnold Brooks, a philosopher and her former doctoral student, whom she married around 2012. Her first husband, the philosopher Ben Callard, shared the same household, as The New Yorker reported in 2023.
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16 min · one sitting