I’d never seen it before.” She asked why he was making that face. As Arnold ate the cookie, Agnes, who was thirty-five, noticed that he had “just this incredibly weird expression on his face. To celebrate the end of the term, Agnes had made cookies for her students, and she gave an extra one to Arnold, a twenty-seven-year-old with wavy hair that fell to his shoulders, who was in his first year of the graduate program in philosophy.
She was married to another philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, Ben Callard, and they had two young sons. “How has it come to pass,” she writes, “that we take ourselves to have any inkling at all about how to live?” 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. She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. Agnes was the only person he’d ever met who seemed to feel the same way.Īgnes 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.
“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. 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. Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard’s office hours every week to talk about Aristotle.
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