About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full
Incoming links
from 2021 Year-end review

Agnes Callard

21 Jun 2022 - 07 Sep 2025
Open in Logseq
    • Philosopher who writes about agency and akrasia, at U Chicago. Seems a bit problematic, see below. Pronounced CALard. Not to be confused with Agnes Callamard, an entirely different famous person.
      • She has the philosophy disease. Akrasia is only a mystery if you have a single-self model. OTOH, she seems to be at least pushing in the right direction.
      • Aspiration distinguished from ordinary agency; it involves setting new goals, not merely acting towards existing ones. It's meta IOW. And interestingly problematic from a square philosophical sense, because how can a present self act in order to give a future self goals it doesn't have now?
      • Mentions the role of god or other sources of teleos.
      • Finite aspiration (with fixed goals) or infinite aspiration (towards perfection, so you know you will never get there but always have to aim higher)
      • Socrates says explicitly: I'm not trying to hurt you, just trying to arrive at the truth.
        • Socratizing:
          • random: "Socrates, you are interfering with my wealth acquisition (or other game)." Socrates: no no, this. is how you get real wealth (or whatever)
    • Anger is a state of agitated enervation that moves the world | Aeon Essays
      • The American philosopher Agnes Callard seems to edge much closer to that logic in her essay ‘On Anger’ (2020), which sees the stubborn indelibility of anger as its defining characteristic. Anger, she argues, is as permanent as the offences that provoke it; steal from me, and you will have stolen from me irrevocably. Whatever restitutive efforts you might make to assuage my anger, the original theft cannot be undone; thus, ‘once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever.’
    • Oh god
    • Also Oh God
      • image.png
      • Not sure how judgy I want to be here, but man, sure must be fun to be a philosopher and push the margins of acceptable behavior as part of your work.
        • Agnes was extremely upset that the divorce would harm their children, but she felt that the alternative was that she would become a bad person. “I thought that I would become sort of corrupted by staying in a marriage where I no longer felt like I was aspirational about it,” she said. Her friends and relatives suggested that she just have an affair, but that felt impossible. “It’s like you have this vision of this wonderful, grand possibility, and then you decide to just play at it, treating it like a vacation or something. It seemed like a desecration of that vision.”
        • So it seems like "being aspirational" is an excuse to be an asshole, and act without any sense of consequence to those you (allegedly) love...yeah not impressed.
      • From the NYer article:
      • Agnes has generally avoided speaking publicly about being autistic, in part because she worries that people will find it preposterous for her to use a label once closely associated with people who are nonverbal. But she feels that the diagnosis helps her understand her immunity to the pull of a certain received structure of meaning.
      • Hm, yeah, another example of putting the Ass in Aspergers