Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, and Principal Investigator on "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life," a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002), and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas. Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.
Selected Publications
Books/Collections
John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge Revivals, 2016)
Violence and Redemption, co-edited with Patchen Markell, special issue of Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2003)
Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
Critical Limits of Embodiment, co-edited with Carol Breckenridge, special issue of Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2002)
Articles and Chapters
"You Owe It to Yourself," in Ethics and Culture: Essays in Honor of David Solomon, ed. Raymond Hain (forthcoming, University of Notre Dame Press)
"Turning to Aquinas on Virtue," in Oxford Handbook of Virtue Ethics, ed. Nancy Snow (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)
"Self-Transcendence, in Varieties of Virtue Ethics," ed. David Carr (forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan Press)
"Nothing Added," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2016)
"Good and Bad in Human Action," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (2014)
"Natural Virtue and Proper Upbringing," Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Julia Peters (Routledge, 2013)
Aristotle, Aquinas, Anscombe and the New Virtue Ethics," in Aquinas's Reception of the
Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Tobias Hoffmann, Jörn Müller, and Matthias Perkams
(Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Media
Candace Vogler's Recorded Interviews and Lectures
Recent Courses
PHIL 21000 Introduction to Ethics
In this course, we will read, write, and think about philosophical work meant to provide a systematic and foundational account of ethics. We will focus on close reading of two books, Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, along with a handful of more recent essays. Throughout, our aim will be to engage in serious thought about good and bad in our lives. (A)
PHIL 24098/34098 Character and Commerce: Practical Wisdom in Economic Life
Most of us seek to be reasonably good people leading what we take to be successful and satisfying lives. There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that most of us fail to live up to our own standards. Worse, we often fail to mark our own failures in ways that could help us improve ourselves. The context in which we try to live good lives is shaped by the vicissitudes of the global economy. The global economy is obviously of interest to those of us studying economics or planning on careers in business. Aspiring entrepreneurs or corporate leaders have clear stakes in understanding practical wisdom in the economic sphere. But anyone who relies upon her pay - or someone else's - to cover her living expenses has some interest in economic life. In this course, we will bring work in neo-Aristotelian ethics and neo-classical economics into conversation with empirical work from behavioral economics and behavioral ethics, to read, write, talk, and think about cultivating wisdom in our economic dealings. While our focus will be on business, the kinds of problems we will consider, and the ways of addressing these, occur in ordinary life more generally - at home, in academic settings, and in our efforts to participate in the daily production and reproduction of sound modes of social interaction. (A)
PHIL 51225 Sources of Critical Theory
This course is designed to give students a broad and rapid introduction to the philosophical and other sources that inform contemporary literary and critical theory. We will cover a lot of ground very quickly. The variety of humanism at issue in our work will be the sort that informs common sense or, as one of our authors might put it, ordinary understanding of the things that strike many of us as obvious about ourselves and other people. The critique will not make anything stop seeming obvious. But it will provide some tools for thinking differently about contemporary commonsense understandings of human life. We will conclude by seeing the way this material shapes work by two prominent recent critics, Slavoj Žižek and Lauren Berlant.
For full list of Candace Vogler's courses back to the 2012-13 academic year, see our searchable course database.