For most of human history, how people were expected to act depended on the situation — where they were, what role they occupied and who they were with. Today, philosopher Agnes Callard argues, we are increasingly living in a world governed by abstract rules and norms meant to apply universally.
Callard calls this shift “the unicontext,” and she believes it helps explain some striking features of modern life—from political hostility and the constant prevalence of advice to our struggles with attention, negativity, rankings and metrics.
A professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, Callard is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming and Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, published by W.W. Norton in 2025. Her work has brought philosophical questions about how we live and think to audiences well beyond the university classroom and has published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and others.
On October 22 at 5 p.m, Callard will visit the University of Southern Maine to present her talk “Prophets of the Unicontext”, where she will explore the idea of the unicontext through the work of modernist writers Robert Musil and Hermann Broch and others. Location information and additional information is available here on the events website.
All students are invited. Come curious, no philosophy background is required.