Duration of stay: April 21, 2025 to December 31, 2025
In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst
Funded by University of Calgary, Research Centre Normative Orders, Insight Development Grant of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Government of Canada)
Agnes Tam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on the nature of collective agency and its roles in ethics and politics. She has published extensively on the role of collective agency in moral progress. Despite their conformist and partial tendencies, she argues that collective agents can rationally revise their particular social norms in alignment with universally valid moral principles. Her latest research explores what kinds of and how narratives unify and confer meaning on social norms and roles, and what happenswhen group narratives break down. She is also the Equity Co-Chair of the Canadian Philosophical Association and the Co-Convenor of the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Ethics and Politics of Narrative at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.
Research project: Towards Narrative Democracy: A New Ethical Model for Inclusive Belonging
In the age of migration, many societies are experiencing a crisis of belonging. Not only do immigrants and minorities experience alienation from their community, even the majority feel increasingly disoriented in their homeland. To address this, political philosophers—especially within the Rousseau-inspired civic republican tradition—argue that democracy is key to forging an inclusive community of belonging. While this project shares the civic republican view that collective participation in common life fosters belonging, it argues that the prevailing model of “deliberative democracy” is conceptually misguided. The argument is ontological: community is not fundamentally a contractarian relation, but a historical one. Joint deliberation on the terms of social cooperation that free and equal rational agents can endorse generates, at best, mutual respect among strangers, but it does not foster a sense of belonging among particular members of a community. As an alternative, this project proposes a new remedy—narrative democracy—which reconceives belonging as an emergent property of joint narration of shared history that diverse members can identify with
Events
1/7 Goethe University of Frankfurt, Normative Orders Research Centre Colloquium
18/7 PPE Society London, Session Presentation
November Trento University, Colloquium Presentation
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Publikationen
Tam, Agnes (lead author, revised Feb 2024). “Progress.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Tam, Agnes & Kymlicka, Will (2023). “Being Popular and Being Just: How Animal Protection Organizations Can Be Both.” In The Ethics of Animal Shelters, eds. V. Giroux, A. Pepper, and K. Voigt. Oxford University Press.
Tam, Agnes (2020). “Why Moral Reasoning is Insufficient for Moral Progress.” Journal of Political Philosophy, 28(1): 73–96.
Tam, Agnes (2020). “The Legitimacy of Groups: Toward a We-Reasoning View.” Analyse & Kritik, 42(2): 343–368.