I am a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. I received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College in 2023, and a B.A. in Religion from Columbia University in 2014.

I specialize in 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy (especially phenomenology and hermeneutics) and social and political philosophy. My work explores various intersections of the themes of emotion, social interpretation, and participatory democracy. I also maintain an active research program on the life and writing of Hannah Arendt.

Here are some of my current projects under development (updated Aug. 25):

• My first book project, Feeling Beside Oneself, on moral emotions, political dialogue, and open-mindedness.

• An article on a variant of Moore’s problem that occurs when we try to practice open-mindedness from within the felt experience of moral indignation

• An article assessing the compatibility between emerging climate intervention technologies and participatory democratic infrastructures at multiple scales.

• An article on Arendt and Jaspers’ correspondences about community, localism, and humanism.

My University of Chicago faculty page can be found here, and you can contact me directly at: magnus.ferguson@uchicago.edu.