Dhananjay Jagannathan
““When we participate in cultural practices, we are connected across time and space to others for whom these practices were or are or will be meaningful. We are thereby held fast by a large and open-ended conversation.””
Dhananjay Jagannathan is an academic and an essayist. He is assistant professor of philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies for the Classical Studies Program at Columbia University, where he has taught since 2017. As a Marshall Scholar, he undertook graduate degrees in philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and in classics at St John's College, Cambridge before completing a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. His scholarly work has focused on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy. His first book Aristotle's Practical Epistemology, out from Oxford University Press in October 2024, is a study of practical wisdom (phronēsis), the central concept in Aristotle's ethics and political philosophy and among the most influential ideas in the history of Western ethics.
Dhananjay has also written widely about music, literature, politics, and religion for a general audience, and his essays have appeared in Plough Quarterly, Commonweal, and Breaking Ground. He also jointly writes the Substack newsletter The Line of Beauty with the novelist and theologian Tara Isabella Burton, which explores the moral dimensions of beauty and the aesthetic dimensions of ethical life.
Dhananjay is an avid vegetarian cook and sings Renaissance polyphonic music with choral groups in New York City.
Published works
