Katja Maria Vogt is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and in contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one's life to go well?

"...her engagement with ancient ideas is creative and novel. Vogt's monograph is therefore an important contribution to scholarship in ancient philosophy. Furthermore, she enriches the contemporary ethical debate, since she offers an interesting and novel way to discuss the question of the good with regard to human agency, psychology and the metaphysics of human action." -- Laura Summa, ZEMO

"Vogt proposes a new way to orient our thinking about Aristotle's ethics and ethics more generally. Her invitation to construe Aristotelian ethics as a theory of human motivation rather than practical reasoning is refreshingly different from the emphasis by scholars in recent decades on questions about practical reasoning in Aristotle and on well-worn debates about the nature of and relation between virtue and happiness in ancient ethics." -- Susan Sauve Meyer, University of Pennsylvania

"Vogt's method resembles that of modern thinkers who have drawn on Aristotle as a resource to inform contemporary virtue-ethics and eudaimonism, though she herself carves out a different line, which does not fall neatly into these categories. The book has an original and arresting thesis, which is stated and argued with clarity and in an engaging way. The book is challenging, intellectually, and is in this sense a demanding read, but is not especially technical and is sometimes disarmingly straightforward in its claims." --Christopher Gill, University of Exeter