Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics. Image File history File links Metadata No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links Metadata No higher resolution available. ... is the 126th day of the year (127th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1947 (MCMXLVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1947 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... For other uses, see Philosophy (disambiguation). ... Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry. ... For the book by Bertrand Russell, see History of Western Philosophy (Russell) The usefulness of dividing philosophy into Western philosophy and other philosophies is open to challenge, not the least for speaking down to those other philosophies. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what... For other uses, see Ethics (disambiguation). ...

Nussbaum is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor. In the spring of 2007, she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School along with her partner and University of Chicago colleague Cass Sunstein, and is currently considering a formal offer to move to Harvard and another offer to return to Brown. For other uses, see University of Chicago (disambiguation). ... Harvard redirects here. ... Brown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island. ... Harvard Law School (colloquially, Harvard Law or HLS) is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. ... Cass R. Sunstein (b. ...

In September 2005 Nussbaum was listed among the world's Top 100 intellectuals by Foreign Policy. ^[1] Some of the public intellectuals who won The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. ... A countrys foreign policy is a set of political goals that seeks to outline how that particular country will interact with other countries of the world and, to a lesser extent, non-state actors. ...

Biography

She was born in New York, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker. She studied theatre and classics at New York University, getting a Bachelor of Arts in 1969, and gradually moved to philosophy while at Harvard, where she received a MA in 1972 and a PhD in 1975, studying under G. E. L. Owen. This period also saw her marriage to Alan Nussbaum (divorced in 1987), conversion to Judaism, and the birth of her daughter Rachel, who would become a professor of German History. New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... Serge Sudeikins poster for the Bat Theatre (1922). ... For other uses, see Classics (disambiguation). ... New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational research university in New York City. ... A B.A. issued from the University of Tennessee. ... Also: 1969 (number) 1969 (movie) 1969 (Stargate SG-1) episode. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... PhD usually refers to the academic title Doctor of Philosophy PhD can also refer to the manga Phantasy Degree This is a disambiguation page — a list of pages that otherwise might share the same title. ... Year 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Conversion to Judaism (Hebrew גיור, giur, conversion) is the religious conversion of a previously non-Jewish person to the Jewish religion and to the Jewish people. ...

She taught philosophy and classics at Harvard in the 1970s and early 1980s, before moving to Brown. Her 1986 book The Fragility of Goodness, on ancient Greek ethics, made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. More recent work (Frontiers of Justice) establishes Nussbaum as a firm cosmopolitan. Brown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island. ...

Nussbaum's work on capabilities has often focused on the unequal freedoms and opportunities of women, and she has developed a distinctive type of feminism, drawing inspiration from the liberal tradition, but emphasizing that liberalism, at its best, entails radical rethinking of gender relations and relations within the family.^[2]

Nussbaum's other major area of philosophical work is the emotions. She has defended a "neo-Stoic" account of emotions that holds that they are appraisals that ascribe to things and persons outside the agent's own control great significance for the person's own flourishing. On this basis she has proposed analyses of grief, compassion, and love,^[3] and, in a later book, of disgust and shame.^[4]

Nussbaum has engaged in many spirited debates with other intellectuals, in her academic writings as well as in the pages of semi-popular magazines and book reviews and, in one instance, when testifying as an expert witness in court. Her testimony in the Colorado bench trial for Romer v. Evans, rebutting the claim that the history of philosophy provides the state with a "compelling interest" in favor of a law denying gays and lesbians the right to seek passage of local non-discrimination laws, has been called misleading and even perjurious by critics.^[5][6] She rebuts these charges in a lengthy article, "Platonic Love and Colorado Law," in the Virginia Law Review 1994. Among the people whose books she has reviewed critically are Allan Bloom^[7], Harvey Mansfield^[8], and Judith Butler^[9]. Her more serious and academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin. Holding An amendment to the Colorado Constitution that allows discrimination against homosexuals and prevents the state from protecting them violated equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, because it was not rationally related to a legitimate state interest, but instead was motivated by animus towards homosexuals. ... Perjury is the act of lying or making verifiably false statements on a material matter under oath or affirmation in a court of law or in any of various sworn statements in writing. ... Allan Blooms translation and interpretation, Second edition 1991. ... Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. ... Image:J Butler. ... John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. ... Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939, in New York City) is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. ... Susan Moller Okin (July 19, 1946 - March 3, 2004) was a feminist political philosopher and author. ...

The Capability approach

Main article: Capability approach

During the 1980s Nussbaum began a collaboration with economist Amartya Sen on issues of development and ethics which culminated in The Quality of Life, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. Together with Sen and a group of younger scholars, Nussbaum founded the Human Development and Capability Association in 2003. With Sen, she promoted the "capabilities approach" to development, which views capabilities ("substantial freedoms", such as the ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, or participate in political activities) as the constitutive parts of development, and poverty as capability-deprivation. This contrasts with traditional utilitarian views that see development purely in terms of economic growth, and poverty purely as income-deprivation. It is also universalist, and therefore contrasts with relativist approaches to development. Much of the work is presented from an Aristotelian perspective. The Capability Approach is a conceptual framework developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum for evaluating social states in terms of human well-being (welfare). ... Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: Ômorto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933), is an Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998, for his contributions to welfare economics for his work on famine, human development theory... Economic development is the development of economic wealth of countries or regions for the well-being of their inhabitants. ... A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum in Jakarta, Indonesia shows what he found. ... Moral universalism is a moral view, often related to humanist philosophy, which claims that the fundamental basis for a universalist ethic—universally applicable to all humanity—can be derived or inferred from what is common among existing moral codes. ... In philosophy, moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances. ... Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. ...

Nussbaum furthered the capabilities approach in Frontiers of Justice (2006), to expand upon social contractarian explanations of justice, as developed most extensively by John Rawls' in his Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, Law of the Peoples, and related works. Nussbaum argues that standard social contractarianism, while far better than utilitarianism in providing a satisfactory framework for justice, relies on the belief and assumption that cooperation is pursued for the purpose of securing mutual advantage. Views deriving from the classical tradition of the social contract, she argues, have great difficulty dealing with issues of basic justice and substantial freedom in situations where there are great asymmetries of power between the parties. As such, Nussbaum argues that the procedural justice-based approach of contractarianism therefore fails to address areas in which symmetrical advantage does not exist, namely, in the context of justice for the disabled, transnational justice, and justice for non-human animals (the three frontiers). John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and The Law of Peoples. ... A Theory of Justice is a book of political and moral philosophy by John Rawls. ...

Noting that Rawls himself acknowledged the failure of his theory of justice to comprehensively address these three frontiers, Nussbaum claims that Rawls's attempt to expand his theory to address one of these areas--transnational justice--is "ultimately unsatisfying" because he fails to follow through with the essential elements developed in a Theory of Justice, namely, by relaxing some of the key assumptions about the parties to the original contract. Nussbaum argues that the contractarian approach cannot explain justice in the absence of free, equal and independent parties in an original position in which "all have something with which to bargain and none have too much" (with reference to Rousseau and Hume), concluding that the procedural perspective alone cannot provide an adequate theory of justice.

To address this perceived problem, Nussbaum introduces the capabilities approach, an outcome-oriented view that seeks to determine what basic principles, and adequate measure thereof, would fulfill a life of human dignity. She frames these basic principles in terms of ten capabilities, i.e. real opportunities based on personal and social circumstance. Nussbaum posits that justice demands the pursuit of a minimum threshold of all of these capabilities for every human person, and promises to further develop what this minimum threshold might require in a forthcoming work (The Cosmopolitan Tradition, to be published by Yale Univ. Press).

References

1. ^ http://www.infoplease.com/spot/topintellectuals.html
2. ^ Nussbaum, Martha. Women and Human Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
3. ^ Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
4. ^ Nussbaum, Martha C. Hiding from Humanity: Shame, Disgust, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
5. ^ The Stand by Daniel Mendelsohn, from Lingua Franca September, 1996.
6. ^ Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum by Robert Boynton from The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1999
7. ^ Martha C. Nussbaum, Undemocratic Vistas, New York Review of Books, Volume 34, Number 17; November 5, 1987.
8. ^ Martha C. Nussbaum, Man Overboard, New Republic, June 22nd, 2006.
9. ^ Martha Nussbaum, The Professor of Parody, The New Republic, 1999-02-22 (Copy)

The New York Review of Books (or NYRB) is a biweekly magazine on literature, culture, and current affairs published in New York which takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity. ... For other uses, see New Republic. ... This article is about the year. ... is the 53rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ...

Publications

• Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (1978)
• The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), ISBN 0521257689; Second edition (2001), ISBN 052179126X.
• Love's Knowledge (1990)
• Nussbaum, Martha, and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
• Nussbaum, Martha, and Amartya Sen. The Quality of Life. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993)
• The Therapy of Desire (1994)
• Poetic Justice (1996)
• For Love of Country (1996)
• Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997)
• Sex and Social Justice (1998)
• Plato's Republic: The Good Society and The Deformation of Desire (1998)
• Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000)
• Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001)
• Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004)
• Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (edited with Cass Sunstein) (2004)
• Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006)
• The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, (2007) ISBN 0-674-02482-6.

Movement of Animals (or On the Motion of Animals or De Motu Animalium) is a text by Aristotle on the general principles of motion in animals. ... Moral luck is the phenomenon whereby a moral agent is assigned moral blame or moral praise for an action or its consequences even when it is clear that the agent in question did not have full control over either the action or its consequences. ... For other uses of Greek Theatre, see Greek theatre (disambiguation). ... Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: Ômorto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933), is an Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998, for his contributions to welfare economics for his work on famine, human development theory... Cass R. Sunstein (b. ...

External links

• University of Chicago Law School bio
• Nussbaum on academic boycotts
• What Makes Martha Nussbaum Run? (2001, Includes a timeline of her career, books and related controversies to that time.)
• Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism a 1994 essay
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, discussion at the Carnegie Council in New York, May 9, 2007. Audio and video recording
• World Beyond the Headline Series.
• David Gordon, Cultivating Humanity, Martha Nussbaum and What Tower? What Babel?, Mises Review, Winter 1997