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.
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.
In September 2005 Nussbaum was listed among the world's Top 100 intellectuals by Foreign Policy. ^[1]

Contents

Biography

The Capability approach

References

Publications

External links

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.
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.
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.
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, and, in a later book, of disgust and shame.
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 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, in the Colorado bench trial for ''Romer v. Evans'' has been called misleading and even perjurious by critics.^{[2] [3]}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, Harvey Mansfield, and Judith Butler. Her more serious and academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin.

The Capability approach

Main articles: 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.
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 shows 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).
Noting that Rawls himself acknowledged the failure of his theory of justice to adequately address these three frontiers, Nussbaum demonstrates that Rawls' sole explicit 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. Showing 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), Nussbaum posits that the procedural perspective alone cannot provide an adequate theory of justice.
Nussbaum therefore points to 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. The Stand by Daniel Mendelsohn, from ''Lingua Franca'' September, 1996.
3. Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum by Robert Boynton from ''The New York Times Magazine'', November 21, 1999

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.

External links

★ University of Chicago Law School bio

★ Nussbaum on academic boycotts

★ The Professor of Parody (1999, Criticism of Judith Butler)

★ What Makes Martha Nussbaum Run? (2001, Includes a timeline of her career, books and related controversies to that time.)

★ The Stand (Nussbaum and the Colorado gay rights case.)

★ Who Needs Philosophy?: A profile of Martha Nussbaum by Robert Boynton from The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1999

★ Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism a 1994 essay

★ Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

★ The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future Transcript of May 2007 discussion at the Carnegie Council in New York.

★ The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future Audio and video recording of May 9, 2007 lecture; part of the University of Chicago's World Beyond the Headline Series.

★ Criticism