Martha Nussbaum facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Martha Nussbaum
Nussbaum in 2010
Born	Martha Craven (1947-05-06) May 6, 1947 (age 78) New York City, New York, U.S.
Education	New York University (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD)
Notable work	The Fragility of Goodness (1986)
Spouse(s)	Alan Nussbaum ​ ​ (m. 1969; div. 1987)​
Awards	Kyoto Prize (2016) Berggruen Prize (2018) Balzan Prize (2022)
School	Analytic philosophy Aristotelianism feminism social liberalism
Institutions	University of Chicago Brown University Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	G. E. L. Owen
Main interests	Political philosophy ethics feminism liberal theory
Notable ideas	Capability approach
Influences Aristotle Catharine MacKinnon John Stuart Mill Adam Smith G. E. L. Owen John Rawls Bernard Williams Amartya Sen
Influenced Amartya Sen Elizabeth S. Anderson Linda Martín Alcoff Louise Antony David G. Hebert

Martha Nussbaum (/ˈnʊsbɔːm/; née Craven; born May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department.

Nussbaum's work has focused on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights. She also holds associate appointments in classics, divinity, 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.

She has written more than two dozen books, including The Fragility of Goodness (1986). She received the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen Prize, and the 2021 Holberg Prize. In recent years, she has also been considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early life and education

Nussbaum was born as Martha Craven on May 6, 1947, in New York City, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker. During her teenage years, Nussbaum attended The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr. She described her upbringing as "East Coast WASP elite ... very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status". She would later credit her impatience with "mandarin philosophers" and dedication to public service as the "repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida".

After studying at Wellesley College for two years, dropping out to pursue theatre in New York, she studied theatre and classics at New York University, getting a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969, and gradually moved to philosophy while at Harvard University, where she received a Master of Arts degree in 1972 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1975, studying under G. E. L. Owen.

Career

In the 1970s and early 1980s she taught philosophy and classics at Harvard, where she was denied tenure by the Classics Department in 1982. Nussbaum then moved to Brown University, where she taught until 1995 when she joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty. Her 1986 book The Fragility of Goodness, on ancient Greek ethics and Greek tragedy, made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. At Brown, Nussbaum's students included philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff and actor and playwright Tim Blake Nelson. In 1987, she gained public attention due to her critique of fellow philosopher Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. More recent work (Frontiers of Justice) establishes Nussbaum as a theorist of global justice. 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 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 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. She testified in the Colorado bench trial for Romer v. Evans, arguing against the claim that the history of philosophy provides the state with a "compelling interest" in favor of a law that sought to overturn local anti-discrimination laws. A portion of this testimony, dealing with the potential meanings of the term tolmêma in Plato's work, was the subject of controversy, and was called misleading and even perjurious by critics.

Nussbaum at The School of Life, 2016

She responded to these charges in a lengthy article called "Platonic Love and Colorado Law". Nussbaum used multiple references from Plato's Symposium and his interactions with Socrates as evidence for her argument. The debate continued with a reply by one of her sternest critics, Robert P. George.

Nussbaum has criticized Noam Chomsky as being among the leftist intellectuals who hold the belief that "one should not criticize one's friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness". She suggests that one can "trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance". Among her academic colleagues whose books she has reviewed critically are Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, and Judith Butler. Other academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin. In January 2019, Nussbaum announced that she would be using a portion of her Berggruen Prize winnings to fund a series of roundtable discussions on controversial issues at the University of Chicago Law School. These discussions will be known as the Martha C. Nussbaum Student Roundtables.

Capabilities approach

Nussbaum is well known for her contributions in developing the capabilities approach to well-being, alongside Amartya Sen. The key question the capabilities approach asks is "What is each person able to do and to be?" As such, the approach looks at combined capabilities: an individual's developable abilities (internal abilities), freedom, and opportunity. Here, "freedom" refers to the ability of a person to choose one life or another, and opportunity refers to social, political, and/or economic conditions that allow or disallow individual growth.

Nussbaum asserts that all humans (and non-human animals) have a basic right to dignity. To provide human dignity, she states that governments must provide "at least a threshold level" of the following capabilities: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought, emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one's environment, including political and material environments.

Personal life

She was married to Alan Nussbaum from 1969 until they divorced in 1987, a period which also led to her conversion to Judaism and the birth of her daughter Rachel. Nussbaum's interest in Judaism has continued and deepened: on August 16, 2008, she became a bat mitzvah in a service at Temple K. A. M. Isaiah Israel in Chicago's Hyde Park, chanting from the Parashah Va-etchanan and the Haftarah Nahamu, and delivering a D'var Torah about the connection between genuine, non-narcissistic consolation and the pursuit of global justice. Nussbaum's daughter Rachel died in 2019 due to a drug-resistant infection following successful transplant surgery. At the time of her death she was a government affairs attorney in the Wildlife Division of Friends of Animals, a nonprofit organization working for animal welfare. The two women had co-authored four articles about wild animals.

Nussbaum dated and lived with Cass Sunstein for more than a decade. They had been engaged to be married. She had previously had a romantic relationship with Amartya Sen.

Major works

The Fragility of Goodness

The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy confronts the ethical dilemma that individuals strongly committed to justice are nevertheless vulnerable to external factors that may deeply compromise or even negate their human flourishing. Discussing literary as well as philosophical texts, Nussbaum seeks to determine the extent to which reason may enable self-sufficiency. She eventually rejects the Platonic notion that human goodness can fully protect against peril, siding with the tragic playwrights and Aristotle in treating the acknowledgment of vulnerability as a key to realizing the human good.

Her interpretation of Plato's Symposium in particular drew considerable attention. Under Nussbaum's consciousness of vulnerability, the re-entrance of Alcibiades at the end of the dialogue undermines Diotima's account of the ladder of love in its ascent to the non-physical realm of the forms. Alcibiades's presence deflects attention back to physical beauty and bodily limitations, hence highlighting human fragility.

Fragility brought attention to Nussbaum throughout the humanities. It garnered wide praise in academic reviews, and even drew acclaim in the popular media. Camille Paglia credited Fragility with matching "the highest academic standards" of the twentieth century, and The Times Higher Education called it "a supremely scholarly work". Nussbaum's reputation extended her influence beyond print and into television programs like PBS's Bill Moyers.

Cultivating Humanity

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education appeals to classical Greek texts as a basis for defense and reform of the liberal education. Noting the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes' aspiration to transcend "local origins and group memberships" in favor of becoming "a citizen of the world", Nussbaum traces the development of this idea through the Stoics, Cicero, and eventually the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Nussbaum champions multiculturalism in the context of ethical universalism, defends scholarly inquiry into race and gender, and further develops the role of literature as narrative imagination into ethical questions.

At the same time, Nussbaum also censured certain scholarly trends. She excoriated deconstructionist Jacques Derrida saying "on truth [he is] simply not worth studying for someone who has been studying Quine and Putnam and Davidson". She cites Zhang Longxi, who labels Derrida's analysis of Chinese culture "pernicious" and without "evidence of serious study". More broadly, Nussbaum criticized Michel Foucault for his "historical incompleteness [and] lack of conceptual clarity", but nevertheless singled him out for providing "the only truly important work to have entered philosophy under the banner of 'postmodernism.' Nussbaum is even more critical of figures like Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will for what she considers their "shaky" knowledge of non-Western cultures and inaccurate caricatures of today's humanities departments.

The New York Times praised Cultivating Humanity as "a passionate, closely argued defense of multiculturalism" and hailed it as "a formidable, perhaps definitive defense of diversity on American campuses". Nussbaum received the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for Cultivating Humanity.

Hiding from Humanity

Hiding from Humanity extends Nussbaum's work in moral psychology to probe the arguments for including two emotions—shame and disgust—as legitimate bases for legal judgments. Nussbaum argues that individuals tend to repudiate their bodily imperfection or animality through the projection of fears about contamination. This cognitive response is in itself irrational, because we cannot transcend the animality of our bodies. Noting how projective disgust has wrongly justified group subordination (mainly of women, Jews, and homosexuals), Nussbaum ultimately discards disgust as a reliable basis of judgment.

Nussbaum in 2004

In an interview with Reason magazine, Nussbaum elaborated:

Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct. For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy.

Nussbaum's work was received with wide praise. The Boston Globe called her argument "characteristically lucid" and hailed her as "America's most prominent philosopher of public life". Her reviews in national newspapers and magazines garnered unanimous praise. In academic circles, Stefanie A. Lindquist of Vanderbilt University lauded Nussbaum's analysis as a "remarkably wide ranging and nuanced treatise on the interplay between emotions and law".

A prominent exception was Roger Kimball's review published in The New Criterion, in which he accused Nussbaum of "fabricating" the renewed prevalence of shame and disgust in public discussions and says she intends to "undermine the inherited moral wisdom of millennia". He rebukes her for "contempt for the opinions of ordinary people" and ultimately accuses Nussbaum herself of "hiding from humanity".

Creating Capabilities

The book Creating Capabilities, first published in 2011, outlines a unique theory regarding the Capability approach or the Human development approach. Nussbaum draws on theories of other notable advocates of the Capability approach like Amartya Sen, but has a distinct approach. She proposes to choose a list of capabilities based on some aspects of John Rawls' concept of "central human capabilities."

Nussbaum's book combines ideas from the Capability approach, development economics, and distributive justice to substantiate a qualitative theory on capabilities. She criticizes existing economic indicators like GDP as failing to fully account for quality of life and assurance of basic needs, instead rewarding countries with large growth distributed highly unequally across the population. The book also aims to serve as an introduction to the Capability approach more generally; it is accessible to students and newcomers to the material because of the current lack of general knowledge about this approach. Finally, Nussbaum compares her approach with other popular approaches to human development and economic welfare, including Utilitarianism, Rawlsian Justice, and Welfarism in order to argue why the Capability approach should be prioritized by development economics policymakers.

Awards and honors

Honorary degrees and honorary societies

Nussbaum is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988) and the American Philosophical Society (1996). She is an Academician in the Academy of Finland (2000) and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2008). She has 66 honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, including:

Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Selected awards

• 1990: Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction
• 1991: PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Love's Knowledge
• 1998: Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (Cultivating Humanity)
• 2002: University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education (Cultivating Humanity)
• 2003: Barnard College Medal of Distinction
• 2004: Honorary membership into Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Chicago.
• 2004: Association of American University Publishers Professional and Scholarly Book Award for Law (Hiding From Humanity)
• 2005: listed among the world's Top 100 intellectuals by Foreign Policy (as well as in 2008 and 2010) and Prospect magazines.
• 2007: Radcliffe Alumnae Recognition Award
• 2009: American Philosophical Society's Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence.
• 2009: Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award from the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS). CCAS bestows this award upon an individual or organization demonstrating exemplary advocacy for the arts and sciences, flowing from a deep commitment to the intrinsic worth of liberal arts education.
• 2010: Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
• 2012: Prince of Asturias Awards for Social Sciences
• 2014: John Locke Lectures at Oxford University.
• 2015: Premio Nonino, Italy
• 2015: Inamori Ethics Prize
• 2016: Kyoto Prize in Philosophy, Japan
• 2017: Jefferson Lecture
• 2017: Don M. Randel Award for Contribution to the Humanities, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2018: Berggruen Prize
• 2021: Holberg Prize "for her groundbreaking contribution to research in philosophy, law and related fields"
• 2022: The Order of Lincoln the highest award for public service conferred by the State of Illinois
• 2022: The Balzan Prize for "her transformative reconception of the goals of social justice, both globally and locally".

See also

In Spanish: Martha Nussbaum para niños