Martha Nussbaum

After more than forty years I still warmly recall the edifying conversations that I had in the episcopal palace in Bergamo with my revered bishop. Msgr. Radini Tedeschi. About the persons in the Vatican, from the Holy Father downwards, there was never an expression that was not respectful, no, never. But as for women or their shape or what concerned them, no word was ever spoken. It was as if there were no women in the world. This absolute silence, this lack of any familiarity with regard to the other sex, was one of the most powerful and profound lessons of my young life as a priest, and even today I thankfully keep the excellent and beneficial memory of that man who raised me in this discipline. Spiritual Diary of John XXIII, quoted in Uta Ranke‐Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: the Catholic Church and Sexuality (1990)

I am extremely grateful to Rick Furtak and Alison McQueen for their valuable and challenging comments. My book is long and complicated, and it can hardly have been easy to internalize its details, both philosophical and political. The two authors have a very accurate grasp of my views, and I am delighted by that. I actually do not need to spend my time correcting misstatements of what I say. Both authors offer really interesting challenges to my views, about which it’s a pleasure to think further.Reply to Rick FurtakFurtak is a very subtle thinker about the emotions. What makes his remarks especially illuminating is that he not only understands the nuances of my own position on emotions, especially as I develop it in Upheavals of Thought , but also has a wide-ranging grasp of the philosophical literature on emotions more generally. He poses questions of two sorts. One set concerns emotions of which I suggest that there is something ..

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex

“It is no chance matter we are discussing,” said Plato’s Socrates, “but how one should live.” All the major ancient Greek and Roman traditions of philosophy held that it was no mere academic discipline, but an art of living, a study whose aim included the improvement of conduct. All held, in addition, that philosophy, properly practiced and properly integrated into the public life of a community, would improve the practice of political life. That public role was not the only role they saw for philosophy, but it was an important one.

Most economists and some philosophers distinguish individual utilities from interpersonal social values. Even if challenges to that conceptual distinction can be met, further philosophically interesting questions arise. I pursue three in this paper, using, as context for the discussion, health economics and its attempt to discern empirically a social welfare function to help guide rationing decisions. (1) To discern these utilities and values in a manner that is morally appropriate if they are to influence rationing decisions, who should be queried? To discern individual health state utilities, persons in precisely those states should be asked (generically, patients), but for social values, representatives of the general public should be. (2) To discern social values, what should representatives of the public be asked? They should be asked person trade-off (PTO) questions that encompass their own self-interest, not PTO questions that focus only on others. (3) What must public representatives understand before they respond to such questions? Despite the philosophically complex problem of patient adaptation, they should understand (among other things) the health state utilities elicited from actual patients with the conditions at issue.

This volume collects the notable published book reviews of Martha C. Nussbaum, a philosopher and high profile public intellectual who comments often on issues in philosophy, politics, gender equality, economics, and the law. Many of her engagements have been through the medium of the book review, which she has published prolifically in academic journals and in high profile venues like The New Republic and The New York Times for over 20 years. This volume collects 25 of what she considers to be her key reviews. The reviews date from 1986 and range to the present, and engage with authors like Roger Scruton, Allan Bloom, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Richard Posner, Catherine MacKinnon, and other prominent intellectuals of our time. Throughout, her views defy ideological predictability, heralding interesting work from unlikely sources, deftly critiquing where it is deserved, and generally providing a compelling picture of how intellectuals might engage with broad social concerns. Nussbaum will provide a new introduction that explains her selection, and provides her view of the role of public intellectuals.

The philosophers of the Hellenistic schools in ancient Greece and Rome (Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, Academics, Cyrenaics) made important contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. This volume, which contains the proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum, describes and analyses their contributions on issues such as: the nature of perception, imagination and belief; the nature of the passions and their role in action; the relationship between mind and body; freedom and determinism; the role of pleasure as a goal; the effects of poetry on belief and passion. Written with a high level of historical and philosophical scholarship, the essays are intended both for classicists and for specialists interested in the philosophy of mind.

Valadez’ book is an excellent investigation of the question of group rights. Nonetheless, there are some serious objections to group rights that he does not investigate. Groups contain hierarchies of power: thus giving legal privileges to a group is usually tantamount to giving more power to those already in power within the group. Groups have unclear and changing boundaries of membership; group rights often reify the current definition of a group and militate against change. Finally, there are ‘dispersed groups’ that may be very important in people’s identity, but that do not figure in the usual discussions of group ethno-cultural rights; the group of women, groups defined by sexual orientation, profession or the love of something. Such groups are unlikely to win legal privileges but then, giving legal privileges to the ethno-cultural groups makes them more salient by contrast with the ‘dispersed groups’. I investigate these points, using a variety of examples.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum FICTIONS OF THE SOUL* Gertrude says, "O Hamlet speak no more. / Thou turnst mine eyes into my very soul." He made her see her soul, then, with a speech. And many types of speeches try to do what Hamlet did here. They present us with accounts or pictures of ourselves, attempting to communicate to us some truth about what we really are — or (to use what is already a certain sort of picture) to show us die insides of our human souls. These truths about ourselves are delivered in many different styles and forms: some through structured argument, some through more devious or more violent strategies. One distinguished thinker compared his discourse about the nature of the soul to dry translucent shafts of sunlight diat disperse the dark shadows of false belief. Another represents the recipient of a true account of the inside of her soul as crying out in pain: "These words like daggers enter in my ears." Clearly there ought to be connections between the way a drinker or writer conceives of the soul and the way he or she constructs a discourse to convey important trudis to such a soul — including, and especially, the truth about the nature of the soul. Whether we are to be approached with sunbeams or with daggers, whether we need light or violent motion to show us what we are: this seems to depend upon what, in fact, we are. On the answer to questions such as: Are our souls transparent? opaque? open? thick-skinned? And: is getting in touch with a human soul like shining light through a diamond? Like embracing a friend? Like drawing blood? To speak more prosaically, on die answers to questions such as: How does a soul arrive at truth? What elements does it have that promote and impede understanding? What is die subject matter or content of the most important truths about it? And in what sort of activity does knowing it consist? A story or account of die soul is, then, told. The telling, if the story is a good one, is not accidentally connected with the content of the told. And this * Editor's note: This article, as well as the contributions by Joseph Margolis, Félix MartínezBonati, and Sanford Freedman which follow it, grew out of a symposium on "Styles of Fictionality," held at Harvard University in 1981. Other papers from that symposium appeared in the April, 1983 issue of Philosophy and Literature. 145 146PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE ought to be so whether die teller is a literary artist, whom we suppose always to be conscious of the nature of the stylistic choices, or a philosopher, whom we often think of as avoiding or eschewing style altogether. No stylistic choice can be presumed to be neutral — not even the choice to write in a flat or neutral style. My aim in this article is to begin working on the complicated connections between a view of what a human soul is and a view about how to address that sort of soul in writing, in die communication of die view.1 I have chosen two very different views, associated with two extremely different styles. One will be an intellectualistic view of die person, expressed in a style commonly associated widi philosophical writing; the other, expressed in a literary narrative, will be severely critical of intellectualism. The philosophical view is associated with a harsh criticism ofliterary art, the literary view widi an equally harsh criticism of philosophical investigation. In each case, I want to ask how the story that is told engages, in the telling, widi the reader's soul, and how the telling and the told are matched. I have chosen two extremes not because I wish to suggest diat these positions somehow express the essence of the philosophical or the literary, but because diey speak to and criticize one another in an illuminating way. By seeing their opposing elements starkly and schematically set out, we will be in a better position, should we wish to, to imagine an alternative between them. My philosophical protagonist will be Plato — or certain aspects of Plato; the literary opponent will be Proust. I shall, in...

Este ensayo considera, dentro de un contexto narrativo, el asunto de cómo llegar a saber de nuestro amor a partir de una comparación entre el comportamiento escéptico y desconfiado del lector de filosofía y el abierto y confiado del lector de relatos. El artículo explica cómo la filosofía permite clarificar la idea del conocimiento del amor por medio del análisis de los conceptos, descubriendo específicamente que es el amor en el alma y como es su conocimiento; y cómo el relato, señala que el carácter las multiples formas de los aspectos en desarrollo y la evolución temporal de lo narrado, no están presentes en las teorías explícitas y reflexivas. Martha Nussbaum afirma que el corazón humano necesita de la reflexión activa, y que para poderle abrir un espacio a las historias de amor, la filosofía debe ser más literaria, debe tener una relación más estrecha con las narraciones y considerar respetuosamente el misterio y los finales abiertos de las mismas.

Este artículo pretende mostrar la crucial importancia de la conversación en la obra Der Stechlin de Fontane. Frente al tradicional desarrollo de la trama literaria, que centra la atención en el drama de los conflictos (complicación y desenlace, tensión y sorpresa, conflicto romántico, etc.), en esta novela no encontramos nada de eso y, entonces, aparentemente, no ha pasado nada. No obstante, este juicio inicial queda desacreditado en la medida en que, compartiendo las conversaciones que entablan los personajes de Der Stechlin, vamos entrando en su mundo personal y terminamos por convertirnos en “amigos” de ellos. Esto lleva a revisar nuestras experiencias literarias ordinarias con mirada crítica: ¿qué manera es esa de tratar a una persona? Se sostiene, entonces, que lo que preocupa a Fontane es el peso de las narrativas sociales por encima de la imaginación amistosa, y de ahí que Fontane nos exija ver a estos “amigos” (personajes) sin recurrir a ciertos tipos de narrativas socialmente transmitidas. Leer Der Stechlin invita, así, a no generalizar a las personas apresuradamente, a no entenderlas a partir de ciertos guiones o mitos socialmente establecidos.