Who is nussbaum martha c

Nussbaum presents a powerful argument for treating emotions not as alien forces but as highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance. Beginning from an intensely personal experience of her own, the grief felt at the death of her mother, she explores and illuminates the structure of a wide range of emotions, in particular, compassion and love. She shows that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions, and that this involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives.

The new religious intolerance : overcoming the politics of fear in an anxious age by Martha Craven Nussbaum Book 30 editions published between and in English and French and held by 2, WorldCat member libraries worldwide "What impulse prompted some newspapers to attribute the murder of 77 Norwegians to Islamic extremists, until it became evident that a right-wing Norwegian terrorist was the perpetrator?

Why did Switzerland, a country of four minarets, vote to ban those structures? How did a proposed Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan ignite a fevered political debate across the United States?

Nussbaum surveys such developments and identifies the fear behind these reactions. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, she suggests a route past this limiting response and toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society.

Women and human development : the capabilities approach by Martha C Nussbaum 47 editions published between and in English and Italian and held by 2, WorldCat member libraries worldwide Proposing a new kind of feminism that is genuinely international, Martha Nussbaum argues for an ethical underpinning to all thought about development planning and public policy, and dramatically moves beyond the abstractions of economists and philosophers to embed thought about justice in the concrete reality of the struggles of poor women.

In this book, Nussbaum argues that international political and economic thought must be sensitive to gender difference as a problem of justice, and that feminist thought must begin to focus on the problems of women in the third world. Taking as her point of departure the predicament of poor women in India, she shows how philosophy should undergird basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by all governments, and used as a comparative measure of quality of life across nations.

Nussbaum concludes by calling for a new international focus to feminism, and shows through concrete detail how philosophical arguments about justice really do connect with the practical concerns of public policy. Frontiers of justice : disability, nationality, species membership by Martha C Nussbaum 41 editions published between and in English and German and held by 2, WorldCat member libraries worldwide The idea of the social contract is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition.

Exploring the limitations of the social contract, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of capabilities as an approach to social co-operation. Sex, preference, and family : essays on law and nature by David M Estlund 32 editions published between and in English and held by 2, WorldCat member libraries worldwide Sex, Preference, and Family brings together seventeen eminent philosophers and legal scholars who offer illuminating and often provocative commentary on sexuality including sexual behavior, sexual orientation, and the role of pornography in shaping sexuality , on the family including both same-sex and single-parent families , and on the proper role of law in these areas.

The essayists are all fiercely independent thinkers and offer intriguingand controversial proposals. Creating capabilities : the human development approach by Martha Craven Nussbaum 32 editions published between and in English and Korean and held by 2, WorldCat member libraries worldwide This is a primer on the "Capabilities Approach," Nussbaum's innovative model for assessing human progress.

She argues that much humanitarian policy today violates basic human values; instead, she offers a unique means of redirecting government and development policy toward helping each of us lead a full and creative life.

On nineteen eighty-four : Orwell and our future by Abbott Gleason 22 editions published between and in English and held by 2, WorldCat member libraries worldwide George Orwell's nineteen Eighty-Fours among the most widely read books in the world. For more than 50 years, it has been regarded as a morality tale for the possible future of modern society, a future involving nothing less than extinction of humanity itself.

Does nineteeFour remainourremain relevant in our new century? The editors of this book assembled a distinguished group of philosophers, literary specialists, political commentators, historians, and lawyers and asked them to take a wide-ranging and uninhibited look at that question. The editors deliberately avoided Orwell scholars in an effort to call forth a fresh and diverse range of responses to the major work of one of the most durable literary figures among twentieth-century EAs nineteenters.

AsNineteen Eighty-Fourprotagonist Winston Smith has admirers on the right, in the center, and on the left, the contributors similarly represent a wide range of political, literary, and moral viewpoints. The Cold War that has so often been linked to Orwell's novel ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but most of the issues of concern to him remain alive in some form today: censorship, scientific surveillance, power worship, the autonomy of art, the meaning of democracy, relations between men and women, and many others.

The contributors bring a variety of insightful and contemporary perspectives to bear on these questions. Nussbaum entered the graduate program in classics at Harvard, in , and realized that for years she had been smiling all the time, for no particular reason.

When her thesis adviser, G. She gave emotions a central role in moral philosophy, arguing that they are cognitive in nature: they embody judgments about the world. One of her mentors was John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher of the last century. He stuttered and was extremely shy. She said that one day, when they were eating hamburgers for lunch this was before she stopped eating meat , he instructed her that if she had the capacity to be a public intellectual then it was her duty to become one.

Utilitarian and Kantian theories were dominant at the time, and Nussbaum felt that the field had become too insular and professionalized.

She argued that tragedy occurs because people are living well: they have formed passionate commitments that leave them exposed. She began the book by acknowledging:.

Nussbaum describes motherhood as her first profound experience of moral conflict. Her pregnancy, in , was a mistake; her I. She goes off and has a baby. Her husband took a picture of her reading. She was at a Society of Fellows dinner the next week. Alan Nussbaum taught linguistics at Yale, and during the week Martha took care of their daughter, Rachel, alone.

They divorced when Rachel was a teen-ager. They were just frightened. This was the only time that Nussbaum had anything resembling a crisis in her career.

I was eager to hear about her moment of doubt, since she always seemed so steely. Instead, she began considering a more public role for philosophy. She was steered toward the issue by Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, who later won the Nobel Prize.

In , they became romantically involved and worked together at the World Institute of Development Economics Research, in Helsinki. Her earlier work had celebrated vulnerability, but now she identified the sorts of vulnerabilities poverty, hunger, sexual violence that no human should have to endure. In an Aristotelian spirit, Nussbaum devised a list of ten essential capabilities that all societies should nourish, including the freedom to play, to engage in critical reflection, and to love.

Nussbaum argued that Rawls gave an unsatisfactory account of justice for people dependent on others—the disabled, the elderly, and women subservient in their homes. She believes that the humanities are not just important to a healthy democratic society but decisive, shaping its fate. Once she began studying the lives of women in non-Western countries, she identified as a feminist but of the unfashionable kind: a traditional liberal who believed in the power of reason at a time when postmodern scholars viewed it as an instrument or a disguise for oppression.

She argued that the well-being of women around the world could be improved through universal norms—an international system of distributive justice. She was impatient with feminist theory that was so relativistic that it assumed that, in the name of respecting other cultures, women should stand by while other women were beaten or genitally mutilated.

Such people, he implies, are the most despicable of all. It had become untethered from the practical struggle to achieve equality for women. The sense of concern and being held is what I associate with my mother, and the sense of surging and delight is what I associate with my father. She has always been drawn to intellectually distinguished men.

Her spacious tenth-floor apartment, which has twelve windows overlooking Lake Michigan and an elevator that delivers visitors directly into her foyer, is decorated with dozens of porcelain, metal, and glass elephants—her favorite animal, because of its emotional intelligence. Nussbaum is preoccupied by the ways that philosophical thinking can seem at odds with passion and love. One tear, one argument. Anger is an emotion that she now rarely experiences. In addition, she has published about articles and edited 26 books.

Her books have been translated into two dozen languages. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society, where she was President of the Central Division from to Personal page at the University of Chicago. The Holberg Comittee Citation. The Holberg Lecture in text. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts at p. The lecture is free and open to the public and will also stream live online at neh.

The project brings a philosophical view to political crises in America, Europe, and India by offering a deeper understanding of how fear, anger, disgust, and envy interact to create a divisiveness that threatens democracies. Across her long and immensely productive career, Martha has been a tireless and peerless advocate for the role and utility of philosophy in our public life.

With this honor, we celebrate at once her philosophical achievements and her example as an engaged and passionate public philosopher.

Nussbaum said she was deeply honored by the invitation to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. I believe it also offers us strategies of hope and connection. Nussbaum, who has written and edited dozens of books and written more than papers, received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.

The lecture was established by NEH in Tickets are available to the public through E ventbrite. Click here to sign up for ticketing notification updates. To request accommodations or for accessibility questions, please email email.

Facebook: National Endowment for the Humanities. Twitter and Instagram: NEHgov jefflec University of Chicago professor and philosopher Martha Nussbaum will deliver the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Adams Nussbaum will deliver the lecture on Monday, May 1 at the John. Tickets will be available in April. Click here to watch the announcement video. One is famous, the other often neglected.

In the famous transformation, Athena introduces legal institutions to replace and terminate the cycle of blood vengeance. Setting up a court of law with established procedures of evidence and argument, and a jury selected by lot from the citizen body of Athens, she announces that blood guilt will now be settled by law, rather than by the Furies, ancient goddesses of revenge.

But the Furies are not simply dismissed. Instead, Athena persuades them to join the city, giving them a place of honor beneath the earth, in recognition of their importance for the health of the city. These passions themselves remain unchanged; they simply have a new house built around them.

The Furies agree to accept the constraints of law, but they retain an unchanged nature, dark and vindictive. That reading, however, ignores the second transformation, a transformation in the character of the Furies themselves. As the drama begins, the Furies are described as repulsive and horrifying. They are said to be black, disgusting; their eyes drip a hideous liquid.

Apollo even says they vomit up clots of blood that they have ingested from their prey. They belong, he says, in some barbarian tyranny where cruelty reigns. Nor, when they awaken, do the Furies give the lie to these grim descriptions.

What Aeschylus has done is to depict unbridled resentment. It is obsessive, destructive, existing only to inflict pain and ill. As the distinguished 18th c. Unchanged, these Furies could not be at the foundation of a legal system in a society committed to the rule of law. But the Furies do not make the transition to democracy unchanged. Until quite late in the drama, they are still their bestial selves, threatening to disgorge their venom on the land.

Then, however, Athena persuades them to alter themselves so as to join her enterprise. She offers them incentives to join the democracy: a place of honor, reverence from the citizens—but only if they adopt a new range of sentiments, substituting future-directed benevolence for retribution.

Perhaps most fundamental of all, they must listen to the voice of persuasion. They apparently assume an erect posture for the procession that concludes the drama, and they receive crimson robes from a group of citizen escorts. They have become Athenians, rather than beasts. Their very name is changed: they are now the Kindly Ones Eumenides , not the Furies. This second transformation is just as significant as the first one, indeed crucial to the success of the first one.

The Furies are still needed, because this is an imperfect world and there are always crimes to be dealt with. But they are not wanted or needed in their original form.

They must become instruments of justice and human welfare. The city is liberated from the scourge of vindictive anger, which produces civil strife. In its place, the city gets forward-looking justice. Like modern democracies, the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem. Read the historians, and you will see some things that are not remote: individuals litigating obsessively against people they blame for having wronged them; groups blaming other groups for their lack of power; citizens blaming prominent politicians and other elites for selling out the dearest values of the democracy; other groups blaming foreign visitors, or even women, for their own political and personal woes.

The Roman philosopher Lucretius even says that all political anger is an outgrowth of fear—of the terror of each human infant, who comes into the world helpless, and, unlike all other animals, can do nothing on its own to get what it needs to stay alive.

Lucretius sees that as life goes on, vulnerability continues or even increases, since the awareness of death hits us hard at some point, making us realize that we are helpless with respect to the most important thing of all. The Greeks and Romans saw a lot of anger around them. But as classical scholar William Harris shows in his fine book Restraining Rage , they did not embrace or valorize anger.

They did not define manliness in terms of anger, and indeed, as with those Furies, tended to impute it to women, whom they saw as lacking rationality. However much they felt and expressed anger, they waged a cultural struggle against it, seeing it as destructive of human well-being and democratic institutions.

I believe the Greeks and Romans are right: anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse when fueled by a lurking fear and a sense of helplessness. As a philosopher I have been working on these ideas for some time, first in a book called Anger and Forgiveness , and now in a book in progress called The Monarchy of Fear, investigating the relationship between anger and fear.

In my work, I draw not only on the Greeks and Romans, but also on some recent figures, as I shall tonight. I conclude that we should resist anger in ourselves and inhibit its role in our political culture. That idea, however, is radical and evokes strong opposition. For anger, with all its ugliness, is a popular emotion.

Many people think that it is impossible to care for justice without anger at injustice, and that anger should be encouraged as part of a transformative process. Many also believe that it is impossible for individuals to stand up for their own self-respect without anger, that someone who reacts to wrongs and insults without anger is spineless and downtrodden. Nor are these ideas confined to the sphere of personal relations.

The most popular position in the sphere of criminal justice today is retributivism, the view that the law ought to punish aggressors in a manner that embodies the spirit of justified anger.

And it is also very widely believed that successful challenges against great injustice need anger to make progress. Still, we may persist in our Aeschylean skepticism, remembering that recent years have seen three noble and successful freedom movements conducted in a spirit of non-anger: those of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Anger pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law. I'll present my general view, and then show its relevance to thinking well about the struggle for political justice, taking our own ongoing struggle for racial justice as my example. Fairly soon, however, that idea creeps in: those caretakers are not giving me what I desperately need.

They did this to me. Experiences of being fed, held, and clothed quickly lead to expectations, expectations to demands. Instinctual self-love makes us value our own survival and comfort. I would prefer to call it fear-anger or even fear-blame. If we were not helpless, we would just go get what we need. But since we are initially helpless, we have to rely on others.

But it also expresses an underlying picture of the world: the world ought to give us what we demand. Protest and blame are positive, in a sense: they construct an orderly purposive world in which I am an agent, making demands. My life is valuable, things ought to be arranged so that I am happy and my needs are met.