Martha Nussbaum - Biography

Martha Nussbaum, Ph.D.,, is a renowned American philosopher who is particularly interested in ancient philosophy, law and ethics. She was born on May 6, 1974. She is law and ethics Professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. Martha Nusbaum believes philosophical theorizing to be of practical and political value, which she contends other more empirical forms of research could not possibly replace.

She was born on May 6th 1947 in New York City. Her father was George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer and descendent of a Mayflower family. Martha Nussbaum would study theater and classics at New York University. She would get her Bachelor of Arts there in 1969. She would then go on to Harvard University to study philosophy. She would get her MA in 1972 and her Ph.D. in 1975. It is during this period that Martha Nussbaum would marry Alan Nussbaum, would convert to Judaism and that a daughter, Rachel, would be born from the union. However, they would divorce in 1987.

Martha Nussbaum would over the years become a major figure of American political philosophy. As a specialist of ancient philosophy she initially engaged with the different schools of philosophy and Greek tragedy, as in The Fragility of Goodness (1986). Her commitment to moral philosophy would be built on close dialogues with literature, as would demonstrate her book Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) as well as others. Additionally, she would study with great originality the place of emotions in our moral lives, as in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001). She would clearly be interested in the learning and transformative aspects of linking philosophy and literature, as is demonstrated in the following quote:

“As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.”

During the 1980s Martha Nussbaum would begin to work with the economist Amartya Sen (1933 - ) on economic development issues and ethics. Together with him she would promote the concept of “capability approach” in the field of welfare economics development. It is an approach that sees on the one hand the building of “fundamental freedoms”, that is to say certain capabilities such as life expectancy, commitment to economic exchanges as well as political participation, as the very constitutive parts of development, and on the other hand poverty as the deprivation of these so-called capabilities.

These ideas would come in contrast with the dominant discourse of the time that would see development in terms of GDP growth alone and poverty simply as a deprivation of salary. Martha Nussbaum’s ideas are also universalistic and would thus differ with the usual relativism associated with the study of development. Many of her works are presented from an Aristotelian perspective, and are influenced by virtue ethics. Here is a short quote that is helpful in understanding better the significant notion of fragility in what Martha Nussbaum means by ethics:

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”

Nussbaum would also use the capability approach in order to reinterpret John Rawl’s (1921 - 2002) A Theory of Justice (1971). According to her Rawl’s principle of freedom is only significant if it is understood in terms of fundamental freedoms, namely real opportunities based on personal and social context, as outlined above. In a similar way, inequality in the principle of difference must be, Nussbaum tells us, be understood in terms of capabilities.

Since 1995 Martha Nussbaum has been a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago Law School. She would live for a while with the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein (1954 - ), professor of constitutional law at the same university. Since 2008 she has been remarried and the same year she would be appointed to the OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) by President Obama (1961 - ).

Martha Nussbaum is a prolific thinker. As such she would testify as an expert, on top of everything else she already does, in the 1996 Supreme Court case of Romer vs. Evans. This would turn into an opportunity for her to criticize the thesis that the history of philosophy could provide a reason in Colorado to ban laws and regulations that prevent discrimination against homosexuals. Part of her testimony would be deemed misleading by some which would in turn earn her attacks several intellectuals, including from Professor of legal theory at Princeton University Robert P. George (1955 - ) who was testifying too. Working in the tradition of New Natural Law Theory he would use Martha Nusbaum’s own published work to contradict her testimony. It would become a highly publicized dispute. She would respond to the attacks by publishing an article entitled “Platonic Love and Colorado Law.”

It is noteworthy that Martha Nussbaum has also objected to people as diverse as the post-structuralist gender theorist Judith Butler (1956 - ) and the classicist philosopher Allan Bloom (1930 - 1992). She would also object to the ban on the burqa, which she considers to be discriminatory. In the case of Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum would write an 8600-word essay entitled The Professor of Parody. Arguably such an attack was disproportionately nasty and thus ultimately unnecessary. One of the things Judith Butler did in responding was to point out that such verbally violent attacks has little to do with her. More substantially, however, Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler do have an important philosophical difference on how to read J.L. Austin’s notion of the performative.

Martha Nussbaum would be the author of a dozen books including, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (1978), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). In this seminal work she undertakes a double exercise. The first is to defend an ethical philosophy thesis. Hers would be one that emphasizes the irreducible complexity of situations, as well as the importance of things and individuals, and finally the fact that good human life is neither reducible to a single criterion of good, nor is it exempt from vulnerability and conflict.

Love’s Knowledge consists in both trying to understand how important love is in a fulfilled human life, but it is also about paying attention to what love can teach us, because that can hopefully give us a sense of the irreducibly singular nature of things and people. Moreover, it is important for Martha Nussbaum here to highlight the significance of style in philosophical knowledge. In the course of the essays in the book Martha Nussbaum interrogates in turn works of Plato (429 - 347 BC), Aristotle (384 - 322 BC), Henry James (1843 - 1916), Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) and Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989). Through such analyzes a kind of philosophy, that of Martha Nusbaum’s, that is attentive to narrative details as well as to the plurality and diversity of voices becomes evident.

Other books of hers include: The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994), Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (1996), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1998), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), Hiding From Humanity: Disgust and Shame in the Law (2004), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's tradition of religious equality (2008), From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law (2009), Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities (2010).

Martha Nusbaum has been the recipient of numerous prizes throughout her career, including in 2009 the A.SK award bestowed by the German Social Science Research Council for her work on social reforms.