43 Facts About Martha Nussbaum

1.

Martha Craven Nussbaum 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.

2.

Martha Nussbaum has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights.

3.

Martha Nussbaum 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.

4.

Martha Nussbaum received the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen Prize, and the 2021 Holberg Prize.

5.

Martha Nussbaum then moved to Brown University, where she taught until 1994 when she joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty.

6.

At Brown, Martha Nussbaum's students included philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff and actor and playwright Tim Blake Nelson.

7.

Martha Nussbaum 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.

8.

Martha 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.

9.

Martha Nussbaum 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 denying gays and lesbians the right to seek passage of local non-discrimination laws.

10.

Martha Nussbaum responded to these charges in a lengthy article called "Platonic Love and Colorado Law".

11.

Martha Nussbaum used multiple references from Plato's Symposium and his interactions with Socrates as evidence for her argument.

12.

Martha 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".

13.

Martha Nussbaum suggests that one can "trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance".

14.

In January 2019, Martha 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.

15.

Martha Nussbaum is well known for her contributions in developing the Capabilities Approach to well-being, alongside Amartya Sen.

16.

Martha Nussbaum asserts that all humans have a basic right to dignity.

17.

Martha Nussbaum was married to Alan Nussbaum from 1969 until they divorced in 1987, a period which led to her conversion to Judaism and the birth of her daughter Rachel.

18.

Martha Nussbaum dated and lived with Cass Sunstein for more than a decade.

19.

Martha Nussbaum had previously had a romantic relationship with Amartya Sen.

20.

When she became the first woman to hold the Junior Fellowship at Harvard, Martha Nussbaum received a congratulatory note from a "prestigious classicist" who suggested that since "female fellowess" was an awkward name, she should be called hetaira, for in Greece these educated courtesans were the only women who participated in philosophical symposia.

21.

Martha Nussbaum 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.

22.

Martha Nussbaum's reputation extended her influence beyond print and into television programs like PBS's Bill Moyers.

23.

Martha Nussbaum excoriated deconstructionist Jacques Derrida saying "on truth [he is] simply not worth studying for someone who has been studying Quine and Putnam and Davidson".

24.

Martha Nussbaum cites Zhang Longxi, who labels Derrida's analysis of Chinese culture "pernicious" and without "evidence of serious study".

25.

Martha Nussbaum received the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for Cultivating Humanity.

26.

Martha Nussbaum discusses at length the feminist critiques of liberalism itself, including the charge advanced by Alison Jaggar that liberalism demands ethical egoism.

27.

Martha Nussbaum accepts Catharine MacKinnon's critique of abstract liberalism, assimilating the salience of history and context of group hierarchy and subordination, but concludes that this appeal is rooted in liberalism rather than a critique of it.

28.

Martha Nussbaum refines the concept of "objectification", as originally advanced by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

29.

Martha Nussbaum defines the idea of treating as an object with seven qualities: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity.

30.

Martha Nussbaum argues that individuals tend to repudiate their bodily imperfection or animality through the projection of fears about contamination.

31.

Martha Nussbaum posits that the fundamental motivation of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian Americans is a "politics of disgust".

32.

Martha Nussbaum argues that legal bans on conducts, such as nude dancing in private clubs, nudity on private beaches, the possession and consumption of alcohol in seclusion, gambling in seclusion or in a private club, which remain on the books, partake of the politics of disgust and should be overturned.

33.

Martha Nussbaum identifies the "politics of disgust" closely with Lord Devlin and his famous opposition to the Wolfenden report, which recommended decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts, on the basis that those things would "disgust the average man".

34.

Martha Nussbaum goes on to explicitly oppose the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating.

35.

In place of this "politics of disgust", Martha Nussbaum argues for the harm principle from John Stuart Mill as the proper basis for limiting individual liberties.

36.

Martha Nussbaum argues the harm principle, which supports the legal ideas of consent, the age of majority, and privacy, protects citizens while the "politics of disgust" is merely an unreliable emotional reaction with no inherent wisdom.

37.

Furthermore, Martha Nussbaum argues this "politics of disgust" has denied and continues to deny citizens humanity and equality before the law on no rational grounds and causes palpable social harms to the groups affected.

38.

Martha Nussbaum's book combines ideas from the Capability approach, development economics, and distributive justice to substantiate a qualitative theory on capabilities.

39.

Martha Nussbaum 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.

40.

Finally, Martha 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.

41.

Martha Nussbaum is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

42.

Martha Nussbaum is an Academician in the Academy of Finland and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

43.

Martha Nussbaum has 63 honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, including:.