Background

Martha Nussbaum was born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947, in New York City, New York, United States to the family of a Philadelphia lawyer George Craven and an interior designer and homemaker Betty Warren. She has an older half-brother, Robert, from her father’s first marriage, and a younger sister, Gail.

When Nussbaum was six months old, the family moved when her father, a tax and estates attorney, became a partner in a prominent Philadelphia law firm. Nussbaum's father was a major influence on her. In a recent interview with philosopher Andrea Scarantino, published in the Emotion Researcher, Nussbaum recalled that from her father she learned that discipline, hard work, and pleasure all ran together.

George Craven also taught his daughter the pleasure of being well dressed but never stuffy, while her mother, also influential on Martha’s life and outlook, taught her the value of emotions and to respect all people, regardless of class.

Martha Nussbaum has, on various occasions, spoken candidly about her parents, including her father’s bigotry (born and raised in Macon, Georgia, before the Civil rights era, he would not attend her wedding to Alan Nussbaum, a Jew) and her mother’s drinking (she later entered AA and helped others embrace sobriety). These factors shaped her life and her thinking, just as her father’s encouragement and her mother’s unconditional love did.

Education

As a girl, Martha Nussbaum attended the Baldwin School, a private school where she learned French, Latin, and Greek, and studied drama, and was one of the tallest and most outspoken of girls. There she also wrote, staged, and played the lead in a production based on the life of Robespierre, whom she saw as a conflicted figure, divided between ideals of political perfection and personal ties to people with a different view of where the revolution should go. She graduated in 1964.

After graduation, Nussbaum headed to Wellesley College, which she found "emotionally and socially stifling." In the middle of her second year, she left to join a repertory theater that specialized in Greek drama, then transferred to New York University to study theater but discovered something unexpected along the way.

At New York University, Nussbaum dropped theater after three semesters and transferred to Washington Square College, where she resumed her studies in Greek and Roman classics. She also met Alan Nussbaum, a fellow student in classics and now a professor in Indo-European linguistics at Cornell University. They married, and Nussbaum converted to Judaism, in which she found an expressiveness and a passion for this world that was wanting in her experience of Christianity. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969.

The young couple went on to Harvard for their graduate studies. Harvard in the early 1970s was not, however, especially welcoming to them. It was, Nussbaum told the Emotion Researcher, "a shocking and repugnant place: anti-Semitic, sexist, anti-gay. My change of name from Craven to Nussbaum was much commented on, and my husband was given the cold shoulder." Despite the malice she encountered, an exceptional career began to take shape in Cambridge as Nussbaum pursued a doctorate in classics while exploring texts not simply as a literary scholar and a linguist but philosophically, as a reader in search of answers about life’s most pressing questions. For her special author in Latin, she read Roman historian Tacitus, in order to study with Glen Bowersock, whom she admires to this day. In Greek she read Aristotle, and went on to write a dissertation on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, exploring the interpretive powers and physical vulnerability of human and non-human animals that move.

Nussbaum earned her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in classical philology from Harvard University in 1971 and 1975 respectively. Her doctoral advisor at Harvard was G. E. L. Owen.

Career

Martha Nussbaum was an assistant and later an associate professor of philosophy and classics at Harvard from 1975 to 1983. She then returned to Wellesley as a visiting associate professor of philosophy and classics from 1983 to 1984 before accepting a faculty position at Brown University, where she taught from 1985 to 1995. Nussbaum left Brown in 1995 and served as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at Oxford University in the spring of 1996. She then moved to Chicago and is currently the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law and Divinity Schools. Now Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Law School and Philosophy Department. She is an Associate in the Classics Department, the Divinity School, and the Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program.

In 1987, Nussbaum began a seven-year, one-month-a-year gig as a research adviser to the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki. And in 1986 she published the book that announced her as a rising star in philosophy with a strong point of view. With her newfound prominence came an offer from the University of Chicago to become a professor with appointments in the law school and the philosophy department.

Working with Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Nussbaum helped found the Human Development and Capability Association, a nonprofit whose mission is to advocate on behalf of this multifaceted standard for human flourishing.

Nussbaum has written and edited dozens of books and written more than 500 papers.

Achievements

• Martha Craven Nussbaum is among the most influential philosophers in the world. She is internationally renowned for her work in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy and the arts and is actively engaged in teaching and advising students in these subjects. Nussbaum is a recipient of more than 60 honorary degrees from universities in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In addition to the Kyoto Prize, Nussbaum was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2012, the Nonino Prize in 2015, and the Inamori Ethics Prize, also in 2015, among others.

Works

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  • Sex and Social Justice

    (What does it mean to respect the dignity of a human being...)

    2000
  • Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach

    (If a country’s Gross Domestic Product increases each year...)

    2011
  • Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law

    (Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social ...)

    2004
  • Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach

    (Proposing a new kind of feminism that is genuinely intern...)

    2000
  • Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice

    (How can we achieve and sustain a "decent" liberal society...)

    2013
  • Essays on Aristotle's De Anima

    (Bringing together a group of outstanding new essays on Ar...)

    1992
  • Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

    (Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, pun...)

    1999
  • Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality

    (In one of the great triumphs of the colonial and Revoluti...)

    2008
  • Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning

    (Distinguished scholars and writers from a broad range of ...)

    1999
  • Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

    (A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today'...)

    2010
  • From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law

    (A distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the Un...)

    2010
  • Rawls's Political Liberalism

    (Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in mod...)

    2015
  • Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions

    (What is it to grieve for the death of a parent? More lite...)

    2001
  • Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions

    (Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum bring together an all-s...)

    2004
  • The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics

    (The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy...)

    2009
  • The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

    (While America is focused on religious militancy and terro...)

    2007
  • The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis

    (From one of the world’s most celebrated moral philosopher...)

    2019
  • The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal

    (The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought b...)

    2019
  • Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education

    (How can higher education today create a community of crit...)

    1997
  • Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life

    (In Poetic Justice, one of our most prominent philosophers...)

    1995
  • The Quality of Life

    (The idea of the quality of life is central to the economi...)

    1993
  • Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature

    (This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers o...)

    1990
  • Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership

    (Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reac...)

    2006
  • Confronting Torture: Essays on the Ethics, Legality, History, and Psychology of Torture Today

    (Torture has lately become front-page news, featured in po...)

    2018
  • For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism

    (The book argues that we should consider ourselves citizen...)

    1996
  • Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities

    (Women, a majority of the world's population, receive only...)

    1995
  • Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret

    (We all age differently, but we can learn from shared expe...)

    2017
  • The New Religious Intolerance

    (Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literat...)

    2012
  • Philosophical Interventions: Reviews 1986-2011

    (This volume collects the notable published book reviews o...)

    2012
  • The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome

    (Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about ...)

    2002
  • The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

    (This book is a study of ancient views about "moral luck."...)

    1986
  • Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice

    (Anger is not just ubiquitous, it is also popular. Many pe...)

    2016
  • Plato's Republic: The Good Society and the Deformation of Desire 1998

Religion

Martha Nussbaum is a convert to Judaism in the early 1970s. She became a bas mitsve at Temple K. A. M. Isaiah Israel in Chicago in 2008 and delivered a dvar torah about narcissism versus social justice.

Politics

Martha Nussbaum is a political liberal in most cases but in debates about higher education, she sees herself as occupying the center.

Views

Nussbaum's work ranges widely, but she has consistently returned to such themes as the nature of emotion and its role in philosophical argument, the extension and application of the "capabilities approach" in the theory of justice, the role of philosophical argument and reflection in the public sphere, and the relationship between philosophy and art and literature. Against the Platonic-Christian view that transcendent Good or God is at the heart of morality, she advances her own comprehensive, Aristotelian-Kantian-Jewish view that religion highlights the largely autonomous, primary domain of human moral effort. The highest moral paradigms are not such figures as the saints or Gandhi, but those who, like Nehru, found the good life in human finitude and limitation. For Nussbaum, rigorist or ascetic moralism, whether in Gandhi or Plato, betrays violence toward the self that may undermine morality and compassion.

The Fragility of Goodness was the first of Nussbaum's books to take philosophy out of its rationalistic comfort zone to consider the impact of forces beyond the individual’s control. Instead of defining goodness in isolation, Nussbaum asked, What threatens and undermines our pursuit of a flourishing life? For answers, she turned to the literature and philosophy of the ancient Greeks, in particular their views on moral luck. Nussbaum’s argument embraces the idea that our own goodness may be subject to slings and arrows that are not of our own making or own fault.

Another example of Nussbaum looking beyond rationalist categories is her scholarship on emotions "as intelligent responses to the perception of value," as she phrased the matter in her 2001 book Upheavals of Thought, which takes its title from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Her previous emphasis on the philosophical usefulness of literature and narrative - not just ancient plays and poetry but modern novels as well - opened an important new vein in her work on such emotions like anger, forgiveness, and shame.

As a young scholar, Martha Nussbaum did not focus on political philosophy. As she wrote more for the public, however, she warmed toward applying her philosophical and rhetorical skills to matters of public debate. In Cultivating Humanity, her 1997 "classical defense of reform in liberal education," she defended African-American studies and women’s studies along with the American academy’s new emphasis on non-Western traditions. In Sex and Social Justice (1999), she tackled the ways in which gender difference and sexual preference are used internationally to justify marked inequalities that are written into law and produce very different outcomes in quality of life.

Membership

Martha Nussbaum is an Academician in the Academy of Finland, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

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  Academy of Finland , Finland

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  British Academy , United Kingdom

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  American Philosophical Society , United States

Personality

Nussbaum is monumentally confident, intellectually, and physically. Her voice is high-pitched and dramatic, and she often seems delighted by the performance of being herself. Unlike many philosophers, Nussbaum is an elegant and lyrical writer, and she movingly describes the pain of recognizing one’s vulnerability, a precondition, she believes, for an ethical life.

Interests

• playing piano, singing

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Donald Winnicott, Richard Stern

• Politicians

  Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr.

• Writers

  Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope

• Artists

  Paul Gauguin

• Sport & Clubs

  jogging

• Music & Bands

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi

Connections

At New York University Martha Craven also Alan Nussbaum, a fellow student in classics and now a professor in Indo-European linguistics at Cornell University. They married in August 1969. They had a daughter Rachel Emily Nussbaum. In 1987, by mutual consent, Martha and Alan Nussbaum divorced. Nussbaum embarked on a romantic liaison with Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Harvard scholar who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics and later moved to Cambridge University in England. After their split, her companion of more than a decade was an American legal scholar Cass Sunstein.

Father:

George Craven

Mother:

Betty Warren

Ex-husband:

Alan Jeffrey Nussbaum

Daughter:

Rachel Nussbaum Wichert

Rachel Nussbaum Wichert died on December 3, 2019, from a drug-resistant infection following successful transplant surgery.

Brother:

Robert Craven

Sister:

Gail Craven Busch

Partner:

Cass Sunstein

Partner:

Amartya Sen

Doctoral advisor:

Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen

References

• Key Philosophers in Conversation
  2002
• Moral Philosophers and the Novel: A Study of Winch, Nussbaum and Rorty
  2004
• Capabilities and Social Justice: The Political Philosophy of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum
  2016
• Nussbaum and Law
  2017
• Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics: Aristotle, Lonergan, and Nussbaum on Emotions and Moral Insight
  2020
• Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education: Arendt, Berger, Said, Nussbaum and their Legacies
  2012
• The Human Embrace
  1999