The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser was best known for his technical image trilogy, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), which expanded photography theory into a radically inclusive philosophy of still and moving images for the digital age. However, he was also fascinated by concurrent developments in biology and biotechnology that were changing notions of nature, materialism, and humans. This essay will look at Flusser’s writing around these (...) ideas, particularly his para-biological fable Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (1987), his “Curie’s Children” column for Artforum (1986–1992), and his collaborations and correspondences with artists impacted by his ideas. (shrink)

In this timely, provocative volume, essayists including Susan Moller Okin, Catherine A. MacKinnon, Cass Sunstein, Martha Minow, William Galston, and Sara McLanahan argue positions on sexuality, on the family, and on the proper role of law in these areas.

This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law’s relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with (...) conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force. (shrink)

Gangestad & Simpson present an idealized model of human mate strategies based on rational economics and genetics that elides most social constraints on human sexuality. They do not deal with observable complexities of courtship nor with ambiguities in short- and long-term mating. The model successfully explicates a narrow set of premises, but cannot yet explain complex sexual behavior.

Martha Nussbuam is one of the most prolific and original philosophers working today. Influenced by ancient philosophy, she has written on the relationship between fiction, the emotions and moral reasoning. With Amartya Sen she developed the capabilities approach to human well-being, which helped shape the UN’s Human Development Index. She is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

In this critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.

Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks (...) a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation. The idea of the social contract--especially as developed in the work of John Rawls--is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship--education, health care, political rights and liberties--to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of capabilities. She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles--and to look to a future of greater justice for all. (shrink)

In this major book Martha Nussbaum, one of the most innovative and influential philosophical voices of our time, proposes a kind of feminism that is genuinely international, 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. 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. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy.

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient (...) Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent''s life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say. (shrink)

“Philosophy is constitutive of good citizenship. It becomes part of what you are when you are a good citizen – a thoughtful person. Philosophy has manyroles. It can be just fun, a game that you play. It can be a way you try to approach your own death or illness, or that of a family member. I’m just focusing on the place where I think I can win over people, and say ‘Look here, you do care about democracy don’t you? (...) Then you’d better see that philosophy has a place.’”. (shrink)

Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like geological upheavals in a landscape, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain and prone to reversal. Are they simply, as some have claimed, animal energies or impulses with no connection to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep awareness and understanding? In this compelling book, 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. She explores and illuminates the structure of a wide range of emotions, in particular compassion and love, showing that there can be no adequate ethical theory without an adequate theory of the emotions. This involves understanding their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operations in our daily lives. (shrink)

This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Martha C. Nussbaum provides a bracing new view that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals.

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal brain might accomplish the (...) complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

Any defense of universal norms involves drawing distinctions among the many things people actually desire. If it is to have any content at all, it will say that some objects of desire are more central than others for political purposes, more indispensable to a human being's quality of life. Any wise such approach will go even further, holding that some existing preferences are actually bad bases for social policy. The list of Central Human Capabilities that forms the core of my (...) political project contains many functions that many people over the ages have preferred not to grant to women, either not at all, or not on a basis of equality. To insist on their centrality is thus to go against preferences that have considerable depth and breadth in traditions of male power. Moreover, the list contains many items that women over the ages have not wanted for themselves, and some that even today many women do not pursue – so in putting the list at the center of a normative political project aimed at providing the philosophical underpinning for basic political principles, we are going against not just other people's preferences about women, but, more controversially, against many preferences (or so it seems) of women about themselves and their lives. To some extent, my approach, like Sen's, avoids these problems of paternalism by insisting that the political goal is capability, not actual functioning, and by dwelling on the central importance of choice as a good. But the notion of choice and practical reason used in the list is a normative notion, emphasizing the critical activity of reason in a way that does not reflect the actual use of reason in many lives. (shrink)

The cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes, who claimed as his identity "citizen of the world." Martha Nussbaum traces the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient times to the present, weighing its limitations as well as merits. Using the capabilities approach, Nussbaum seeks to integrate the "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship with cosmopolitanism's concern with moral and political justice for all.--.