Martha Nussbaum

Martha Craven Nussbaum was born May 6, 1947, in New York City, into what she later called a sterile, status-conscious East Coast household, her father a Philadelphia lawyer, her mother a homemaker. She trained as an actress before changing direction, earning a bachelor's degree in theater and classics from New York University in 1969, the same year she married the linguist Alan Nussbaum and converted to Judaism. She went on to Harvard for graduate work in ancient philosophy, taking a PhD in 1975 under the classicist G. E. L. Owen, and was denied tenure by Harvard's Classics Department in 1982 despite a growing reputation, a rejection she has said reflected the department's discomfort with a woman working across classics and philosophy as much as it reflected her scholarship.

Nussbaum built her career largely outside the department that had turned her down, at Brown and then, from 1995, the University of Chicago, where she holds a joint appointment in the law school and philosophy department. With the economist Amartya Sen she developed the capabilities approach, a framework for measuring wellbeing and justice by what people are actually able to do and be, covering health, education, political voice and bodily integrity rather than income alone, and it now underlies the United Nations Human Development Index and welfare-policy debates worldwide. Her books, from The Fragility of Goodness in 1986 through Sex and Social Justice in 1999 and Creating Capabilities in 2011, range across ancient philosophy, emotion, disability, religious liberty and animal rights, and she has testified as an expert witness in cases involving gay rights, applying classical philology to constitutional argument.

Her 1996 expert testimony in Romer v. Evans, a Colorado gay-rights case, drew on her reading of a Greek word in Plato to argue that ancient Athens had not condemned homosexuality the way the state's defenders claimed; critics, including some classicists, argued her translation stretched the evidence to fit the conclusion she needed, a charge that has followed the case into legal-scholarship debates about the limits of expert testimony. Her daughter Rachel, a government-affairs attorney, died in 2019 from a drug-resistant infection after transplant surgery, a loss Nussbaum has written about only sparingly. Her own marriage to Alan Nussbaum ended in divorce in 1987, decades before the honors, the Kyoto Prize, the Berggruen Prize, the Holberg Prize, began arriving in her seventies and eighties.

Nussbaum, in her late seventies, continues publishing roughly a book a year, and how her enormous range will settle in the discipline's memory is still an open question: philosophers debate whether the capabilities approach or the work on emotion and ethics will prove more durable, and classicists still argue over the Romer testimony's use of Plato. What is not contested is the reach: economics, law, psychology and disability studies have each absorbed pieces of her work into their own core vocabulary, an unusual spread for a philosopher trained, originally, to be an actress.

Martha Nussbaum's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Fragility of Goodness book
  Study of luck and ethics in ancient Greek philosophy and tragedy 1986
• The capabilities approach other
  Co-developed with Amartya Sen as a framework for measuring justice and wellbeing 1993
• Cultivating Humanity book
  Argued for a classical liberal-arts core in higher education 1997
• Sex and Social Justice book
  Essays applying the capabilities approach to gender and sexuality 1999
• Creating Capabilities book
  The fullest statement of the capabilities approach 2011

• May 6, 1947 aged 0 Born in New York City
• 1969 aged ~22 Earns a B.A. in theater and classics from NYU and marries Alan Nussbaum
• 1975 aged ~28 Earns her PhD in ancient philosophy from Harvard
• 1982 aged ~35 Denied tenure by Harvard's Classics Department
• 1986 aged ~39 Publishes The Fragility of Goodness
• 1995 aged ~48 Joins the University of Chicago Law School and philosophy department
• 1996 aged ~49 Testifies as an expert witness in Romer v. Evans
• 2016 aged ~69 Wins the Kyoto Prize
• 2019 aged ~72 Her daughter Rachel dies after transplant surgery

• John Rawls 1921–2002
  Political philosopher whose A Theory of Justice became the most influential work of political philosophy in the 20th century. extended the work of
• Amartya Sen b. 1933
  Indian-American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on welfare economics and famine reshaped development. co-developed the capabilities approach with
• Judith Butler b. 1956
  Philosopher whose work on gender performativity reshaped feminist and queer theory worldwide. public critic of
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. opposed