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Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2001. i-xiii plus 751 pages with index. $70.00 hardback, $17.53 paperback. (Reviewed by Barbara Hues Mesle, Graceland University.)
Martha Craven Nussbaum's critics would surely never describe her books (twelve so far1) or career the way that Samuel Johnson described Alexander Pope's Essay on Man when he said of it that penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment were never so happily disguised. First of all, Nussbaum's credentials are undeniably dazzling. She is Ernest Freund Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in Philosophy, Divinity, and Law; Associate in Classics and Political Science; Board member of the Human Rights program; Affiliate of the committee on Southern Asian Studies; and Coordinator of the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. And while it is true that her career includes controversy,2 in part this is true because of Nussbaum's commitment to bring her philosophic and legal acumen to bear upon important issues in contemporary life.
When Nussbaum was invited to be on a panel discussion on Catholic higher education, she first asked herself why she, an outspoken critic of conservative thinking, and a convert to Reform Judaism who usually speaks from a secular perspective, was included. To address this question, Nussbaum recounted the part of Dickens's Christmas Carol in which Marley's ghost cries, "Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business."3
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions is a superb work that ought to be of keen interest to the broad audience of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy community. First and foremost this is so because Nussbaum genuinely makes the comprehensive ocean of real, lived human experience her business. The starting hypothesis of Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought is that emotions have been too often discounted as irrational distractions from our best ethical reasoning. Instead, emotions should have a more central role which neither privileges them nor ignores their complicated, even messy, cognitive structures. Nussbaum's nuanced arguments never oversimplify complex issues, but at the same time,...