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ABSTRACT Martha Nussbaum's account of human emotions, given in her influential 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions Is, in many ways, a balanced and insightful one. Her discussion steers prudently and carefully between, on the one hand, the excesses of cultural relativism and social constructivism, and on the other, the crude universalism of biological and cognitivist accounts of emotion. And yet I do not find Nussbaum's overall account fully adequate, and, in particular, I do not think she accords sufficient weight to the role of language in emotional experience or its interpretation. She acknowledges that language differences probably* shape emotional life in some ways, but she goes on to say that "the role of language has often been overestimated" (p. 1551)-without noting that it has also often been greatly underestimated.
In this article, largue that despite her desire to strike a balance between extreme positions on emotion and culture, Nussbaum's account of human emotions errs on the side of universalism. I focus on "grief, "which is her key example of a universal human emotion, and contrast the Anglo cultural perspective (some aspects of which Nussbaum assumes to be universal) with those reflected in other languages such as Russian, French, Chinese, and the Central Australian languasle Pintuni.
Martha Nussbaum, the distinguished philosopher, classicist, and literary scholar, is one of the most prominent polymaths on the contemporary world scene. Of her 1990 book Love's Knowledge, which received the PEN Spielvogel-Diamonstein Prize for the Best Collection of Essays, the Bloomsbury Review wrote, "With this volume Martha Nussbaum gives new meaning to the word 'interdisciplinary' " (cover). The same could be said of Nussbaum's influential 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Upheavals of Thought moves effortlessly between perspectives derived from literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology while at the same time drawing, with grace, courage, and perspicacity, on personal experience. The importance of this book derives not only from its intrinsic merits but also from its ability to enter into an empathetic dialogue with a very wide range of disciplines. Given the book's strongly humanist, literary and autobiographical emphases, the fact that it was well received by psychologists is particularly notable in this context (cf. Keith Oatley's [2003] survey of opinions among the...