Martha Nussbaum has always had it in for the ivory tower. The leading female philosopher in America argues that philosophy needs to be more than philosophy. It needs to be relevant and above all useful.
So, instead of allowing her fellow sages to languish in the airy heights, Nussbaum insists that philosophers should be lawyers for humanity - sorting through the dirty, incomplete and contradictory facts of human existence - building a case for a better, more just, more compassionate, more civil, society.
Her new book, Upheavals of Thought, is a defense of the importance and the intelligence of emotions. It begins with the Stoics, carries through her own mother's death, and ends with the triumph of Mahler, Whitman and Leopold Bloom. Literature, philosophy - and PASSION with Martha Nussbaum
