Winner of the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein prize for the best collection of essays in 1991
1: Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature
2: The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of
Private and Public Rationality
3: Plato on Commensurability and Desire
4: Flawed Crystals: James's The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral
Philosophy
5: "Finely Aware and Richly Responsible": Literature and the Moral
Imagination
6: Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory
7: Perception and Revolution: The Princess Casamassima and the
Political Imagination
8: Sophistry About Conventions
9: Reading for Life
10: Fictions of the Soul
11: Love's Knowledge
12: Narrative Emotions: Beckett's Geneology of Love
13: Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic
Aspiration
14: Steerforth's Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View
15: Transcending Humanity
Martha C. Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics and the University of Chicago Law School.
"An engaging and satisfying study of literature's intrinsic
relationship to philosophy, and of philosophy in its relationship
to the rich web of human love and choice....It is a book textured
with so many lives and stories that it cannot fail to inspire
lively debate on the role of novelist as philosopher and on the
centrality of love to wisdom."--Christianity & Literature
"The best modern discussion of the ways in which what we call
philosophy and what we call literature interrelate....Anyone who
wants to think about how literature and philosophy can serve each
other should not just read this book but study it and return to its
complex arguments again and again." --Wayne Booth, Philosophy and
Literature
"I did not want Love's Knowledge to stop, and I find myself
trusting its progress as much as that of any work of moral thinking
of recent times."--Arion
"One of the most original books published [in 1991], a hugely
stimulating read, which returns us with thoughts refreshed to some
of our best-loved authors and brings philosophy back to earth in
the process."--The Observer
"With this volume Martha Nussbaum gives new meaning to the word
`interdisciplinary': No mere dabbling in closely aligned fields,
the essays presented here are based on her considerable knowledge
and understanding of classics, philosophy, and comparative
literature....Her assertions are balanced, insightful, and infused
with subtle humor."--The Bloomsbury Review
"An engaging and satisfying study of literature's intrinsic
relationship to philosophy, and of philosophy in its relationship
to the rich web of human love and choice....It is a book textured
with so many lives and stories that it cannot fail to inspire
lively debate on the role of novelist as philosopher and on the
centrality of love to wisdom."--Christianity & Literature
"The best modern discussion of the ways in which what we call
philosophy and what we call literature interrelate....Anyone who
wants to think about how literature and philosophy can serve each
other should not just read this book but study it and return to its
complex arguments again and again." --Wayne Booth, Philosophy and
Literature
"I did not want Love's Knowledge to stop, and I find myself
trusting its progress as much as that of any work of moral thinking
of recent times."--Arion
"One of the most original books published [in 1991], a hugely
stimulating read, which returns us with thoughts refreshed to some
of our best-loved authors and brings philosophy back to earth in
the process."--The Observer
"With this volume Martha Nussbaum gives new meaning to the word
`interdisciplinary': No mere dabbling in closely aligned fields,
the essays presented here are based on her considerable knowledge
and understanding of classics, philosophy, and comparative
literature....Her assertions are balanced, insightful, and infused
with subtle humor."--The Bloomsbury Review
"To move with authority over so wide a range of intellectual
history, the author must be an unlikely combination: an acute and
sensitive critic of ancient and modern literature, a professional
philosopher and a trained scholar of ancient Greek. In this case
skepticism can be dispensed with; Martha Nussbaum is all of these
things."--Washington Post Book World
"Only taken together can these essays hope to become the saboteurs
and not the victims of interdisciplinary demarcations. The
cumulative effect of reading them in succession is a sense of
richness and exhilaration."--A.W. Price, Center for Hellenic
Studies, Washington, DC
"Martha Nussbaum is doubtless one of our most compassionate
philosophical critics. These essays restore a deeply philosophical
intelligence to literature; at the same time philosophy once again
becomes human through its encounter with the literary
text."--Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California, Berkeley
"It is Martha Nussbaum's striking and profound idea that questions
of style and substance are so intricately bound up with one
another, that if the deep questions of moral life are in issue,
they can be but inadequately dealt with through philosophical
writing as currently practiced. The novel, by contrast, is a
marvelously suited instrument of moral cogitation, and in this book
she takes the novel away from the dry deconstructive fingers of
literary
theory, as she takes moral philosophy out of the narrowing confines
of professional philosophical prose. So she has put together a
wonderful book about meaning, writing, knowledge, and human
truth."--Arthur C.
Danto, Columbia University
"Love's Knowledge is an important book, one that should reshape our
thought about ethics. Martha Nussbaum shows how contemporary
philosophical debate has excluded central questions: questions
about human life and what is important in it, questions about how
styles of thought and writing express particular and challengeable
ethical views, questions about the mutual relations of philosophy
and literature. She makes clear what was at stake in the
'ancient quarrel' between poetry and philosophy, and brings out its
relevance to our own attempts to achieve understanding of the
complex and confusing realities of our lives. Love's Knowledge is
written with grace
and clarity; it is, indeed, illuminated by love--love of the texts
and authors that Professor Nussbaum writes about, and loving
attention to what our lives, including our moral thoughts and
feelings, are really like."--Cora Diamond, University of
Virginia
"Love's Knowledge is a work of passionate reflection, exemplifying
the virtue it extols. It is a courageous work, morally and
intellectually, for which Martha Nussbaum deserves praise as well
as thanks."--Radcliffe Quarterly
"This weighty collection of essays offers a feast not to be missed
by those disillusioned with the positivistic strains of much
twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy and ethics....Her
premises are classic; her reasoning, innovative by virtue of its
courageous consistency."--Journal of the American Academy of
Religion
"Fundamentally a collection of essays, this book re-pays
re-reading, and not simply because it has an attractively
inconclusive quality about it which makes one want to read more of
Professor Nussbaum's work. It is important because it is in large
part an attempt to reconceptualize the relationship between
`virtue' and `enlightenment', two modes of ethical thinking between
which we do not have to choose."--Literature & Theology
"Love's Knowledge is a welcome book."--Dialogue
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