Nussbaum Martha C(raven) (b.1947), American philosopher, classicist, and public intellectual with influential views on the human good, the emotions and their place in practical reasoning, and the rights of women and homosexuals. After training at Harvard in classical philology, she published a critical edition, with translation and commentary, of Aristotle’s Motion of Animals (1978). Its essays formulated ideas that she has continued to articulate: that perception is trainable, imagination interpretive, and desire a reaching out for the good. Via provocative readings of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Fragility of Goodness (1986) argues that many true goods succumb to fortune, lack any common measure, and demand finetuned discernment. The essays in Love’s Knowledge (1990) – on Proust, Dickens, Beckett, Henry James, and others – explore the emotional implications of our fragility and the particularism of practical reasoning. They also undertake a brief against Plato’s ancient criticism of the poets, an argument that Nussbaum carried on years later in debates with Judge Richard Posner. The Therapy of Desire (1994) dissects the Stoics’ conviction that our vulnerability calls for philosophical therapy to extirpate the emotions. While Nussbaum holds that the Stoics were mistaken about the good, she has adopted and strengthened their view that emotions embody judgments – most notably in her Gifford Lectures of 1993, Upheavals of Thought. A turning point in Nussbaum’s career came in 1987, when she became a part-time research adviser at the United Nations–sponsored World Institute for Development Economics Research. She there adapted her Aristotelian account of the human good to help ground the ‘capabilities approach’ that the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen was developing for policymakers to use in assessing individuals’ well-being. Nussbaum spells out the human capabilities essential to leading a good life, integrating them within a nuanced liberalism of universalist appeal. This view has ramified: Poetic Justice (1996) argues that its legal realization must avoid the oversimplifications that utilitarianism and economics encourage and instead balance generality with emotionally sensitive imagination. Sex and Social Justice (1998) explores her view’s implications for problems of sexual inequality, gay rights, and sexual objectification. Feminist Internationalism, her 1998 Seeley Lectures, argues that an effective international feminism must champion rights, eschew relativism, and study local traditions sufficiently closely to see their diversity. See also AESTHETICS , ARISTOTLE , EMO- TION , PRACTICAL REASONING , VIRTUE ETHIC. H.S.R.