Description
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together Martha Nussbaum''s published papers, some revised for this collection, on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. It also includes two new essays and a substantial Introduction.The papers, many of them previously not readily available to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical questions; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and style; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. The author investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rule.
Trade ReviewThe lucid and penetrating essays in Love's Knowledge demonstrate that Martha Nussbaum is the finest philosophic mind of her generation. * Philosophy and Literature *
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 * Mark Archer, Observer *
Table of Contents1: 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
