SOURCE: Fricker, Miranda. Review of Sex and Social Justice, by Martha Nussbaum. Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 8 (August 2000): 471-75.

In the following review, Fricker offers praise for Sex and Social Justice, calling it an impressive, wonderfully diverse, and enormously rewarding collection of essays.

The final essay in this impressive volume Sex and Social Justice, Martha Nussbaum is a discussion of the quotidian yet complex interpretive enterprise of understanding other people. It presents, in domestic microcosm, many of the themes treated at a more general level in the preceding essays. The focus is on the couple at the center of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, who communicate without giving voice, and concede or hold their ground over their differences without making anything explicit. They sustain a subtle, if fallible, working understanding of each other's thoughts and experiences by drawing silently on their intimate history together. Although most of the rather...