Martha Nussbaum has contributed to ethics, political theory, classics, philosophy of mind, legal theory, educational theory, public policy, and gender studies. Educated at New York University (BA, 1969) and Harvard University (MA, 1971; PhD, 1975), she has taught at Harvard, Brown University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago.

Nussbaum's work ranges widely, but she has consistently returned to such themes as: the nature of emotion and its role in philosophical argument, the extension and application of the "capabilities approach" in the theory of justice, the role of philosophical argument and reflection in the public sphere, and the relationship between philosophy and art and literature. Her work can be helpfully characterized as a sustained critique of Platonism. The Fragility of Goodness (1986), her first major book, argued that the Platonic view of the good life marks "an aspiration to rational self-sufficiency through the 'trapping' and 'binding' of unreliable...