SOURCE: O'Brien, Dennis. “Socrates Didn't Have Tenure.” Commonweal 125, no. 7 (10 April 1998): 26-7.

In the following review of Cultivating Humanity, O'Brien discusses the philosophy of Socrates in relation to Nussbaum's arguments about education.

[In Cultivating Humanity] Martha Nussbaum, one of our most distinguished philosophers and classical scholars, has fashioned a “report card” on contemporary liberal education: not failure, certainly not a “gentleman's” C (politically incorrect), perhaps not A＋, but very much alive and lively in an astonishing array of academic settings. Her reassurance about the vitality of liberal arts is particularly striking coming as a classical defense of liberal education because it would seem that it is precisely the classical that has been eroded by contemporary interest in non Western culture, African-American studies, women's studies, and gay studies. To external critics, none of these educational turns, fashions, or fads look at all like the traditional classical curriculum, for example, “the...