Interview with Martha Nussbaum on Anger, Disgust, and Love
On Anger, Disgust, and Love
You are one of the world’s best known and most celebrated living philosophers, as testified by your 57 honorary degrees and by your reception of the most prestigious honors in philosophy (just in the last two years: Philip Quinn Prize 2015, for outstanding service to the profession of philosophy; Inamori Ethics Prize for Outstanding Ethical Leadership, 2015; Nonino Prize for a “Master of Our Time,” 2015; Kyoto Prize in Philosophy, 2016; NEH Jefferson Lecture, 2017). And yet, your graduate education was not in philosophy but in classical philology. Your PhD dissertation, defended in 1975 at Harvard University, was entitled Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, and it was more or less the same as the book of that title, published in 1978. What attracted you to classical philology in the first place, and why did you eventually make the transition to philosophy? Is your graduate training in philology to be credited in part for your success as a philosopher, and if so how?
I was attracted to Classics by my love of Greek tragedies and comedies, which I read first in English and then, as soon as I could, in Greek. When I went to graduate school I wanted to write about tragedy – and lo and behold, I did! – but later. Because when I got to Harvard I found that nobody was addressing the deep ideas in the tragedies. Some were editing texts, and others were doing literary criticism of a somewhat superficial and vapid sort. The people who really commanded my respect were G. E. L. Owen, the great scholar of Plato and Aristotle, and Glen Bowersock, the historian. I don’t have a gift for history, but in order to work with Glen I made Tacitus my “special author” in Latin, and I’ve always delighted in Glen’s prodigious learning, his grace, his wit.
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