Martha Nussbaum Honored with Doctor of Laws at Harvard’s Commencement
Harvard to award seven honorary degrees
Recognizing game changers who continue to shape the world
Seven will receive honorary degrees from Harvard during today’s Commencement ceremony in Tercentenary Theatre.
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Martha Craven Nussbaum
Doctor of Laws
Martha Nussbaum’s 24 books and 509 papers address topics ranging from Greek and Roman philosophy to reform in liberal education, sex and social justice, emotional intelligence to sexual orientation and constitutional law. The Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, she is internationally known as a scholar of feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of the arts, and used Stoicism to help define the base values of liberal education: critical self-examination, the idea of world citizenship, and developing narrative imagination. Nussbaum has also explored the philosophy of emotion, writing in “Upheavals of Thought” after her mother’s death that her own stoic expressions “that my mother found cold and unloving could actually be a form of love. It’s a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.” On ethics, she has written, “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered.” A former Harvard professor who earned her A.M. and Ph.D. here, Nussbaum became just the second woman to deliver the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 2014 and delivered the Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities three years later. She has received honors including the Grawemeyer Award in Education, the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, the $500,000 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Don M. Randel Prize for Achievement in the Humanities, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, the Holberg Prize, and the Inamori Ethics Prize.
Read more at The Harvard Gazette