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One of the strengths of Cultivating Humanity is that it explores the conflict between authority and reason explicitly--even if it doesn't entirely resolve it. Nussbaum's untrammeled confidence in both the universality of reason and the diversity of human life makes hers a challenging and novel book, one that strongly endorses multicultural study while distancing itself from nearly everything typically associated with it, including postmodernism, identity politics, and the critique of philosophical universalism...If her book is read as carefully and as sympathetically as it was written, it just might give humanism a good name in the academy again...For secular intellectuals who agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, it seems only human to hope that Nussbaum's vision of higher education will guide American universities in the twenty-first century.
--Michael Bérubé (Lingua Franca )

Nussbaum is a culture warrior who earned her stripes defending universities from charges of caving in to the demands of politically correct multiculturalists. In this vigorous response to critics, Nussbaum adopts an unusual approach in her defense of the college-level multicultural curriculum. Instead of casting multicultural instruction as a type of payback for the sins of Western racism and sexism, she artfully argues how the Western philosophical tradition itself leads directly to a multicultural agenda...Nussbaum's arguments are convincing. She is careful to avoid the pitfalls of cultural relativism, and there is no debating the cosmopolitan effects of the educational process she supports. Her work is a welcome addition to the ongoing debate about culture and curriculum. (Publishers Weekly )

Nussbaum provides an accessible examination of recent curricular reforms. Her assessments are enriched by a detailed discussion of the development of specific courses at a wide range of "test case" colleges and universities. Extreme partisans in the "culture wars" will take little comfort in Nussbaum's dispassionate defense of Socratic education and citizenship. But general readers, those interested in thinking about the larger purpose of higher education and how this country's colleges and universities are both fulfilling and failing that mission, will find Nussbaum's assessment both reassuring and challenging. Perhaps most important, her articulation of the classical ideal of "cultivating humanity" will serve as a valuable guidepost for directing future reforms.
--Timothy P. Duffy (Washington Post )

Martha C. Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum (1947) -  American classical and moral-philosopher. Nussbaum was educated at New York University and Harvard, and is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on moral and political philosophy, often bringing classical learning to bear on her writings, and equally often bringing literary and humane studies to bear on her learning. She stands for a liberalism that pays due attention to issues of diversity and of economic and social injustice. Works include Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (1978), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Love's Knowledge (1990), The Therapy of Desire (1994), Poetic Justice (1996), For Love of Country (1996), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1998), Women and Human Development (2000), and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001).