Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum in 2010
photo by Sally Ryan
(source: wiki)
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American philosopher (Professor of Law and Ethics at the Chicago University), with a keen interest in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political theory, feminism, ethics (including human rights, as well as animal rights); author or editor of a number of books on these topics; The Fragility of Goodness, on ancient Greek ethics and Greek tragedy, was published by her in 1986, and made Nussbaum a well-known figure throughout the humanities; her 2006 Frontiers of Justice established Nussbaum as a theorist of global justice; other major area of Nussbaum's philosophical work is the field of emotions, where she developed a neo-Stoic theory of grief, compassion and love (Poetic Justice: Literary Imagination and Public Life, 1995), also of disgust and shame and their imprint on the legal system (From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law, 2010 - Nussbaum considers that the legal norms related to sexual behavior should be based solely on the principles of harm, consent, age of majority and privacy - thus any legal norm originated on shame/disgust morality should be overturned - the same goes for inter-racial norms, where popular revulsion plays a very negative role); throughout the years Nussbaum has engaged in many spirited debates with other famous contemporary thinkers, being at times extremely harsh on Chomsky, Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others ejusdem farinae (source: wiki).

Let me give here a very small excerpt from Nussbaum - I totally agree with what she says:

The real clash is not civilizational one between "Islam" and "the West," but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations--between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.

(The clash within democracy, religious violence, and India's future, 2007)

(A Life in Books)