SOURCE: Knox, Bernard. “The Theater of Ethics.” New York Review of Books (4 December 1986): 51-6.

In the following review, Knox asserts that Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness is unique in that it includes expert analysis of both philosophical and tragic literary texts. Knox observes that the book is intellectually demanding as well as richly rewarding.

“There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” says Plato's Socrates, as, in Book X of the Republic, he reconfirms his decision to banish Homer and the tragic poets from his ideal city. And indeed it is true that long before Plato such philosophers as Xenophanes and Heraclitus had inveighed against the poets for, among other things, their presentation of gods engaged in unjust or immoral activities. Poets working in what Plato called the imitative poetic media, epic and tragedy, were of course unable to reply in kind (though some passages of tragic...