SOURCE: Marino, Gordon D. Review of Love's Knowledge, by Martha Nussbaum. America (7 December 1991): 442-43.

In the following review of Love's Knowledge, Marino observes that Nussbaum presents a strong case for expanding the concept of moral philosophy to include literature.

In her earlier work, The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum gracefully established the futility of reading Plato and Aristotle in isolation from Greek tragedy. In Love's Knowledge, Nussbaum continues her reflections on the relationship between philosophy and literature. For those concerned with the rank order of disciplines, Nussbaum, professor of philosophy and classics at Brown University, has some humbling news for philosophers. Where human excellence is the end, it is better to major in comparative literature than philosophy.

In a compelling chapter on Aristotle, Nussbaum argues that ethics is not a science and that there is no single standard of value by which all decisions can be cast. Forging...