SOURCE: Sirridge, Mary. Review of Love's Knowledge, by Martha Nussbaum. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 1 (winter 1992): 61-5.

In the following review, Sirridge asserts that Love's Knowledge lacks a clear central focus, and that Nussbaum's arguments are not persuasive because they are not based on sound philosophical foundations.

Love's Knowledge is a collection of essays, many of which have been published previously. These essays have a common rationale, however, and represent collectively an effort to develop and conduct ethical investigations in the way in which Nussbaum thinks ethics should proceed: by bringing philosophical awareness to bear upon the works of literary imagination.

Ethical inquiry, for Nussbaum, aims at an answer to the question: How should one live? She favors an answer to this question which she calls “Aristotelian.” This conception of ethics involves, first of all, a recognition that objects of value do not differ just quantitatively...