Updated 14 July 2019
On Martha Nussbaum’s Reading of Kant by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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On Martha Nussbaum’s Reading of Kant: Aristotelean Teleology Meets Kantian Archaeology
The following is an email that was sent to Herman Waetjen, Emeritus Professor of the San Francisco Theological Seminary and Berkeley’s GTU. During a recent visit with him in San Anselmo, Herman shared with me passages from Martha Nussbaum’s , Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,2006) that offer her reading of Kant on reason, morality, and humanity’s responsibilities to nature, other species, and the physically and mentally challenged. Herman had written a paper on “Towards a Theology of Animals” for the Spring 2016 meeting of the Pacific Coast Theological Society meeting. His paper is available on-line at https://www.academia.edu. This email provides my response to what I take to be a serious but, unfortunately, all too frequent “mis-reading” of Kant. To be sure, every reading of a text is an interpretation, but that fact is no license to generate any whimsical reading that serves one’s purposes in the moment. As Paul Ricoeur proposed: A good reading is congruent with the text and generates a plenitude of rich meaning. A poor reading is narrow and far-fetched. In my judgment, Martha Nussbaum’s reading of Kant is incredibly narrow and far-fetched, even if there are powerful voices in the academy today who share her reading.
