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  • 4 - Intellectual History and Defending the Capabilities Approach

  • from Part I - Historical Antecedents and Philosophical Debates
  • Edited by Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, Siddiqur Osmani, Mozaffar Qizilbash, University of York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach
    Published online:
    11 November 2020
    Print publication:
    19 November 2020, pp 76-91

  • Summary

    For Martha C. Nussbaum, the history of political philosophy possesses philosophical value for reasons that are seldom explicitly argued. It is not so much that past political philosophers are worthy of our attention primarily because they identified philosophical problems that we continue to consider significant. Rather, we should pay especially close attention to those who also managed to arrive at solutions to these problems similar to our own. Their significance for us stems less from the fact that we recognize their purported philosophical problems as our own problems and more from the fact that we sometimes discover their purported solutions to these problems mirroring or overlapping with our own. Consensus with the dead warrants philosophical claims as much as consensus with the living. For Nussbaum, discovering that T. H. Green’s philosophical liberalism emulates her version of the capability approach warrants its credibility. Intellectual history is sometimes philosophically very useful. The hermeneutical conundrums raised by this manipulation of intellectual history are considerable.