Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature by Martha Nussbaum

Published 1990 · 432 pages · 130,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism

How hard is Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature to read?

Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
Philosophical vocabulary used with care for general academic readers.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Abstraction: 78 out of 100
High philosophical abstraction, but consistently grounded in close textual reading.
Information density: 76 out of 100
Philosophically dense with extensive engagement with both literary and philosophical texts.
Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
Direct philosophical argument with literary illustration.
Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
Analytical register throughout.
Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
Earnest moral-philosophical engagement throughout.
Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
Arguments reach considered conclusions in each chapter.
Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
Essays on individual authors framed by a unified philosophical argument.

How Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature is regarded

Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Martha Nussbaum