Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics, by Cora Diamond

Abstract

In 1991, Cora Diamond published The Realistic Spirit, a collection of essays that has since become a classic. This long-awaited new book, like the first, combines work in the history of analytic philosophy and in moral philosophy. And it is similar in continuing to philosophize in what Diamond calls the ‘realistic spirit’. As she explained in the ‘central’ essay in her earlier collection, ‘Realism and the Realistic Spirit’, this spirit in philosophy encourages us to not avoid details, but ‘look at them from close to’ (Philosophical Investigations §§51–52, quoted in Diamond 1991, p. 46, and referenced in Diamond 2019, p. 76). In this spirit we attend to our use of language and our patterns of thought, in their contexts, and with their histories, and avoid temptations to generalization and to a priori claims about how things must be. I will try to make evident how continuous this mode of philosophizing is in Diamond’s new book.