Cora Diamond Research Articles

Wittgenstein on Religious Disagreements

Religious disagreement has recently been a popular topic in analytic philosophy of religion. Many of those who have dealt with the topic have done so from an assumption that logically there is no difference between disagreements on religious matters and disagreements on other areas of life. This assumption is called into question by Wittgenstein (and his followers). This paper explores how Wittgenstein’s view of religious disagreements should be understood. The main source of the study is Wittgenstein’s treatment of the nature of religious disagreements in his lectures on religious belief. In particular, I will explore Wittgenstein’s thought by referring to two recent studies on these lectures made by Cora Diamond and Martin Kusch. I will use the tools of epistemic logic to clarify some problems in this discussion. I will also comment on the common fideistic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s view of religion and his antiintellectualist conception of faith.

Reshaping Ethics after Wittgenstein

This article suggests a reading of the significance of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for ethics, in the light of Cora Diamond’s resolute reading. The contrasts between sense and nonsense and between ethics and science are commented on and are connected to a further contrast between a specialized response to language and the world and an unspecialized response characteristic of the humanistic disciplines. The Tractatus is seen as a work which diagnoses the loss of such a fully human unspecialized sense of things and which wishes to recover this possibility for its reader. On the basis of such reading, the article also suggests how to connect the significance of the later Wittgenstein for ethics with the Tractatus. A connection can be established by following Iris Murdoch’s notion of conceptual clarification.

Bearing Reality: A Christian Meditation

In this essay I draw on the work of novelist J. M. Coetzee and philosophers Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and Stephen Mulhall to reflect on what it might mean to do Christian ethics without denying the “difficulty of reality.” I then turn to John Howard Yoder’s 1987 SCE presidential address to show how his call to see history doxologically enables the Christian to acknowledge the “difficulty of reality” without succumbing to despair. To acknowledge humanity’s limitations without falling into despair or hopeless skepticism is only possible because the community founded on the crucified and risen Lord means we never bear reality alone.

James Baldwin’s ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’: Educating our responses to racism

The aim of this article is to establish—and explore—James Baldwin’s significance for educational theory. Through a close reading of ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, I show that Baldwin’s thinking is an important (if unrecognized) precursor to the work of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, and is relevant to a number of problems that are educationally significant, in particular problems of race and racism.

The Everyday's Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein

This essay takes up the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for our understanding of literature (and vice versa) through a comparative reading of the stakes and aims of Kafka's and Wittgenstein's respective circa 1922 puzzle texts “Von den Gleichnissen” (“On Parables”) and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The essay builds upon the so-called resolute program of Wittgenstein interpretation developed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others, bringing its insights to bear on Kafka's perplexing work. The essay explores the ethical weight of these two writers' investment in the philosophical depth of riddles, irony, and parabolic and nonsensical expression as unorthodox modes of indirect instruction about ordinary language and world, the yearning for transcendence, and the failure to achieve it. Both demanding works deal with the ethical difference between “getting” the philosophical import of a story or joke and not getting it in the context of an examination of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the activities and difficulties of everyday life, on the one hand, and those of literary expression and/or spiritual or philosophical teaching, on the other. Both strive to open readers to experience — as revealed through everyday language — by leading us beyond the dichotomy of facticity and transcendence, away from the urge to transcend the limits of language, and toward a recognition of the possibility of seeing our ordinary dealing with things as presenting a face of significance that is at once linguistically meaningful and ethically valuable. The central aim of this discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and “Lecture on Ethics” alongside Kafka's parable is to examine the ways in which Wittgenstein's philosophical outlook, writing, and method (shaped by his general attraction to the Book and book writing as well as by his reading of certain works of literature) are deeply relevant to literary studies, and particularly to our understanding of literary modernism.

Reflecting on Language from ‘Sideways-on’: Preparatory and Non-Preparatory Aspects-Seeing

Aspect-seeing, I claim, involves reflection on concepts. It involves letting oneself feel how it would be like to conceptualize something with a certain concept, without committing oneself to this conceptualization. I distinguish between two kinds of aspect-perception:1. Preparatory: allows us to develop, criticize, and shape concepts. It involves bringing a concept to an object for the purpose of examining what would be the best way to conceptualize it.2. Non-Preparatory: allows us to express the ingraspability of certain experiences. It involves bringing a concept to an object for the purpose of showing—per impossible—what it would take to properly capture one’s experience. I demonstrate the usefulness of the two kinds of aspect perception in making conceptual judgments, and in making moral and aesthetic judgments.ReferencesSara Bachelard. On Euthanasia: Blindspots in the Argument from Mercy. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19(2):131–40, 2002.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-5930.00210PMid:12747357Avner Baz. What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects? Philosophical Investigations, 23(2):97–121, 2000.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9205.00116Avner Baz. On Learning from Wittgenstein, or What Does it Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects? In W. Day Anew and V. J. Krebs, editors, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, pages 227–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511750663.013Avner Baz. Seeing Aspects and Philosophical Difficulty. In M. McGinn and O. Kuusela, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, pages 697–713. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011.http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199287505.003.0031Stanley Cavell. The Availability of Wittgensteins Later Philosophy. In his Must We Mean What We Say?, pages 44–72. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969.Stanley Cavell. The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.Bob Dent. Why I Wanted to Die: Bob Dents Last Words. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 16(1):19–32, 1999.Cora Diamond. Secondary Sense. In her The Realistic Spirit, pages 225–41. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991a.Cora Diamond. The Face of Necessity. In her The Realistic Spirit, pages 243–66. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991b.Richard Eldridge. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164740Juliet Floyd. On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect-Perception, Logic, and Mathematics. In W. Day and V. J. Krebs,editors, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, pages 314–337. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.Geach, P.T. Mental Acts. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957.Immanuel Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by J.C. Meredith. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1952.John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, 1996.John McDowell. Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following. In S. Holtzman and C. M. Leich, editors, Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule, pages 141–62. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981.Stephen Mulhall. Inheritance and Originality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. New Directions, New York, 2007.David Seligman. Wittgenstein on Seeing Aspects and Experiencing Meanings. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 37(2): 205–17, 1976.http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2107192Timothy Williamson. Vagueness. Routledge, London, 1994.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge, London, 1922.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, Oxford, 3rd edition, 1958.Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Blue and Brown Books. Blackwell, Oxford, 2nd edition, 1969.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Blackwell, Oxford, 1980.Ludwig Wittgenstein. Culture and Value. Blackwell, Oxford, 1998.

Essays on Anscombe's Intention * Edited by ANTON FORD, JENNIFER HORNSBY AND FREDERICK STOUTLAND

Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention is now recognized to be one of the most important works in the philosophy of action of the last century – some would say the most important – but, as Cora Diamond says on the dust jacket of this volume, its significance ‘has been taken for granted rather than genuinely understood’. One of the many merits of this collection of essays is that no one reading it could be left in much doubt of the work’s significance, nor for that matter of the fecundity of Anscombe’s thought: many of the essays here show her ideas and claims opening up new avenues and taking on a life of their own. Take for instance Anscombe’s notion of ‘practical knowledge’, i.e. the knowledge a person has of what he or she is doing. Anscombe saw such knowledge as ungrounded, and also as distinct from ‘contemplative knowledge’ (whose status derives from its conformity with what it is knowledge of). And she took the nature of practical knowledge to be dependent in a certain way on the structured phenomenon of practical reasoning. Four of the ten essays in this book concern themselves directly with this topic, while it figures also in others, and John McDowell’s essay examines the related topic of first-personal knowledge of posture and movement. But what is really notable is the range of novel and imaginative uses to which Anscombe’s ideas are put.

Cora Diamond and the Ethical Imagination

In much of her writing, Cora Diamond stresses the role of the imagination in awakening the sense of our humanity. She subtly unthreads the operations of the ethical imagination in literature, but deplores its absence in philosophy. Borrowing the notion of ‘deflection’ from Cavell, Diamond sees ethical understanding ‘present only in a diminished and distorted way in philosophical argumentation’. She does, however, herself make a philosophical, if idiosyncratic, use of the imagination in her appeal to it for a ‘transitional’ understanding of nonsensical Tractarian remarks. I begin by delineating and endorsing Diamond’s humanistic view of the creative imagination; I then argue against her opportunistic use of the imagination in her interpretation of the Tractatus and her condemnation of philosophical ethics.

Cora Diamond and John Dewey on the Difficulties of Reality: Two Readings of Coetzee’s <I>The Lives of Animals</I>

Cora Diamond and John Dewey on the Difficulties of Reality: Two Readings of Coetzee’s <I>The Lives of Animals</I>

Pierre Hadot as a Reader of Wittgenstein

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation.

A Brilliant Perspective: Diamondian Ethics

AbstractThe aims of this paper are twofold: (i) to bring out how Cora Diamond's essays on ethics represent a shift in perspective when considered against the backdrop of dominant trends in contemporary moral philosophy and thereby (ii) to shed light on and indicate strategies for combating sources of philosophical resistance to her ethical project.

The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir

The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir

The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. By Stephen Mulhall.

In 1997, Nobel Prize-winning novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. Departing from the Lectures’ standard format of philosophical address, Coetzee instead read a work of fiction about an esteemed Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture at a fictional college in the USA. Stephen Mulhall begins The Wounded Animal with the suggestion that Coetzee's Tanner Lectures—which were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and later as part of his 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello—mark ‘a deliberate attempt’ to reopen the perennial ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and literature (p. 1), thus setting the scene for an assessment of both Coetzee's confrontation with philosophy, and subsequent philosophical responses to Coetzee, including those of Peter Singer, Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Mulhall's central claim is that Coetzee's writings about Costello illustrate philosophy's failure to adequately represent the reality it seeks to convey and understand. His argument is twofold. On the one hand, philosophers have failed because of their refusal to engage with the ‘difficulty of reality’ (a phrase gleaned from Diamond), a refusal symptomatic of ‘philosophy's capacity to be deflected from those difficulties precisely because of its characteristic ways of attempting to respond to the claims of reason’ (p. 69). On the other hand, philosophers have failed because reality, in its difficulty, resists such projects of understanding. In this respect, argues Mulhall, philosophy has a great deal to learn from literature's attempts (and in particular Coetzee's attempts) to come to terms with reality's resistance to that very understanding. It is this twofold picture—philosophy's failure to face up to reality and reality's resistance to philosophical understanding—that is the guiding thread of Mulhall's enterprise.

Le perfectionnisme à l’épreuve du pragmatisme

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I first lay out a definition of perfectionism drawing mainly upon the works of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Secondly, I introduce the notion of “expressive rationality” and show how it contributes to expanding the scope of pragmatism beyond its original boundaries. I then proceed to examine pragmatism and perfectionism as competing alternative accounts of moral experience, through a discussion of Coetzee’s novelThe Lives of Animals.In so doing, I intend to show that pragmatism and perfectionism constitute two necessary and irreducible approaches to moral experience, pointing towards two diverging and yet irreducibly joined spheres of moral life.

Reality and Philosophy: Reflections on Cora Diamond's Work

AbstractThe publication of Cora Diamond's important 2002 “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Animal Life) stimulated the writing of this essay. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” attempted to show that there are experiences of reality (recounted especially in literature like John Coetzee's novels and Ted Hughes' poetry) in relation to which philosophical concepts and words encounter difficulty. The experiences resist conceptualization. By examining several of Diamond's earlier writings, I try to show that the difficulty of philosophical conceptualization of reality is due to the fact that reality does not exist external to experience. Reality being internal to experience means that reality contains an unfixed set of possibilities. Being experiential, reality is historical. The historical dimension of reality – such as the reality of animal life suffering – makes the words through we describe this reality too weak, i.e. they are not powerful enough to capture reality, hence the difficulty. Consequently, as I argue, for Diamond, the weakness of words means that words are never complete concepts. The meaning of them seems always still to come since reality seems always to have a surplus of possibilities. I suggest that because of this always still “to come” aspect of the meaning of words, we might characterise Diamond's thought as a messianism.

Philosophy and Poetry

Philosophy certainly has connections with science but it is not itself a science. Nor is it literature. But it is related to literature in a way that excessive emphasis on science can obscure. In this paper I defend the rather old-fashioned view that philosophy is essentially linguistic. I also argue, less conventionally, that there is an unavoidable personal aspect to at least some philosophical problems, and in answering them we must speak for ourselves without being able to count on every other speaker of our language agreeing with us or even understanding what we say. Where the rules of our language are not set we must, so to speak, make them up for ourselves as we go. In this way philosophy requires the kind of linguistic creativity more often associated with poetical kinds of literature. Drawing on the work of Cora Diamond and Alice Crary, I argue that philosophy should be regarded as, not identical with, but continuous with poetry.

Emersonian Moral Perfectionism

Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism is not a compete theory of moral philosophy alongside utilitarianism or deontology; it seeks to get a grip of a dimension in any moral thinking, less of a hierarchy of what to value most in life and more a sketch on how we come to value anything in the first place. Emersonian perfectionism tries to understand what it means to be a moral subject, an authentic self, and to do this it cannot stay solely within the conventional sub-disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. First and foremost, Cavell intends his outlook as a way of discovering the philosophical uniqueness of Emersonian thought; he asks us to take very seriously what Emerson has to say on the self and its coming to itself. But such themes are never confined within the narrow framework of a particular author, essayist or a poet, and Cavell traces related topics in works of art as diverse as Ibsen’s Doll House and the poetry of Whitman, philosophers as seemingly distant as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. While Cavell is oftentimes suggestive rather than elaborate on the relevance of Wittgenstein and Heidegger for his version of moral perfectionism, a critical reader ought to spell out the senses in which the two thinkers are essential to the perfectionist project. In brief, neither one of them had much to say on ethics by way of explicit commentary, yet both of them have given rise to a host of reasonable studies in ethics, following them. Thus philosophers like Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch have made their name drafting a new kind of ethics, sometimes bluntly dubbed Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and authors such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Luc-Nancy have done the same in the Heideggerian footsteps, drawing attention to his “originary ethics.” The key issue regarding the aforementioned exemplars in moral philosophy, and arguably Emersonian ethics, is that they speak to ethical issues without explicitly addressing ethics; they touch on something crucial to our ethical conduct without laying out ethical norms. They are not so much interested in the normativity of ethics in the first place. They seem to grasp that ethics has to do with something more fundamental, perhaps something like an original encounter with the being of the world, a genuine attentiveness to the particularity of our experience, rendering ethics possible in the first place. Such an outlook on morality may not be unambiguously called ethics, at least not as something separate from epistemology and ontology, yet its affinities with contemporary moral philosophy are wide-ranging, in particular, with the work of Iris Murdoch.

The Difficulty of Moral Perfectionism

In this paper I want to consider a kind of inexpressiveness that can characterize our moral experience. The acknowledgement of the possibility of failure in trying to word the world – to find adequate means of expression for our condition – deeply informs Cora Diamond’s conception of language and moral thought as well as her philosophical method. In particular, in her paper The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy Diamond is concerned with a resistance by reality to one’s ordinary modes of thinking and talking, the feeling of a mismatch between concepts and experience in which it is the nature of experience itself that deprives one of the words suitable to contain it. In this paper I want to show how a particular kind of moral conflict can be perspicuously described as a difficulty of reality. This conflict occurs when we lose the ability to conceive the moral world we inhabit as ours, when, that is, our self-conceptions clash with the requirements of morality and we find ourselves in the position of not being able to say what “morality” means for us anymore. Stanley Cavell speaks in this vicinity of the possibility of repudiating morality when it threatens our integrity. This distance between the subject and the world, the self and morality, which, in Cavell’s account of perfectionism, is a precondition for the development of an authentic moral perspective, is nonetheless neglected by metathical analyses in which the prominent occurrences of ethical disagreements pertain principally to the correct application of evaluative terms. I sketch Cavell’s analysis of disagreement in the light of his discussion of moral rationality. Then I connect the topic with Diamond’s notion of the “difficulty of reality,” developing the link between Diamonds and Cavell’s thought by using an example taken from Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road. My aim will be twofold: the focus on Cavell’s conception of moral rationality, on the one hand, is intended to show how the traditional meta-ethical debate about disagreement is deflected in that it cannot acknowledge this kind of conflict; on the other hand, to speak of a difficulty of reality in the context of a perfectionist account of moral life is a way to give content to the idea of morality as “limited,” a way of understanding morality as of human origin.

Wittgenstein and Internal Relations

Abstract: Interpretations of the Tractatus divide into what might be called a metaphysical and an anti‐metaphysical approach to the work. The central issue between the two interpretative approaches has generally been characterised in terms of the question whether the Tractatus is committed to the idea of ‘things’ that cannot be said in language, and thus to the idea of a distinctive kind of nonsense: nonsense that is an attempt to say what can only be shown. In this paper, I look at this dispute from a different perspective, by focusing on the treatment of the concept of internal relations. By reference to the work of Peter Hacker, Hidé Ishiguro and Cora Diamond, I show how this concept is understood quite differently in each of the two interpretative traditions. I focus particularly on how Wittgenstein's idea of the ‘internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world’ (Tractatus 4.014) might be understood within the two interpretative approaches. I offer some reasons in support of the anti‐metaphysical treatment of the concept.

Learning Our Concepts

Richard Stanley Peters appreciates the centrality of concepts for everyday life, however, he fails to recognize their pedagogical dimension. He distinguishes concepts employed at the first-order (our ordinary language-use) from second-order conceptual clarification (conducted exclusively by academically trained philosophers). This distinction serves to elevate the discipline of philosophy at the expense of our ordinary language-use. I revisit this distinction and argue that our first-order use of concepts encompasses second-order concern. Individuals learn and teach concepts as they use them. Conceptual understanding is an obligation that all individuals, and not just academically trained philosophers, must fulfil. I conclude that the role of philosophy in education is to provide a conversational context for the pedagogical dimension of concepts. I draw upon the philosophies of Cora Diamond, Stephen Mulhall, Iris Murdoch and Rush Rhees.