Cora Diamond Research Articles

"They practice their trades in different worlds": Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy

"They practice their trades in different worlds"Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy Toril Moi (bio) The capacity for understanding is the same as the capacity for misunderstanding. —Stanley Cavell Introduction I moved to the United States in August 1989. Before I had unpacked my boxes, Ralph Cohen invited me to give a talk at the brand new Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change. Quick off the mark, passionately interested in new people and new ideas, with an unmatched knowledge of what everybody in the world was working on, Ralph was the ideal director of the Center. But he was not alone: Libby Cohen's passion and enthusiasm were as vital to the Center's generous atmosphere as Ralph's intellectual open-mindedness. I am grateful to them for inviting me back so often. Their kindness and hospitality made me feel more at home in the United States. My first talk at the Center was about feminism and the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which Ralph published in New Literary History.1 When the journal arrived in the mail, I discovered that my essay was placed right after Cora Diamond's "Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things," a discussion of the feminist claim that "women have distinctive modes of knowledge."2 Her paper was a revelation: here was an immensely powerful way of thinking about questions that really mattered to me. Where did this voice, this style come from? From Ludwig Wittgenstein, it appeared: I clearly had much to learn. In the early 1990s, I was already disenchanted with the increasingly predictable and dogmatic arguments generated by the newly hegemonic poststructuralist theory. My interest in Bourdieu and in the decidedly nonpoststructuralist Simone de Beauvoir was a symptom of [End Page 801] that disenchantment.3 Yet neither Bourdieu nor Beauvoir were theorists of language; only Wittgenstein held out the promise of a serious alternative to the poststructuralist vision. I spent the rest of the 1990s immersing myself in the Wittgensteinian tradition, and trying to put it to use in feminist theory and in literary criticism.4 The present essay, written to mark the end of Ralph's editorship of New Literary History, can be read as an account of the intellectual journey inspired in part by his editorial vision. In my early attempts to educate myself in Wittgensteinian thought, I came across the 1988 issue of New Literary History devoted to "Wittgenstein and Literary Theory" (vol. 19, no. 2). By devoting an issue to the relationship between deconstruction and Wittgenstein at such an early date, Ralph demonstrated his usual prescience, as well as his conviction that theory and philosophy are fundamental parts of literary scholarship. The issue focused on Jacques Derrida and Wittgenstein. In 1988, ordinary language philosophy was not yet a significant term, and the name Stanley Cavell was barely mentioned.5 Today, Cavell's towering importance must be acknowledged. As I use the term, "ordinary language philosophy" means the philosophical tradition after Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin as established and extended in Cavell's work.6 Poststructuralism is harder to define.7 I use the term about theories and philosophies that build on Ferdinand de Saussure's vision of language, alone or in combination with continental philosophy. Structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction are names for different strands of this post-Saussurean tradition. "Theory" or "French theory" are other names for the same phenomenon. Thinkers within each tradition are quite different from one another, yet not in ways that make it difficult to decide which tradition to place them in. A generation ago poststructuralism was a firebrand stirring up the humanities. Today, most humanities scholars outside philosophy departments have been trained in some form of poststructuralism. The poststructuralist understanding of language, meaning, and interpretation has become the unspoken doxa of the humanities. It is no coincidence that almost all the books on Cavell that have appeared since 1989 have been written by philosophers and not by literary critics.8 This situation makes the concerns of ordinary language philosophy hard to grasp. Over the years I have found that attempts to discuss ordinary language philosophy often fail because my post-Saussurean interlocutors and I begin with startlingly different assumptions about fundamental...

“Of All Nonsensical Things”: Performance and Animal Life

And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse! Not the boy, but the horse, and what it might be trying to do.—Peter Shaffer, EquusA “zoontology” is currently uncovering the productive difficulty that animals bring to philosophy. in essays in a volume by leading philosophers entitled Philosophy and Animal Life, the contours of the challenge that animals pose to philosophy emerge from discussion of, among other texts, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, where both rational argumentation and poetic invention are (in Cora Diamond's inspired borrowing from Ted Hughes) “shouldered out”2 by the impossibility of comprehending and conveying everything that animal lives challenge us to recognize about our human selves. A long-standing response to that impossibility has been simply to declare the subject irrelevant or even—as Peter Shaffer's unhappy protagonist in Equus says—“nonsensical” (21). As that play glosses the role of animality in psychoanalysis, to put the horse before the boy is to violate the anthropocentric grammar of the normal. A similar assumption of animal irrelevance characterizes public culture, camouflaged by such ubiquitous and unexamined “animal-loving” practices as keeping pets and watching wildlife films.

Food for thought: resourcing moral education

J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is an overtly philosophical novel, at the heart of which are questions concerning the relation of human beings to animals and the discussion of animal rights. The nature of its subject matter and the prominence it gives to dialogue, sometimes of an almost Platonic kind, make it a rich potential resource for moral education. This article begins by imagining a course based on extracts from the novel, intended for teenage students or older people. It goes on to make suggestions for further reading. There is now a rich secondary literature that has developed in response to central elements in Coetzee's text, involving the work of Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Cary Wolfe, and Ian Hacking, amongst others. This literature raises questions about the nature of moral philosophy, and it has implications for moral education.

Beasts, Beliefs, Intentions, Norms

“Terms that have histories cannot be defined.” – Nietzsche“[T]he reality to which we were attending seemed to resist our thinking it.” – Cora Diamond[1] Much has been learned in recent decades about the behaviour and abilities of many species of non-human animals. Increasingly many who reflect on the abilities of languageless animals are uncomfortable with a once prevalent dichotomy of either assigning these abilities to the realm of mere (usually “associative”) mechanism or granting such creatures full rationality and more or less the entire range of abilities that involves. This has lead to no little reflection and debate regarding how to proceed in studying animal “cognition,” and about what counts as adequately or accurately explaining animal behaviour. I cautiously hope herein to contribute to the clarity of what is already a discussion too rich and complex to do any justice to here. Little of what I say will be original, but the particular way of approaching the issues herein may shed some light on why certain issues have endured.

Philosophy and Animal Studies: Calarco, Castricano, and Diamond

AbstractRecently, animal studies has started to gain popularity. This interdisciplinary field investigates the human-animal relationship from different perspectives, including philosophy, cultural studies, and biology. In 2008, at least three books explored themes related to animal studies: Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal; Jodey Castricano (Ed.), Animal Subjects: An Ethics Reader in a Posthuman World; and Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, et al. (Eds.) Philosophy and Animal Life. Each volume approaches animal studies from a different viewpoint (Continental philosophy, interdisciplinary, and Wittgensteinian), but they also share many themes. This review paper discusses the differences and similarities between the volumes and highlights the directions in which animal studies is developing. It is argued that an emphasis on "direct" perception or experience of animality and heterogeneity, and an exploration of otherness, are elements that all these books share, and that are relevant to animal studies.

Educating the Heart: Realism, Reason, and the Novel

fourteen-chapter book. Mulhall borrows idea of a difficulty of from his fellow philosopher Cora Diamond, who uses it to designate experiences in which something in reality seems hard or impossible or agonizing to get one's mind around (70), or in Mulhall's formulation, the possibility of experiencing something that is perfectly everyday as constitutively enigmatic (92). Both philosophers adopt a Wittgensteinian view that in Western philosophy, an imperialism of reason with respect to real (116) systematically deflects such difficulties, and they link this tendency to Plato's founding repudiation of literature as register of emotion, immanence, and concreteness as against philosophy's defining commitment to intellect, transcendence, and universality. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy instead tries to delineate vital areas of common concern between literature and philosophy. Specifically, book suggests how post-Wittgensteinian philosophy and contemporary novelistic realism can in effect perform limitations of

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond - Alice Crary

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond - Alice Crary

Wittgenstein, Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically‐ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically‐ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing.

Eating Meat and Reading Diamond

Here is a very common philosophical opinion: being human plays no important role in moral thinking. Call this the anti-humanist thesis. I argue that a thirty-year old paper by Cora Diamond, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People' (‘EMEP') can help us to see that the anti-humanist thesis is false. Philosophical Papers Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 157-175

Wittgenstein, Contextualism, and Nonsense

What nonsense might be, and whatWittgenstein thought that nonsense might be, are two of the central questions in the current debate between those-such as Cora Diamond, James Conant and Michael Kremer-who favour a approach to Wittgenstein's work, and those-such as P. M. S. Hacker and Hans-Johann Glock-who instead favour a more approach. What answer we give to these questions will determine the nature and force of his criticisms of traditional philosophy, and so the very shape Wittgenstein's work has for us, as well as, to some extent, what the lesson of the Tractatus might be. My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed defence of the austere view of nonsense, that lies at the heart of the resolute approach, against a range of influential criticisms developed by Hans-Johann Glock and which focus on Wittgenstein's contextualism. In so doing, I hope also to shed some light on the kind of view the austere view is, as well as how it might relate to certain other crucial aspects of Wittgenstein's thought.

Elucidation, Meta-Philosophy, and Hacker’s Use of “External Evidence”

In his paper, Was He Trying to Whistle It, P. M. S. Hacker argues that the weight of what he terms the and evidence shows that the kind of interpretation of the Tractatus put forth by Cora Diamond is wrong. The internal evidence is the Tractatus itself, while the external evidence consists of some of Wittgenstein's other philosophical writings, letters, and records of his discussions about the book. This paper critically examines the way Hacker uses some of the external evidence in building his case against Diamond and those sympathetic to her approach to the Tractatus. The main goal is not so much to defend the views that Hacker wants to attack, but to argue that given the nature of those views, the manner in which he attempts to use certain pieces of evidence against them is seriously misguided.

Derrida's Cat (Who Am I?)

AbstractWhat is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where “the question who?” leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer.

Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy

In what follows, I want to suggest that a good deal of confusion about studies has stemmed from our inability to locate question properly.1 More specifically, if philosophical work that takes moral status of non-human animals seriously is, in some obvious sense, posthumanist (i.e., challenging ontological and ethical divide between humans and non-humans that is a linchpin of philosophical humanism), such work may still be quite humanist on an internal theoretical and methodological level that recontains and even undermines an otherwise admirable philosophical project. My aim here is to map a kind of philosophical or theoretical spectrum that moves from humanist approaches to posthumanism (or anti-anthropocentrism) to posthumanist approaches to posthumanism, moving from a cluster that includes Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian capabilities approach, Peter Singer's utilitarianism, and Tom Regan's post-Kantian animal rights philosophy at one end, through post-Wittgensteinian work of philosopher Cora Diamond (itself inflected by Stanley Cavell's writings on philosophical skepticism), to, finally, later work of Jacques Derrida on the question of animal. My point will not be to pursue a kind of more-posthumanist-than-thou sweepstakes, but rather to try to bring out how very admirable impulses behind any variety of philosophy that challenges anthropocentrism and speciesism (impulses that I respect wherever they may be found) demand a certain reconfiguration of what philosophy (or theory) is and how it can (and cannot) respond to challenge that all of these figures want to engage: challenge of sharing planet with non-human subjects. Such differences should not obscure a remarkable fact with which I'd like to begin: that figures as diverse as Nussbaum, Diamond, and Derrida all set out from same starting point that anchors our ethical response to non-human animals: namely, how our shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude makes us, as Diamond will put it, fellow creatures in ways that subsume more traditional markers of ethical consideration, such as capacity for reason, ability to enter into

Reading Cavell (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Cavell Emily Budick Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh , eds. Reading Cavell. London: Routledge. 2006. x + 262 pp. In their introduction to Reading Cavell, Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh claim as the volume's "principle of unity" "the role within Cavell's thought of the view or, in Cavell's terms, the 'vision' of language" (which he derives from Wittgenstein) according to which the "language and concepts we use are invariably 'ours' in the sense that they reflect human interests." "Our modes of thought and speech," they go on to explain, "express our shared humanity" or what Cavell calls our "attunement in our criteria" (1). Although each of the eleven essays in the volume expresses the unique, individual, and often brilliant vision of each of their authors, they do tend to coalesce around this distinctive feature of Cavell's thought: what we might designate, not so much ordinary language philosophy as a philosophy of the ordinarily (and extraordinarily) human. The first three essays deal with the ordinary language philosophy out of which Cavell's other interests can be understood to evolve. Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein entitled "The Wittgensteinian Event" already exhibits Cavell's language-oriented, readerly approach to philosophy: his "reading" of Wittgenstein's text, he tells us, "is guided by the idea of taking it not alone as an object of interpretation but at the same time as a means of interpretation" (10). "Reading" the text (to invoke the title of this volume) is for Cavell the activity of philosophy, cultural criticism, and ordinary human exchange. The eventfulness of language, its performativity — how we do things with words — also governs the thinking of Stephen Mulhall and Alice Crary in their two essays. Mulhall's "Suffering a sea-change" is itself a Cavellian reading of Austin, not only in that it evokes those dimensions of Austin's thought important to Cavell, which Cavell then supplements or transforms, but also in the sense that it takes seriously the hesitations and recursions expressed in Austin's text, which constitute moments of its own self-transformation. Self-transformation, albeit as moral growth, is also the focus of Crary's essay on Austin. Crary takes up "Cavell's claim that Austin provides support for a species of 'moral perfectionism'" (42) in order to draw out the "implications" of Austin for "ethics — implications connected to the fact that the conception of language-world correspondence that it brings into question determines the problem-space within which theories of moral judgment are for the most part developed and debated" (43). "Part of what is disappointing about existing discussions of Austin's view of language in relation to ethics," writes Crary, "is . . . that they overlook the sense in which his view equips us to acknowledge the possibility of simultaneously [End Page 309] emotional and cognitive forms of moral growth" (59–60). Like the idea of self-transformation in Mulhall's essay, the idea of "perfectionism" (not perfectibility) and "growth" here constitute Cavellian markers of the dynamics of interrogation, interaction, and self-implication, which for him define "reading" (or thinking) as the project of philosophy. To quote Nancy Bauer concerning the figure that concerns all of these first four essays: "Austin's goal is not to . . . propound some counter-theory [of language]." Rather, he is "suggesting that doing philosophy . . . does not require that we be able to pin down the semantics of natural language in advance of what Wittgenstein . . . calls 'looking and seeing'" (69). For Bauer the misapplication of Austin to the discussion concerning pornography results in the evasion of "an honest accounting of our investments, both positive and negative, in the phenomenon of pornography." And she concludes: "the example Austin sets gives us reason to imagine that we will feel at least as much exhilaration as despair or shame when we recognize the depth of our own implication in what our words — and, I am suggesting, our pictures — see and do" (91–92). It is from this same position of self-investment and self-implication that Cora Diamond situates her reading of J. M. Coetzee's Lives of Animals, which turns out to be nothing less than an investigation of the "vulnerability" of that...

The ethical residue of language in Levinas and early Wittgenstein

Using the later Levinas as a point of departure, this article tries to provide an account of the ethics of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Although there has not been written much on this topic, there seems to be an increasing awareness among philosophers that there are interesting points of convergence between Levinas and the early Wittgenstein. In contrast to most (if not all) other accounts of the relation, however, this article argues that the truly significant convergence emerges only when one abandons the received interpretation of the early Wittgenstein, and instead opts for something more akin to the ‘new Wittgenstein’ interpretation introduced by Cora Diamond and James Conant, among others. On the received interpretation, Wittgenstein places ethics in a realm of ineffable being and truth, and thus remains within what Levinas calls ontology. But on Conant's and Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein, there really are no profound ethical truths that we cannot state, but only ‘show’; all the sentences of the Tractatus that appear to claim otherwise are ultimately completely nonsensical. This article argues that the Tractatus has an ‘ethical point’ in a quite Levinasian sense, precisely because of the way it unveils its sentences as utterly nonsensical; for this can be seen as a Wittgensteinian attempt to ‘unsay’ the ‘said’, in order to let the ‘saying’ itself be heard.

Is the Argument from Marginal Cases Obtuse?

Elizabeth Anderson claims that the argument from marginal cases is 'the central argument' behind the claim that nonhuman animals have rights. But she thinks, along with Cora Diamond, that the argument is 'obtuse'. Two different meanings could be intended here: that the argument from marginal cases is too blunt or dull to dissect the reasons why it makes sense to say that nonhuman animals have rights or that the argument from marginal cases is insensitive regarding nonrational human beings (the marginal cases of humanity). The purpose of the present article is to argue that, despite Anderson's and Diamond's nuanced and perceptive treatments of the argument from marginal cases, this argument is not obtuse in either sense of the term.

An Elucidatory Interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Critique of Daniel D. Hutto's and Marie McGinn's Reading of Tractatus 6.54

Much has been written on the relative merits of different readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. The recent renewal of the debate has almost exclusively been concerned with variants of the ineffabilist (metaphysical) reading of TL‐P – notable such readings have been advanced by Elizabeth Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and H. O. Mounce – and the recently advanced variants of therapeutic (resolute) readings – notable advocates of which are James Conant, Cora Diamond, Juliet Floyd and Michael Kremer. During this debate, there have been a number of writers who have tried to develop a third way, incorporating what they see as insights and avoiding what they see as flaws in both the ineffabilist and resolute readings. The most prominent advocates of these elucidatory readings of TL‐P are Dan Hutto (2003) and Marie McGinn (1999). In this paper we subject Hutto’s and McGinn’s readings of TL‐P to critical scrutiny. We find that in seeking to occupy the middle ground they ultimately find themselves committed to (and in the process commit Wittgenstein to) the very ineffabilism they (and Wittgenstein) are seeking to overcome.

Le plaisir de la lecture Reading the Other Animal

Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.

Knowing (with) Others

Feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science have argued that our efforts to know the world are always situated, accompanied by such things as desires, beliefs, and interests that guide and shape what it is we discover and perhaps even what we can know. If this is the case, how is one to be receptive to that which is outside of the purview of one's current understanding of the world? Some feminists have argued that in order to know more effectively and more broadly we need to make our knowledge communities as diverse as possible so as to insure the greatest possible range of discovery. Others have argued that we need to begin by adopting the perspectives of those marginalized by society. These suggestions of where we ought to begin our inquiry, however, do not adequately guide us in how we ought to proceed. In both cases (beginning with diverse communities or focusing on the experiences of those marginalized), it is critical that we know and understand others as a condition for broadening the range of our sources of knowledge. Knowing others is a crucial yet often neglected epistemological problem. In this paper I begin by examining some problems that can arise with how we understand others. Drawing on the work of Cora Diamond, I suggest some possibilities that may help us with the problems sketched in the first part. Finally I argue that developing the virtue of care is critical if we are to further our possibilities for knowing the world in general.

Ethics and the Tractatus: A Resolute Failure

The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written.