Cora Diamond is an important and illuminating voice in contemporary philosophy, particularly in relation to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as this collection aims to show, the subject of ethics. However, as Maria Balaska, the editor of Diamond on Ethics, makes clear in her introduction, it is somewhat misleading to frame the relationship between Diamond’s thinking and ethics as a discussion concerning some predetermined set of moral concepts with predetermined rules of engagement attached. Diamond shows us, time and again, and from different angles, that we conceptually blind ourselves to the richness of our moral lives if we delimit what pertains to talk on ethics before we even look to see what our moral lives might show us about ethics. As Balaska remarks, “we could say that Diamond’s work bears on ethics as a whole insofar as it aims to clarify what possibilities our forms of life open for us, the complexity of our lives with concepts, what arises as significant therein” (p. 1, original emphasis). This ongoing project is much in line with Wittgenstein’s (2001) remark in the ‘Preface’ of the Tractatus, “[i]t will only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will be nonsense” (p. 4). Diamond shows us, through careful attention to moral language in use, where the limits might be. It is fitting, then, that Diamond’s own contribution to the collection reflects on our relationship with concepts, and on the way that presupposing a concept’s shape before considering it in use can blind us to the role such a concept might play in the complex web of our moral lives. The concept in question here is that of an “openness to the unbidden” (p. 7), and Diamond introduces the notion of the “concept police” to warn us that even well-meaning police “on occasion go after an innocent” (p. 7). She sees Guy Kahane going “after an innocent” in his criticism of Michael Sandel’s conception of an “openness to the unbidden,” and the place such a concept might have in one’s life. While Sandel speaks of the concept in the context of what it might mean in relation to parenthood for the unbidden to be “worth affirming” (p. 8), Kahane argues that if Sandel really were open to the unbidden, then he would be open to everything that is unbidden in life, from weeds in the garden to debilitating diseases. According to Diamond, Kahane does not see the place that an openness to the unbidden might have in a life like Sandel’s because of what he takes to be a “proper understanding” of the concept and of what being open to it would entail (p. 10). Kahane’s claim that Sandel misunderstands a “proper use” of the concept blinds him from what Diamond shows us, the reader, to be a completely recognizable attitude towards an openness to the unbidden. We are invited here to see ourselves in Sandel’s concept of an openness to the unbidden, while Kahane’s “proper understanding” of the concept seems unreachable to us. Thus, in giving up here on a preconceived notion of what an openness to the unbidden as a concept must look like, we allow ourselves to look and see what shape the concept can look like in our moral lives. Following Diamond’s essay, the remainder of the collection is separated into five themes, most of which (expect perhaps the final theme) will be immediately recognizable to readers familiar with Diamond’s work: Concepts, Moral Theory, Animal, Human, and Narcissism. Each theme constitutes two original papers, each of which approaches a designated theme in a unique, yet recognizably “Diamondian” spirit. Beginning with ‘Concepts’, Roger Teichmann reflects on whether confused concepts result from being nonsensical or from having a “special meaning”, while David Cerbone sheds light on the depths to which the concept of “hope” is woven into the fabric of our lives via a reading of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Next, under ‘Moral Theory’, Oskari Kuusela defends Diamond’s view that there is no subject matter specific to ethics against Edward Harcourt’s claim that this in turn denies that moral concepts exist, while Garry L. Hagberg sheds light on the concepts of “adventure” and “improvisation” in our moral lives via a series of examples from music and literature. This is followed by ‘Animal’, where Alice Crary suggests that Leo Tolstoy’s discussion of visiting a slaughterhouse in ‘The First Step’ contains a form of Diamondian thinking in its depiction of an inherently ethical relation between animals and humans, while Ian Ground and Mike Bavidge explore the relationship between Diamond’s picture of moral life and ethological discoveries. Under ‘Human’, Stephen Mulhall considers Craig Taylor’s discussion of the connection between moral judgements and moralism as “a failure to recognize the humanity of the person being judged” (pp. 176-177), while Anniken Greve develops Diamond’s discussion of what a look between human beings can tell us about what is to count as a human being via a re-reading of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. These essays provide a series of fresh perspectives on topics those familiar with Diamond’s writing will feel to some extent at home in. Each essay in its own way sheds light on important aspects of Diamond’s writings on ethics, emphasizing the importance of taking seriously the need to look and see what is there in our moral lives, and to allow questions of the sense we make of moral concepts and our moral lives to be shaped by what we see when we look. This comes out in a particularly interesting way in the final two essays under the perhaps less familiar theme of narcissism. Richard Gipps begins by thinking about narcissism as a “tendency to a wishful fantasy of independence and self-reliance, invulnerability to vicissitude, and insulation from challenge,” and with the aid of Diamond’s notions of the “difficulty of reality” and the significance and character of the role of illusory imaginings in our moral lives, provides us with a “sharpening [of] our reflective understanding of what it means to suffer narcissism” (p. 224). Balaska’s own text then considers the possibility of making sense of thinking for which it seems obvious to say that thought has somehow gone off the rails. Balaska draws on the character of Hadoula (also known as Frankoyannou) from Alexandros Papadiamantis’ The Murderess and her thinking as she carries out a series of grisly murders of children, beginning with her own granddaughter. Balaska shows us that contexts in which reflection upon thinking that has gone “off the rails” or “up in smoke” might help us see the shape of morally detrimental concepts like “narcissism” in our lives. Hadoula “commits a hubristic violation of what we humans mean by death and life, twisting them so that they conform to her will” (p. 265). Nevertheless, Balaska claims, “we as readers can connect to or at some level understand the bearers of [these] thoughts” (p. 266). One understands Hadoula, according to Balaska, when one finds oneself “convinced by Hadoula’s impulses and worries, to find these in oneself” (p. 266). The key point, though, is that we must be willing to be open to seeing such connections if we are to illuminate moral thought. What Balaska shows us is that “openness to otherness is vital for the activity and what Diamond approaches as its guiding role” (p. 265). What both essays on narcissism show us, it might be said, is that it is important for moral reflection that we not only determine what is thought gone off the rails, but how or why such thought twisted itself away from the rails in the first place. Though I have predominantly reflected upon two contributions in the space of this short review, this is not to say that the texts I could only briefly mention here are any less worthy of the same attention and consideration, or that the myriad of connections between Balaska and Diamond’s texts and these other texts have been exhausted in my short remarks. There are many illuminating connections between essays placed under different themes. As Balaska notes, a central trait of Diamond’s approach is that “inquiring into ethics is interwoven with an inquiry into how concepts work, what it is to recognize someone’s humanity, the role that imagination plays in our attempt to understand the world, our shared life with non-human animals” (p. 5). Balaska has done well to present us with a collection of essays by a broad range of thinkers who help develop conversations on ethics and its place in our lives. It might be said that these essays are not designed to tell you what to think about ethics, but may act as a guide in your own thinking about ethics.1