Description
This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honour the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit.
The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that pays close attention to actual moral life and experience. Their essays, inspired by Diamond’s work, take up pressing challenges in Anglo-American moral philosophy, including Diamond’s defence of the concept ‘human being’ in ethics, her defence of literature as a source of moral thought that does not require external sanction from philosophy, her challenge to the standard ‘fact/value’ dichotomy, and her exploration of non-argumentative forms of legitimate moral persuasion. There are also essays that apply this framework to new issues such as the nature of love, the connections of ethics to theology, and the implications of Wittgenstein’s thought for political philosophy.
Finally, the book features a new paper by Diamond in which she contests deep-rooted philosophical assumptions about language that severely limit what philosophers see as the possibilities in ethics. Morality in a Realistic Spirit offers a tribute to a great moral philosopher in the best way possible—by taking up the living ideas in her work and taking them in original and interesting directions.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor
- Ethics and Experience
- Cora Diamond and the Uselessness of Argument: Distances in Metaphysics and Ethics
- The Importance of Being Fully Human: Transformation, Contemplation and Ethics
- How to be somebody else: imaginative identification in ethics and literature
- Different themes of love
- A Brilliant Perspective: Diamondian Ethics
- The Riddling God
- Shakespeare, Value and Diamond
- The asymmetry of truth and the logical role of thinking guides in ethics
- Difficulties of Reality, Skepticism and Moral Community: Remarks After Diamond on Cavell
- Comparison or Seeing-As? The Holocaust and Factory Farming
- Two conceptions of "community": as defined by what it is not, or as defined by what it is
- Thinking with Animals
- Diamond on Realism in Moral Philosophy
Cora Diamond
Reshef Agam-Segal
Sarah Bachelard
Sophie Chappell
Christopher Cordner
Alice Crary
Andrew Gleeson
Simon Haines
Oskari Kuusela
David Macarthur
Talia Morag
Rupert Read
Duncan Richter
Craig Taylor
