Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond

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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Copyright Contents Introduction 1 Ethics and Experience 2 Cora Diamond and the Uselessness of Argument: Distances in Metaphysics and Ethics 3 The Importance of Being Fully Human: Transformation, Contemplation, and Ethics 4 How to Be Somebody Else: Imaginative Identification in Ethics and Literature 5 Different Themes of Love 6 A Brilliant Perspective: Diamondian Ethics 7 The Riddling God 8 Shakespeare, Value, and Diamond 9 The Asymmetry of Truth and the Logical Role of Thinking Guides in Ethics 10 Difficulties of Reality, Skepticism, and Moral Community: Remarks After Diamond on Cavell 11 Comparison or Seeing-As? The Holocaust and Factory Farming 12 Two Conceptions of “Community”: As Defined by What It Is Not, or as Defined by What It Is 13 Thinking With Animals 14 Diamond on Realism in Moral Philosophy Contributors Index