Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond

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 Cora Diamond and the Uselessness of Argument: Distances in Metaphysics and Ethics Reshef Agam-Segal The Importance of Being Fully Human: Transformation, Contemplation and Ethics Sarah Bachelard How to be somebody else: imaginative identification in ethics and literature Sophie Chappell Different themes of love Christopher Cordner A Brilliant Perspective: Diamondian Ethics Alice Crary The Riddling God Andrew Gleeson Shakespeare, Value and Diamond Simon Haines The asymmetry of truth and the logical role of thinking guides in ethics Oskari Kuusela Difficulties of Reality, Skepticism and Moral Community: Remarks After Diamond on Cavell David Macarthur Comparison or Seeing-As? The Holocaust and Factory Farming Talia Morag Two conceptions of "community": as defined by what it is not, or as defined by what it is Rupert Read Thinking with Animals Duncan Richter Diamond on Realism in Moral Philosophy Craig Taylor