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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.
List 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
About the author
Craig Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University. He is the author of Moralism: A Study of a Vice (2012) and Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (2002); a co-editor of Hume and The Enlightenment (2011) and A Sense for Humanity: the Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita (2014).
Andrew Gleeson has taught philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, the University of Adelaide, and the Flinders University of South Australia. He works mainly in ethics and philosophy of religion. His book A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil was published in 2012.
Summary
This book honours the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers. It develops and deepens a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit.
Report
"This is a rich collection, containing a great deal of beautiful philosophy . . . The (comparative) unity of themes serves to bring into relief the difference of style and intellectual temperment of the different contributors . . . The beauty comes from the deep reflectiveness of many of the essays, as well as their use of powerful examples." - Lars Hertzberg in Philosophical Investigations
