Cora Diamond

Cora Diamond (born 1937) is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.

Education and career

Diamond received her Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1957, and her Bachelor of Philosophy degree from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1961. She began a master's in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957. However, she never finished it, realising, after attending classes at Harvard taught by Paul Grice and Morton White, that she wanted to pursue philosophy. Before she began the BPhil, she spent a year saving money by working at IBM.

Philosophical work

One of Diamond's most famous articles, "What Nonsense Might Be", criticizes, on Fregean grounds, the way that the logical positivists think about nonsense. Another well-known article, "Eating Meat and Eating People", examines the rhetorical and philosophical nature of contemporary attitudes towards animal rights. Diamond's writings on Wittgenstein have made her a leading influence in the New Wittgensteinian approach advanced by Alice Crary, James F. Conant, and others.

Diamond has published a collection of essays titled The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. She is the editor of Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939, a collection of lectures assembled from the notes of Wittgenstein's students Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and R. G. Bosanquet.

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (edited by Alice Crary ) features essays by Crary, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and James F. Conant, among others.

Selected works