Cora Diamond

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Cora Diamond (born October 30, 1937 in New York ) is an American philosopher .

A group of philosophers who, as they call it, share a resolute reading of Wittgenstein's works, refer to Diamond's work on Ludwig Wittgenstein . The group is thus directed against a standard interpretation .

Another area of ​​interest Diamond is moral philosophy and in turn the dispute about animal rights .

Life

Diamond began teaching philosophy in 1961 at Swansea University . Further stations were Sussex and Aberdeen . From 1971 until her retirement in 2002, she taught at the University of Virginia , most recently as "Kenan Professor" for philosophy. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University, among others .

Diamond was married to Michael Feldman in his first marriage and to the philosopher Anthony Woozley († 2008) in his second marriage. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society .

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Cora Diamond was already known in Wittgenstein research since the mid-1960s through essays on Wittgenstein and Gottlob Frege and as the editor of Wittgenstein's "Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics" when she began in 1984 with the essay Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus suggested a new interpretation of the Tractatus.

Diamond is directed against the then prevailing view that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, although he denies that in philosophy meaningful sentences on metaphysics (or ethics) are possible, but "unspeakable" ( ineffable telling) truths, truths that not by words can be expressed, but "show". Diamond objects, however, that this does not do justice to Wittgenstein, because at the end of the Tractatus it is said that the reader who understands it after climbing the ladder will recognize the sentences of the Tractatus himself as nonsensical and will throw the ladder away. (Tractatus 6.54)

When, for example, the “logical form of reality” is mentioned, then the idea that corresponds to something that we somehow refer to without being able to express it is a “ chickening out ” of Wittgenstein's demands, his sentences to be recognized as nonsensical.

"To chicken out is to pretend to throw away the ladder while standing firmly, or as firmly as one can, on it."

According to Wittgenstein, so Diamond, there are simply no properties of reality that we cannot express, but which do show themselves; instead his view was that the Tractatus language was useful, or even essential for a time, for clarifying philosophical problems, but in the end it was just real, simple nonsense. The sentences do not correspond in any way to unspeakable truths.

A more concrete example that Diamond mentions is the sentence “A is an object”. According to the interpretation directed against Diamond (she explicitly mentions Peter Hacker ) the sentence “A is an object” is a prerequisite for the “ intelligibility ” ( intellegibility ) of ordinary sentences, but putting that into words constitutes a violation of Logical syntax. On the other hand, it proposes to understand Wittgenstein in such a way that the philosophical perspective, from which we see expressible or inexpressible necessities as the basis of reality, or possibilities as objective features of reality, whether expressible or not - that this perspective itself is an illusion created by sentences like “A is an object”. According to Wittgenstein's interpretation, “A is an object” is just as innocently nonsensical as “Socrates is colored”. We are, she says, so sure that we understand what we are trying to say that we see only two options: it can be expressed, or it is not expressible, but Wittgenstein trying to say that there is no there there.

One consequence of her interpretation, which Diamond recognizes, is that she also has to describe Wittgenstein's sentences, which she calls "wonderful", such as that there are only logical necessities (Tractatus 6.37) as "ironic-self-destructive".

Wittgenstein, and that is Diamond's second basic idea, already expressed the idea in the Tractatus, which he deepened in his late philosophy, that there is a connection between misunderstandings about the “truth of logic” and our attachment to a philosophy of doctrines, theses and theories give. Even if she sees differences between Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, the unity of Wittgenstein's philosophy is in the foreground. This view, too, is in contrast to the traditional view, according to which the early and late Wittgenstein represented radically different philosophies. It is true that there were philosophers before who tended to emphasize the similarities, but for Diamond in the early and late Wittgenstein not only the goals and points of criticism, but also the methods are similar.

criticism

The hacker criticized by Diamond accuses her, among other things, of having given the preface and the final part of the Tractatus excessive weight and thereby being methodologically inconsistent.

Diamond believes he can refute another point of criticism. If, according to the question, Wittgenstein did not want to convey in the Tractatus what cannot actually be said, then how is Frank Ramsey's criticism of Wittgenstein to be understood that there is no philosophically "important" nonsense, that what cannot be said, also could not be "whistled"? Ramsey had long conversations with Wittgenstein in 1923 and should most likely have understood the Tractatus. If Wittgenstein did not want to "show" what cannot be "said", why did he not save Ramsey from the misunderstanding?

Diamond calls it a legend that Ramsey's often quoted sentence "But what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either" actually refers to Wittgenstein's handling of the unspeakable. Rather, it is a matter of a comment on the technical proposal to regard general statements as infinite conjunctions. She names AJ Ayer as the key witness , who brought the legend into being but also refuted it.

influence

The interpretation of Wittgenstein, which goes back to Diamond and an early colleague James Ferguson Conant , has gained great weight in Wittgenstein research over the past fifteen years. The advocates of this interpretation are sometimes referred to collectively as " Neuer Wittgenstein ", after a kind of manifesto that was published in 2000. Originally the direction was called “therapeutic” (as opposed to “metaphysical”), sometimes also “transitional”. Meanwhile, the term "resolute reading" (has resolute reading ) enforced.

bibliography

Books

  • Cora Diamond: The Realistic Spirit . Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991 [RS]
  • Alice Crary (Ed.): Wittgenstein and the Moral Life - Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007 [WaML]
  • Cora Diamond: people, animals and concepts. Essays on moral philosophy . Edited and with an afterword by Christoph Ammann and Andreas Hunziker, translated by Joachim Schulte. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-29617-2 .

Essays

  • Cora Diamond: Throwing away the ladder. In: Philosophy (Cambridge University Press) 63, 1988 ( text from Jstor ). Also in [RS].
  • Cora Diamond, James Conant: On reading the Tractatus resolutely: reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan. In: M. Kölbel, B. Weiss (Eds.) The Lasting Significance of Wittgenstein's Philosophy , Routledge, 2004
  • Cora Diamond: We Can't Whistle It Either: Legend and Reality. In: European Journal of Philosophy , “early view” February 19, 2010

Web links

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  1. ↑ Philosophy 63,1988 ( text by Jstor ), also in: Diamond: The Realistic Spirit. MIT Press, 1991 (= [RS])
  2. ↑ Throwing Away the Ladder, [RS] p. 194
  3. ↑ Throwing Away the Ladder, [RS] p. 181
  4. ↑ Throwing Away the Ladder, [RS] p. 197
  5. ↑ Throwing Away the Ladder, [RS] p. 198
  6. ↑ In Germany, Wolfgang Stegmüller was particularly influential, who opposed an early philosophy I with a later philosophy II, which was a "completely new philosophy" . Main currents of contemporary philosophy Volume I. Stuttgart 1978, p. 561
  7. ↑ Diamond himself calls Peter Winch .
  8. ^ Alice Crary Introduction . In: [WaML], p. 7
  9. ↑ Peter Hacker What he trying to whistle it? , P. 104. In: Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies, Oxford, 2001
  10. ↑ FP Ramsey General Propositions and Causality , In: RB Braithwaite (Ed.) The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays . London 1931
  11. ^ "We Can't Whistle It Either: Legend and Reality", p. 16
  12. ↑ Alice Crary, Rupert Read (Ed.) The New Wittgenstein . Routledge, 2000
  13. ^ J. Conant & C. Diamond, On reading the Tractatus resolutely .
personal data
SURNAME Diamond, Cora
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH new York