Cora Diamond
Cora Diamond 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 degree 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 in MIT in 1957, but she never finished it, realising, after attending classes with Paul Grice and Morton White, that she wanted to pursue her interests in Philosophy. Before she began the BPhil, she spent a year saving money by working at IBM. After her BPhil she taught at the University of Swansea, University of Sussex, and University of Aberdeen. In 1969, she spent a year at the University of Virginia on a visiting appointment. In 1971, she moved there and has taught there ever since. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.Philosophical work
One of Diamond's most famous articles, "What Nonsense Might Be", criticizes the way that the logical positivists think about nonsense on Fregean grounds. 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 both "early" and "late" 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 features essays by Crary, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and James F. Conant, among others.