Wittgenstein and the Moral Life

Cora Diamond is one of the most imaginative and interesting philosophers working today. She is known particularly for her work on Wittgenstein and in moral philosophy, essays of both kinds appearing in The Realistic Spirit (MIT Press, 1995). Although she has written on early and late Wittgenstein, it is her reading of the Tractatus that has received most attention, a reading that takes seriously what Wittgenstein says at the end of the book (6.54), that the propositions of the book itself are nonsensical, and are to be ‘transcended’. For Diamond, this must include the proposition (4.1212) that ‘what can be shown cannot be said’; there is no ineffable something‐or‐other (‘what can be shown’) to be perceived or intuited, a sort of nonsensical sense which the philosopher may come to grasp. Diamond's interpretation of the Tractatus stirred up a controversy whose heat and persistence has belied Hume's description of philosophical speculations as appearing ‘so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further’ – though Diamond herself has always remained calm

Diamond · Epistemology · Honor · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Proposition · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · Ridiculous · Chemistry · Philosophy · Psychology · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications