Alice Crary (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond
Crary, Alice, ed. Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007.
Honoring Cora Diamond is an action I approve of, so I was happy to grab this off the new releases shelf at the library. The book probably should have been called Wittgenstein or the Moral Life - most of the essays tackle one or the other - but if you're into this kind of thing I especially recommend Juliet Floyd's subtle analysis of what's at stake in the Tractatus controversies. Hilary Putnam also interjects some considered doubts about the remarks on mathematics and David Finkelstein has a commonsense emendation of the questionable Davidson/Rorty line on animals having no thoughts. (Do not read James Conant's long and annoying parody of Johannes Climacus, which confirms his status as Diamond for Dummies.)
And then I was privileged to encounter the latter part of a long interpretive chain - John McDowell remarking on Stanley Cavell reading Diamond reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello - all of them being fine enough thinkers and writers that meaning accretes rather than attenuates in the process. It's nice when the good people cluster together. The rest was anticlimax.
Honoring Cora Diamond is an action I approve of, so I was happy to grab this off the new releases shelf at the library. The book probably should have been called Wittgenstein or the Moral Life - most of the essays tackle one or the other - but if you're into this kind of thing I especially recommend Juliet Floyd's subtle analysis of what's at stake in the Tractatus controversies. Hilary Putnam also interjects some considered doubts about the remarks on mathematics and David Finkelstein has a commonsense emendation of the questionable Davidson/Rorty line on animals having no thoughts. (Do not read James Conant's long and annoying parody of Johannes Climacus, which confirms his status as Diamond for Dummies.)
And then I was privileged to encounter the latter part of a long interpretive chain - John McDowell remarking on Stanley Cavell reading Diamond reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello - all of them being fine enough thinkers and writers that meaning accretes rather than attenuates in the process. It's nice when the good people cluster together. The rest was anticlimax.
Comments
MacIntyre getting manful with the Greeks sounds like a good time to me - I will have to check it out.
Has anyone read Meredith Williams? She published an interesting-looking book on Wittgenstein's psychology, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
To bring it full circle, Crary presented a paper on Liz Costello's animal rights sections earlier this year, which everyone told me was incoherent.