Cora Diamond

Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics

From his return to Cambridge in 1929 to his death in 1951, Wittgenstein influenced philosophy almost exclusively through teaching and discussion. These lecture notes indicate what he considered to be salient features of his thinking in this period of his life.

Throwing Away the Ladder

Whether one is reading Wittgensteins Tractatus or his later writings, one must be struck by his insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses; or by his suggestion that it cannot be done, that it is only through some confusion one is in about what one is doing that one could take oneself to be putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses at all. I think that there is almost nothing in Wittgenstein which is of value and which can be grasped if it is pulled away from that view of philosophy. But that view of philosophy is itself something that has to be seen first in the Tractatus if it is to be understood in its later forms, and in the Tractatus it is inseparable from what is central there, the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.

What Nonsense Might Be

There is a natural view of nonsense, which owes what attraction it has to the apparent absence of alternatives. In Frege and Wittgenstein there is a view which goes against the natural one, and the purpose of this paper is to establish that it is a possible view of nonsense.

What if x isn't the number of sheep? Wittgenstein and Thought-Experiments in Ethics

Abstract Wittgensteinian ethics, it may be thought, is committed to detailed examination of realistically described cases, and hence to eschewing the abstract hypothetical cases, many of them quite bizarre, found in much contemporary moral theorizing. I argue that bizarre cases may be helpful in thinking about ethics, and that there is nothing in Wittgensteins approach to philosophy that would go against this. I examine the case of the ring of Gyges from the Republic; and I consider also some contemporary arguments about thought-experiments in philosophy.

What Does a Concept Script Do

Implicit in this program is a threefold philosophical methodology. The task of philosophy is seen as the determination of the objective content of philosophically interesting statements, a critique of their expression in ordinary language, and their translation into an adequate language. It is a methodology which the analytic tradition has endeavored to carry out. It has done so by adopting the outline of Freges program but modifying the details. (Sluga, p. 67)

Rights, Justice and the Retarded

Is proper treatment for the retarded a matter of justice or of charity? — That is the issue, raised by Professor Woozley [8], on which I want to comment, but I shall start at some distance from anything he discusses. There is an idea which can be found in quite a lot of recent writing about the rights of the retarded: the idea that we are finally getting away from the myths and ideologies and irrational fears which distorted our ancestors’ ways of thinking about the mentally retarded. This idea is, for example, expressed by Paul Friedman, well known for his legal work on behalf of the retarded, and by Issam Amary, in a book on the rights of the retarded ([3], p. 16; cf. [6]; [1], pp. 3–4). Amary states that traditionally the retarded have been regarded as outcasts of their societies and as individuals who brought shame to their families; and Friedman says that traditionally the mentally retarded have been viewed as subhuman organisms or as menaces to society or as eternal children or as irreversibly diseased persons. The view that you get then in writers like Amary and Friedman is that while there still are people who think in terms of such stereotypes, we have at least made a beginning at getting away from such false views. We have at least begun to recognize retarded people as our fellow human beings; we have begun to recognize their rights, and to modify and reshape our social institutions to accord them their rights.

Hommage ou Dommage

Collingwood was hardly in danger. In 1939, when he wrote that, Festschrift volumes for British scholars were rare; for philosophers they were virtually non-existent. Whitehead had been given two, but then he had put himself at risk by going to America. Recently things have changed, and it is no longer safe to stay at home: half a dozen such volumes—at least—were published in honour of British philosophers between 1977 and 1980. But are they really a Bad Thing?