Thinking about life: Cora Diamond

February 11th, 2012 by admin

Cora Diamond, Phin Upham, Philosophy

Prepared by The Harvard Review of Philosophy and edited by S. Phineas Upham

Cora Diamond has taught and written on Wittgenstein for over thirty years, and her work has exercised a decisive influence on the way Wittgenstein has come to be read by American philosophers.

She has edited Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics” and has written over a dozen articles directly concerning Wittgenstein, the earliest of these (“Secondary Sense”) published in 1966 and, more recently, (“How Old Are These Bones?”) in 1999 and (“How Long is the Standard Meter in Paris?”) 2001.

She is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary scholars of Wittgenstein. But to regard Diamond simply as a scholar of Wittgenstein is to miss the significance of her writings, and to misunderstand the influence of Wittgenstein’s thought in contemporary American philosophy. For what is notable about Diamond’s work is the relative rarity with which she engages in the explication of Wittgenstein’s writings simply for the sake of scholarship. Rather, such explications are closely bound to her arguments about nettlesome problems in contemporary philosophy, even problems, such as animal ethics, of which Wittgenstein seems to have been unaware.

Diamond’s route into professional philosophy bears a strong resemblance to Wittgenstein’s own. Diamond took her undergraduate degree in mathematics, began graduate study in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked as a computer programmer for IBM before going to Oxford to take a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Wittgenstein worked as an engineer before going to Cambridge to take up philosophy.

Visit Phin’s website for more information.

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