Overview

This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honour the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit. The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that pays close attention to actual moral life and experience. Their essays, inspired by Diamond’s work, take up pressing challenges in Anglo-American moral philosophy, including Diamond’s defence of the concept ‘human being’ in ethics, her defence of literature as a source of moral thought that does not require external sanction from philosophy, her challenge to the standard ‘fact/value’ dichotomy, and her exploration of non-argumentative forms of legitimate moral persuasion. There are also essays that apply this framework to new issues such as the nature of love, the connections of ethics to theology, and the implications of Wittgenstein’s thought for political philosophy. Finally, the book features a new paper by Diamond in which she contests deep-rooted philosophical assumptions about language that severely limit what philosophers see as the possibilities in ethics. Morality in a Realistic Spirit offers a tribute to a great moral philosopher in the best way possible—by taking up the living ideas in her work and taking them in original and interesting directions.

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9781032177281

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This is a rich collection, containing a great deal of beautiful philosophy . . . The (comparative) unity of themes serves to bring into relief the difference of style and intellectual temperment of the different contributors . . . The beauty comes from the deep reflectiveness of many of the essays, as well as their use of powerful examples. - Lars Hertzberg in Philosophical Investigations

Author Information

Craig Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University. He is the author of Moralism: A Study of a Vice (2012) and Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (2002); a co-editor of Hume and The Enlightenment (2011) and A Sense for Humanity: the Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita (2014). Andrew Gleeson has taught philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, the University of Adelaide, and the Flinders University of South Australia. He works mainly in ethics and philosophy of religion. His book A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil was published in 2012.

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