Wednesday 7th June | 5 – 6:30pm | St Aidan’s College, Lindisfarne 1 & 2
Cora Diamond
University of Virginia
Cora Diamond is University Professor and Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia. She is the editor of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics and the author of articles and books on Anscombe, Wittgenstein and Frege, philosophy of language, ethics, and philosophy in relation to literature.
Anscombe and Foot on What Has No Sense
I discuss two papers: Anscombe’s “The Reality of the Past” and Foot’s “Utilitarianism and the Virtues”. The papers are quite far apart in subject matter: Anscombe’s is about our mastery of the past tense, and Foot’s is about the attraction that may be exercised on our thought by Utilitarianism. But there is a philosophical concern the papers share: they are both about the inclination we may have to see a kind of sense where we may come to recognize that there is no sense. My aim is to bring out how the two philosophers draw on Wittgenstein in related ways in their treatment of sense and nonsense.