Cora Diamond (born 1937)^[1] is anAmerican philosopher who works in the areas ofmoral philosophy,animal ethics,political philosophy,philosophy of language,philosophy and literature, and the thought ofLudwig Wittgenstein,Gottlob Frege, andElizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at theUniversity of Virginia.

Diamond received herBachelor of Arts degree fromSwarthmore College in 1957, and herBachelor of Philosophy degree fromSt Hugh's College, Oxford (where her tutor wasPaul Grice,^[2] in 1961. She began a master's in economics inMIT in 1957, but she never finished it, realising, after attending classes withPaul Grice (who was visitingHarvard at the time) and Morton White, that she wanted to pursue her interests in Philosophy. Before she began the BPhil, she spent a year saving money by working atIBM. After her BPhil she taught at theUniversity of Swansea (1961–62),University of Sussex (1962-1963), andUniversity of Aberdeen (1963-1971). In 1969, she spent a year at the University of Virginia on a visiting appointment. In 1971, she moved there and has taught there ever since.^[3] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.^[4]

One of Diamond's most famous articles, "What Nonsense Might Be", criticizes the way that thelogical positivists think about nonsense onFregean grounds (seecategory mistake). Another well-known article, "Eating Meat and Eating People", examines the rhetorical and philosophical nature of contemporary attitudes towardsanimal rights. Diamond's writings on both "early" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus era) and "late" (Philosophical Investigations era) Wittgenstein have made her a leading influence in theNew Wittgensteinian approach advanced byAlice Crary,James F. Conant, and others.

Diamond has published a collection of essays titledThe Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. She is the editor ofWittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939, a collection of lectures assembled from the notes of Wittgenstein's studentsNorman Malcolm,Rush Rhees,Yorick Smythies, and R. G. Bosanquet.

Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (edited byAlice Crary^[5]) features essays by Crary,John McDowell,Martha Nussbaum,Stanley Cavell, andJames F. Conant, among others.

• American philosophy

• Diamond's home page at UVa
• An interview with Diamond from 2000 (pdf)

• 1937 births
• 20th-century American philosophers
• 20th-century American women writers
• Alumni of St Hugh's College, Oxford
• American ethicists
• American political philosophers
• American women philosophers
• Animal ethicists
• Living people
• Philosophers from New York (state)
• American philosophers of language
• Swarthmore College alumni
• University of Virginia faculty
• Wittgensteinian philosophers
• Writers from New York City

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Articles with hCards