Craig taylor author biography outline

Morality in a Realistic Spirit

In her paper "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy" (2003), Cora Diamond di... more In her paper "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy" (2003), Cora Diamond discusses experiences and feelings that defy our regular ways of speaking. These are affectively troubling moments where we discover the limits of our characteristic taming of experience by our familiar conceptual tools and our rational capacity. As Diamond puts it, these are "experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability" (2003,(2)(3). We are "exposed" (21) 2 in our limitations-our concepts do not always provide us the grip on reality we think we can and should have. We are exposed in our vulnerability, our lack of control of our experience, our being "flesh and blood" (25), 3 affective creatures that can be overwhelmed by reality. A central example in Diamond's paper is our treatment of animals. We share an affinity with them that is itself difficult to describe but that we experience when we cuddle our companio

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