Cora Diamond & James Conant

Cora Diamond and James Conant are the two names most closely tied to the "resolute reading" of the Tractatus, the heart of what is often called the New Wittgenstein. Diamond (born 1937) taught at the University of Virginia from 1971 to 2002 and is Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita there. Conant (born 1958), who studied with Stanley Cavell, is Chester D. Tripp Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

What they took from Wittgenstein

Their starting point is one sentence near the end of the Tractatus.

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, daß sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt …

My propositions elucidate in this way: whoever understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical …

Tractatus 6.54

Notice who does the recognising: not someone who understands the propositions, but someone who understands their author. On the traditional reading, the book's sentences are nonsense, yet they still point towards deep truths about logic and the world that can only be shown, not said. In "Throwing away the ladder" (1988) Diamond called this "chickening out". If the sentences really are nonsense, no hidden content is left over. Nonsense is simply nonsense.

What they did with it

On the resolute reading, the Tractatus is a carefully laid trap. You are drawn into the feeling of grasping metaphysical truths, and by working through the book you come to see that those apparent thoughts were no thoughts at all. The preface and the closing remarks form a frame that tells you how to take the rest. The aim of the book is therapeutic, which puts the early Wittgenstein much closer to the later author of the Philosophical Investigations than older accounts allowed.

The approach became widely known through The New Wittgenstein (2000), edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Read. In "On reading the Tractatus resolutely" (2004), Conant and Diamond stressed that "resolute" names a way of reading, a programme, not a finished doctrine. Both have taken the approach further. Diamond's essays in The Realistic Spirit (1991), and her writing on ethics and animals such as "Eating meat and eating people" (1978), ask us to look at moral life without the distortions of theory. Conant has written on the idea of "logically alien" thought, on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and on film.

Where the disagreement lies

Few positions in Wittgenstein studies are argued over as hotly. Critics such as P.M.S. Hacker reply that the Tractatus is full of claims Wittgenstein plainly meant, and that the later Wittgenstein said his first book contained serious mistakes, which would be odd for a book designed to dissolve itself. Resolute readers answer that they accept those mistakes but place them elsewhere, for instance in what the young Wittgenstein took for granted about logical analysis. Resolute readers also differ among themselves about how much of the book survives the climb. For a newcomer, the debate is a useful reminder: the Tractatus does not come with one agreed meaning.