CORA DIAMOND and JAMES CONANT (hosted by Niklas Forsberg)

Niklas Forsberg, the Head of Research for the Centre for Ethics at the University of Pardubice, hosts Cora Diamond and James Conant for a lengthy discussion following their Truth in Ethics intensive seminar, which took place October 19-21 of 2018.

"[I]t is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge. I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to, ‘Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy’ (or in ‘Nineteenth-century continental philosophy’ or ‘Aesthetics’, as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them."

(Paul Grice, "Reply to Richards” (in Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, eds., Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 64.