ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with Cora Diamond’s question at the end of her essay “Realism and the Realistic Spirit” about what realism, or as she puts it “the realistic sprit,” might involve in moral philosophy. According to Diamond, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s point was not directed simply at F. Ramsey and his empiricism as she outlines it, but was a more general point about realism in philosophy. As Diamond puts it, “a fantasy of what it is for a term to mean something is what leads us to a philosophical fantasy about what we are getting at when we distinguish the real from the chimerical”. Diamond suggests that there is more to this idea of exposure that we can find in John Coetzee’s lectures. The idea of deflection, as Diamond notes, is central to understanding certain philosophical responses to the difficulties of morality that she is concerned with.
