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Quote by James Conant

“How does one do justice to what occasions philosophical wonder in us without conferring false sublimity upon it? We said that what occasions Frege’s wonder—the absoluteness of the logical order—seems to him to be such that it cannot possibly be implicated in our dependence upon language: say, in our meaning to assert p in using a proposition to say one thing rather than another, or in our using just these words rather than some others to assert it. The Tractatus (while repudiating Frege’s conception that the nature of logic may in no way be implicated in that of language) still seeks a way to hold onto the idea that in logic it is not we who express, by means of signs, what we want; rather it is the nature of the essentially necessary signs—it is logic—that asserts itself. The later Wittgenstein, as we are about to see, seeks to undo this residual subliming of the logical in the Tractatus, while in no way seeking to dissipate the sense of wonder at the illimitable depth of the logical—(what he later calls) the grammatical—that shows itself in our forms of thought and life.”

Quote by James Conant

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The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

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James Conant

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