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12/16/2014

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Matt Lister

He leveraged his being categorized as a genius to be in academia without in any way taking responsibility for improving academia or even thinking about how others might continue on his path.

In fact, Wittgenstein feared how others might "continue on his path" when he said (somewhere or other that I can't find right now) that what he feared most was that people would ape him, taking on his form and gestures without learning from them, or thinking about what he was doing. I think he was right to fear this, but he probably didn't fear that it would be quite as literal as this case seemed to have been.

(It's worth noting that Sellars wrote at least one paper in the style of numbered paragraphs, not exactly like the Investigations, but obviously inspired by it. It's not his most memorable work, and the affectation of it clearly distracts from rather than improves the work, I think.)

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Here's a link to my past blogging (and discussions involving me) at: New APPS.

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