this approach, while they differ on details, are broadly agreed on the following key points: Early and late Wittgenstein subscribed to a ’deflationary’ conception of philosophy, according to which it asks no questions and advances no theses (see, for example, Diamond 1991: 202-3; Conant 1992: 156; Goldfarb 1997: 58). In keeping with this conception, the Tractatas itself contains no philosophical theses or doctrines (Conant 1992: 156; 1993: 216; 1995, 270; Floyd 1998: 87; cf. Diamond 1991: 182). Rather, except for certain ’framing remarks,’ Z which provide instructions for reading the book, the Tractatus contains only strings of plain nonsense — ’plain’ because it is not deep or illuminating nonsense that is imagined somehow to ’gesture at' something that cannot be put into wordsj (Diamond 1991: 181; Conant 1989b: 344-5; Floyd 1998: 98). In reading the Tractatas one is supposed to ’work through"* its nonsense sentences — to struggle to make sense of them — but only in order to experience them ’dissolv[ing] from inside,’ or ’crumbling in upon themselves’ in the attempt (Goldfarb 1997: 66; Conant 1989b: 339; cf. Conant 1989a: 274, fn. 16). By means of this process, which some have described as a ’dialectic’ (e.g., Floyd 1998: 82), the reader is supposed to unmask the disguised nonsense that constitutes the ’body’ of the Tractatas (Conant 1989b: 346; 1992: 159; 1993: 218). Importantly, the nonsense of the Tractatas is not designed, as many ’standard’ readers suppose, to alert us in some indirect way to the capacity of language to show something that cannot be said (cf. Conant 2000: 196). Instead, even Wittgenstein’s remarks about ’showing’ are in the end to be abandoned for nonsense (Conant 1989b: 340-1; 2000: 196; Diamond 1991: 181-2; Ricketts 1996: 93; Putnam 1998: 110; Kremer 2001: 55-6).* Tractarian nonsense nonetheless possesses enough psychological suggestiveness to generate the illusion of sense and, for some advocates of this view, to count as ’ironically self-destructive’ (e.g., Diamond 1991: 198)...