Wittgenstein Workshop: Sullivan & Moore

Peter Sullivan gave a paper entitled 'Synthesizing without Concepts, or Making Sense of Things', and Adrian Moore gave a reply to it entitled 'Reply to Pete'.
Peter's paper is part of an ongoing discussion between him and Adrian on how to place Wittgenstein, early and late, vis a vis the transcendental idealist tradition. In a nutshell, Peter holds that the early Wittgenstein avoids TI but the later does not, whereas Adrian holds something like the reverse. Peter elucidated the debate in terms of whether Wittgenstein wants to convey, via grammatical remarks, the 'limits' of thought or its 'limitations'. Very roughly, limits do not exclude anything that might be appropriate to the domain of which they mark the boundaries, whereas limitations do. Peter thinks we can only intelligibly talk about limits, suggesting that Adrian takes it that there is sense to talk of limitations (but see below). Peter also thinks that Adrian downplays the doctrine of analysis in Wittgenstein's thought and that, properly understood, analysis should always expose apparent limitations as limits. However, Peter holds that the later Wittgenstein has a tendency to present the results of analysis in a way that makes them seem like limitations, in order to reject doctrines like Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. Adrian, on the other hand, hears Wittgenstein's remarks in this area as reminders of limits, rather than limitations.
Peter went on to engage with David Bell's conception of 'intranstive understanding', which is the idea that thought engages with the world on the basis of a non-conceptual synthesis that Adrian calls the 'Feeling of Unity'. Peter argued that there doesn't seem to be a problem to which intransitive understanding is the solution: he argued that such understanding just is the unhalting ease with which thought spontaneously engages the world, rather than a precondition of it. On this point, Adrian conceded that the 'Feeling of Unity' is indeed a form of conceptual synthesis. He also accepted that we should only talk of limits rather than limitations. However, he rejected the idea that the later Wittgenstein slides into talking of limitations: rather the talk is of constitutive limits. For Adrian, elucidating the latter does not invite TI, but does bring to light more than analytic trivialities. Limits are not limitations in the transcendental idealist sense. Yet the particular limits we grasp do count as a form of substantial knowledge: they map the constitutive limits of who we are.