John Hyman (Oxford), in a quite positive review of Michael Forster’s book Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (Princeton University Press, 2004), makes an observation that is striking for those of us who are not Wittgenstein scholars but occasionally read the literature in that area: after noting that Forster’s book is "lucid, subtle, and intellectual scrupulous," Hyman also observes that it "is unusual in being both sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s ideas and critical of them." (This is, by the way, true of all of Forster’s work that I have read, for example, on Hegel and on Herder. Forster, of course, is best-known for his seminal work on German philosophy from the late 18th- through the 19th-century [e.g., here, here, here, and here], where he is clearly one of the three or four leading scholars working on figures in this period in the Anglophone world.)
I would be curious to hear from readers whether there is other work that fits this bill, i.e., that is "both sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s ideas and critical of them." I’m particularly interested to hear about books or articles in this vein that have been recommended, with success, to graduate students. Thanks.
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