Some thoughts, in no particular order.
Compare two views of philosophy. Philosophy is an attempt to escape the confusions created by language, vs. Philosophy is 'courting truth with a kind of romantic passion' (Mary Astell's characterization of her own philosophical work). Which best characterizes philosophy, i.e., the love of wisdom?
Wittgensteinians are people who think there is only one sort of sophism, the fallacy of the form of the expression, and think that philosophy is just persuading people that they are guilty of it. They are like people who think the moral weakness to which they are most susceptible is the only moral weakness, and think that ethics consists entirely in convincing people they have it.
Their view of philosophy wrecks the history of philosophy. It becomes just a long series of eminent confusions that need to be corrected. But they are bad at showing this. To see the history of philosophy this way you must 1) know they are confused; 2) recognize the right sort of confusion. But when has a Wittgensteinian ever correctly diagnosed the confusion of anyone outside the twentieth century? They always turn out to have misread. If you see the philosophical past as serial confusion, you encourage habits of misreading. They have a little rut around which they go, and they try to force everything into that rut.
How extensive, really, is this confusion-due-to-the-form-of-the-expression? One sees people straightfacedly analyzing the 'grammar' of the phrase 'mental object' as an analogy with 'physical object'. But only they do anything so silly as to treat 'mental object' as a metaphor derived from 'physical object'; one needs to say to them: But this is not how it actually happened, this is not how the phrase actually developed, this is not how this or that thinker actually treats it. And they do this constantly. There is no doubt that this fallacy has happened in the history of philosophy--the medievals were better at spotting it than the moderns. But they have no conception of how one thing is relevant to another. They sometimes manage to do good philosophical work (e.g., Bouwsma on evil deceivers). But they are misguided in thinking that it applies to what they claim to be discussing. They are like people who say, "Aha, he uses the phrase 'hook, line, and sinker'. So he thinks errors are like fishing tackle." To which one responds: It is you who are in error; it is you who are misled by language.
They confuse the opposing of one sophistical refutation (in Aristotle's sense) with the whole of philosophical work. But that does not even cover the whole Sophistical Refutations, much less the whole Organon, much less the whole of philosophical work. How can they honestly think they are covering everything? They take a drop of water for an ocean, a one-night stand for a marriage.
They do not realize that philosophy is less a matter of language than a matter of personal life and the things we find there.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a view that says: everyone is wrong except us. Everyone is confused except us. We have nothing to learn from you except what we can learn from the confusion (which we've already assumed is a confusion).--There is an ethical flaw to this approach. And it means that no real learning occurs; the problems of philosophy get 'solved' off the top of one's head, in an armchair.
In practice the method of Wittgenstein is little more than a rhetorical persuasion to see the matter in a certain way. It is the use of one set of analogies and metaphors to try to make another set of analogies and metaphors look silly. This would make sense if it were only one of the many, many things philosophy does.
Wittgenstein's genius is coming up with cogent particular examples to discuss. But it would be silly to say that only this is genuine philosophical work.
They treat philosophy as though it were--journalism!
The value of Wittgenstein is that he made twentieth-century philosophers begin to understand how silly they were. The problem of Wittgenstein is that he only cleared away a small part of the silliness, but some who follow him think he frees them from everything.
