SOURCE: "Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980), University of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 19-36.

Rorty is a noted American philosopher. In the following essay, originally published in 1976, he provides an overview of Wittgenstein's influence on later philosophical movements.

Ever since philosophy became a self-conscious and professionalized discipline, around the time of Kant, philosophers have enjoyed explaining how different their subject is from such merely "first-intentional" matters as science, art, and religion. Philosophers are forever claiming to have discovered methods which are presuppositionless, or perfectly rigorous, or transcendental, or at any rate purer than those of nonphilosophers. (Or, indeed, of any philosophers save themselves and their friends and disciples.) hilosophers who betray this gnostic ideal (Kierkegaard and Dewey, for example) are often discovered not to have been "real philosophers."

Ludwig Wittgenstein began by thinking that he had made philosophy so pure that its...