In short
Richard Rorty (1931-2007) named Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey the century's most important philosophers because each gave up the search for foundations. He used the later Wittgenstein's therapy and his view of words as tools to argue that philosophy should stop trying to mirror reality. Critics say he turned a method into a doctrine of his own.
Richard Rorty used Wittgenstein to argue that philosophy should give up its oldest ambition: to mirror reality accurately. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) he named Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century, because each in his later work had abandoned the search for foundations. Rorty (1931-2007) taught at Princeton, Virginia and Stanford, and became the best known American pragmatist of his generation.
What he took from Wittgenstein
Rorty took the later Wittgenstein's therapeutic view of philosophy: many philosophical problems are not deep truths waiting to be found but knots tied by a misleading picture.
Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.
To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Philosophical Investigations §309
The picture Rorty attacked was the mind as a mirror and knowledge as accurate representation, a picture the Tractatus had worked out with great rigour and the later Wittgenstein took apart. He also took the idea that meaning is use: words are tools, and a vocabulary should be judged by what it helps us do, not by whether it copies the world.
What he did with it
Rorty distinguished "systematic" philosophers, who build theories of knowledge, from "edifying" ones, who keep the conversation going and help us out of worn-out vocabularies. Wittgenstein was his model of the second kind. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) he went further: our language, our self and our community are contingent, products of history rather than reflections of a fixed reality, and he appealed explicitly to the Wittgensteinian analogy between vocabularies and tools. His ideal is the "liberal ironist", who holds her deepest commitments while knowing they could have been otherwise.
Where he and Wittgenstein part
Many readers think Rorty turned a method into a doctrine. Wittgenstein did not say that truth is whatever our peers let us get away with. He tried to describe our practices, including checking, proving and correcting, without replacing them with any theory, pragmatist or not. He also took philosophical confusion with a seriousness that sits uneasily with Rorty's relaxed invitation to change the subject. Wittgenstein wanted problems to disappear through clarity; Rorty was often content to let them disappear through boredom.
The contrast shows in Rorty's review of Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, where he found its preoccupation with scepticism unnecessary, while for Cavell the sceptical temptation is part of being human. As the Stanford Encyclopedia and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy note, his readings of other philosophers were often appropriative. Still, few did more to bring Wittgenstein into conversation with Heidegger, Derrida and American pragmatism.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Rorty rank Wittgenstein so highly?
Because in his later work Wittgenstein, like Heidegger and Dewey, gave up the idea that philosophy provides foundations for knowledge. For Rorty this made him a therapeutic, "edifying" thinker rather than a builder of systems.
Is Rorty's Wittgenstein the real Wittgenstein?
Only in part. Most scholars accept the therapeutic side but reject the idea that Wittgenstein was a pragmatist who reduced truth to social agreement or wanted philosophy simply to be dropped.
Sources
wittgenstein.be, “Richard Rorty”, https://wittgenstein.be/en/philosophers/richard-rorty/ (2026-10-20)