Richard Rorty – Pragmatism and Contemporary Philosophy (1980)

From the Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980 (1982).

Featuring James, Dewey, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Quine, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, Carnap, Descartes, Kant, Whitehead, Peirce, Gadamer, Bergmann.

'It is the impossible attempt to step outside our skins—the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism—and compare ourselves with something absolute. This Platonic urge to escape from the finitude of one's time and place, the "merely conventional" and contingent aspects of one's life, is responsible for the original Platonic distinction between two kinds of true sentence.'