Quora answer: What’s so special about philosophers like Kant, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche?
Who said Wittgenstein is all that great. Putting him between Kant and Nietzsche is a sacrilege from the view point of Continental Philosophy, Hegel belongs there. Wittgenstein is just the nihilistic opposite of Heidegger according to Stanley Rosen in Nihilism. My view is that all Western Philosophers are Sophists in Plato’s sense of the word, even Plato with the puppet he manipulates called Socrates on his hand. In the end you cannot distinguish between Socrates and the Sophists which he is at war with. It is ultimately impossible to make a non-nihilistic distinction here because saying they are foreign and take money to talk to you like modern psychotherapists just begs the question. If their ideas seem simple to you I suggest you try Hegel on for size. Hegel who was misplaced in your series. (Cf. Deleuze The Logic of Sense) Hegel understood everything about the Western worldview, and Blake saw it in a Vision. Nietzsche is just cleaning up after the master sculpture has done his work. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are setting on the side lines watching. While Kant is desperately trying to save the paradise of Reason in the Enlightenment which has not broken down into the Terror that Hegel will see as yet. Nietzsche merely sums up and shows us that madness is coming, called the Twentieth Century with Three World Wars, two hot and one cold.