I tend to think that Rorty's account of the history of philosophy, while written with a broad brush, is basically right. His account, as I understand it, basically goes like this:

Nietzsche, along with Marx, Freud, Bergson, and perhaps also Dilthey on the Continent, and James, Dewey, and (as a late representative of this trend) Whitehead in the Anglophone tradition, thought of philosophy as a blend of naturalism, historicism, and aestheticism -- in their hands, the other-worldly desire for the eternal was being transformed into a this-worldly desire for the future.

But in the early 20th century, the resulting loss of absolutes, of certainty, was seen to be as too heavy a price to pay, and there were two rebellions against the rejection of the quest for certainty: the Husserlian rebellion and the Russellian rebellion. Both Husserl and Russell wanted, in their own ways, to renew the Kantian search for apodictic truth and to give philosophy a special role to play, uncontaminated by anything empirical or natural. Phenomenology and logical empiricism were inspired by the desire to give philosophy a job to do that could continue the project of Plato, Descartes, and Kant.

Since then there have been various responses to the failure of the Husserlian and Russellian fantasies. But I find it striking that, whereas 19th century philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic (and Channel) was both naturalistic and historicist, contemporary philosophy remains divided.

By and large, "Continental" philosophy has become historicist without becoming naturalistic -- Deleuze is and remains an exception -- if one considers him in light of Sartre, Althusser, or even most of Foucault. And conversely, "analytic" philosophy has become naturalistic without becoming historicist -- the most obvious example being Quine, but I think this remains true of contemporary analytic naturalists, such as the Churchlands or Dennett. (Nevertheless, the anti-naturalistic approach remains strong.)

The analytic tradition has recovered naturalism by blurring the distinction between philosophy and science (think Quine); the Continental tradition has recovered historicism by blurring the distinction between philosophy and literature (think Derrida). But only a very few representatives of either the Continental or analytic traditions have seen that all of these distinctions need to be blurred.

At present, I fear, we're still some distance from recovering the insight that Dewey and Nietzsche learned from Hegel and Darwin: there is no historicization without naturalization, or vice-versa.