An interesting example of a 'philosopher' who is very popular in a variety of other fields, but is at best almost completely ignored, and at worst regarded as an utter joke, within philosophy itself. There is of course Martha Nussbaum's famous article 'The Professor of Parody', and I'll also quote this from Brian Leiter (who is a somewhat controversial figure himself, and is maybe unduly harsh on English here, but, I think, completely right about Butler):
Whatever the limitations of “analytic” philosophy, it is clearly far preferable to what has befallen humanistic fields like English, which have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world’s bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history. (Surely humanity “celebrities” like Stanley Fish and Judith Butler are fine contemporary examples of “the man of letters who really is nothing but ‘represents’ almost everything, playing and ‘substituting’ for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated.…”) When compared to the sophomoric nonsense that passes for “philosophizing” in the broader academic culture—often in fields like English, Law, Political Science, and sometimes History—one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers.
A good example of Butler's lack of philosophical seriousness is that the supposed philosophical foundation of a good deal of her work is a totally butchered reading of the great J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts. Any halfway decent philosopher would be able to tell you that she has got Austin completely wrong, hence why the field on the whole pays her very little heed, but such critical reflection on the basis of her thought is curiously absent in those other disciplines in which she continues to hold sway.
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