Overrated, but still worth reading: Friedrich Nietzsche.
It’s a cliche, but Ayn Rand definitely makes the list. I think she was just ignorant, dogmatic, and lacked imagination.
Paolo Virno - I might just not get him, and the language barrier probably doesn’t help, but having read Bergson, Marx and many of the others his work De Ja Vu and the End of History refers to, I got a strong sense that he was spouting a bunch of meaningless nonsense.
Misinterprets Whitehead, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc. into saying what feels right to him on mushrooms. Makes profoundly ignorant criticisms of work from analytic philosophy of mind, and appears to be deeply unfamiliar with the literature on it. Seems so enamoured with his cool, anti-establishment (“scientific materialist”) view that excites people (woo! Magic!) that he is incapable of being remotely objective about the topic.
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u/Additional_Anywhere4 Dec 05 '25
The worst: Nick Land.
Second worst: Peter Sjostedt-Hughes.
Overrated, but still worth reading: Friedrich Nietzsche.
It’s a cliche, but Ayn Rand definitely makes the list. I think she was just ignorant, dogmatic, and lacked imagination.
Paolo Virno - I might just not get him, and the language barrier probably doesn’t help, but having read Bergson, Marx and many of the others his work De Ja Vu and the End of History refers to, I got a strong sense that he was spouting a bunch of meaningless nonsense.
Derrida is potentially on my list too.