Scanning the Wikipedia page on Heidegger...yeah, that's not real philosophy.

From Wikipedia:

Within philosophy [Heidegger's work] played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Well-known philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Ahmad Fardid, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.

See, that's not real philosophy. Existentialism, deconstruction, postmodernism? Sartre, Foucault, Derrida?

Real philosophy is Russell and Quine.

I mean to say, look at these quotes from Metcalf's piece:

I saw Heidegger then as one of many thinkers who believe humanity took a wrong turn of thought or action that distorted its true nature. Science takes space and time, the framework of all possible reality, and in studying them as formal entities, disenchants them, destroying them forever as home to belief. What if, Heidegger asked, another more primal way of knowing, one that accords with our status as humans—that is, as the only creatures whose being (what am I? why am I here?) is a question—has been hidden by purely rational or instrumental modes of thinking?

A turn of thought was taken; man repudiated his own essence; and we have lived henceforth as fallen beings. Many thinkers, from Jesus to Blake to the free market utopians, have believed this. Man in his search for mastery is a kind of fool. Many writers, from Marcus Aurelius to Montaigne to Melville, have believed this.

This isn't philosophy. This is Robert Bly or Eckhart Tolle stuff. It's just "I love nature, modern life's a drag, now I'm going to get gratuitously mystical about it." That's Rousseau, not philosophy. If Heidegger was alive today he'd be writing pseudo-spiritual New Age books and appearing on Oprah.

My nomination would be someone people don't normally study as a philosopher: Kurt Godel.

With one stroke - his argument for incompleteness - he destroyed the entire rational basis behind the failed ideologies of the 20th Century. If more people studied Godel and fewer Heidegger, the world would be a much better place.

I think both those nominations are excellent. As for the continentals, let the pseudo-intellectuals waste their time with that heap of garbage.