alternatehistory.com

"Let's face it: there are no Nobel prizes in philosophy and there shouldn't be."--Hilary Putnam https://books.google.com/books?id=NsRJCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA39

But suppose there were? Who would some of the winners be? (Probably Putnam himself would be one.) I can see a lot of (mainly Anglophone) analytical philosophers angry about some of the likely Continental (and Third World) winners. Howard Robinson writes in *The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy,* "It would be disingenuous not to say clearly that analytic philosophers, on the whole, think continental philosophy is plain bad philosophy and lacking the basic standards of philosophical argument and even intellectual integrity, at least in some of its most recent forms." https://books.google.com/books?id=qQ-_AQAAQBAJ&pg=PT685 (Robinson sees the rot as beginning not with Derrida or Heidegger or even Hegel, but with Kant.) In particular, if Derrida gets a Nobel, we are likely to see the same kind of protest as when he was awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. ("Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university." http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/varia/Derrida_Letter.htm Not all these protestors, incidentally, were Anglo-Saxon or even analytical philosophers, certainly not in the sense of scorning all modern non-Vienna-school continental philosophy; Barry Smith for example is an expert on Husserl.)

For an argument that there should be such a prize, see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-08/blackford-should-there-be-a-nobel-prize-for-philosophy/6837526

Some philosophers did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in OTL--Bertrand Russell and (though he turned it down) Jean-Paul Sartre. (One could also consider Camus a philosopher.) Russell, Sartre, and Camus of course were all involved with political issues, and one can see some political figures winning the Nobel in Philosophy: Vaclav Havel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Václav_Havel and Leopold Senghor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léopold_Sédar_Senghor and if you consider him "political" John Paul II. And maybe this is how Gandhi, who never got the Nobel Peace Prize in OTL, could get a Nobel after all...
Top