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I'm not up on current PhD philosopher's tastes, and I'm biased since I'm a major fan of Wittgenstein, but, assuming you don't have a biased sample, I'd say this phenomenon is explainable through some of the Frankfurt School's theorizing on specialization, the professionalism of philosophy, and the general bureaucratic turn of society. Personally, I like to view philosophy and academic philosophy as two distinct things. The former is represented best by the famous philosophers, many of whom would never make it past a peer review, e.g. Wittgenstein himself, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille, Adorno, even Foucault to an extent, etc.--I think the reason for this is that all of these famous, epoch shaping philosophers have a certain mysticism or poeticism about them--their work doesn't really hold up to the standards of academies, since these are institutions with very specific mechanisms and rules. All the great philosophers have a certain creativity and ingenuity to them that defies the confines of convention and reason. Wittgenstein is in many respects a key player in shaping our modern though on logic, yet he was also an undeniable mystic who went so far as to say certain things escape representation and codification as formalized knowledge altogether, which is not amenable to the motives of academies--producing formalized knowledge that they can sell. I say this, again, as someone who entirely lacks context but who can imagine certain structural tendencies that would disfavor a philosopher like Wittgenstein. Academic philosophy is, in my opinion, quite a different beast that's focused on solving very specialized and particular abstract problems deemed to be foundational, meta, or novel enough to escape analysis in the fields of application they'd otherwise belong to (the foundations of mathematics, of great concern to Wittgenstein and Turning as this post illustrates, is a good example of such a topic--it's too meta to be the concern of mathematics proper, too narrow to be the concern of a philosopher in the classical or "true" sense, who is supposed to concern herself with the broad problems of existence (like Wittgenstein points out, the living (assuming to philosophize still means to theorize on what it means to live a good life don't really need to concern themselves with such issues), so it falls to specialized academics). |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistic_abstraction