That Mr. Stephens thinks that his opinion matters on the vexing question of a Nobel Prize being awarded to Handke: he ignores the fact that the two most famous/infamous philosophers of the 20th Century, Sartre, a Nobel Prize winner, & Heidegger ( The Black Notebooks, a record of his idée fixe of the Jewish World Conspiracy) are still read, studied, and written about.
Mr. Stephens is an American provincial, but also a committed ideologue, that is, he is the natural inheritor of an etiolated Straussian philosophical mendacity. Strauss re-wrote the philosophical tradition, not as an act of explication, but an act of ideological vandalism! Mr. Stephens is another member of the New York Times’ staff of ersatz public moralists, whose hectoring signals what is acceptable, as defined by the measure of the only thing that matters, the cultivation of  bourgeois political respectability.

Philosophical Apprentice