To go back to the title of this post, I would say that one sign of second-rate philosophy is philosophy that is able to judge other philosophy only according to whether it agrees or disagrees with the explicit propositional content of that philosophy. It would be like me hating Tristan Garcia simply because I’m a vegetarian but Garcia criticizes vegetarianism in Forme et objet.
This is a very big issue for anyone who works in History of Philosophy, one that constantly comes up in one form or another.
