Ayn Rand
Which is an answer guaranteed to make heads explode on academics or anyone who considers philosophy their profession.
She has a straightforward and logical set of ideas, expressed in straight language, which while not flawless, are more consistent with reality and the nature of humanity than most formal philosophies.
Professional philosophy, in our time, generates volumes of near-incomprehensible theory that, like high-order multidimensional physics, is probably understandable to other professionals, but doesn't have the real-world applications that, say, Newton's Laws do.
Here's something I just pulled at random off a philosopher's website:
A central problem facing a probabilistic approach to the problem of induction is the difficulty of sufficiently constraining prior probabilities so as to yield the conclusion that induction is cogent. The Principle of Indifference, according to which alternatives are equiprobable when one has no grounds for preferring one over another, represents one way of addressing this problem; however, the Principle faces the well-known problem that multiple interpretations of it are possible, leading to incompatible conclusions. In the following, I propose a partial solution to the latter problem, drawing on the notion of explanatory priority. The resulting synthesis of Bayesian and inference-to-bestexplanation approaches affords a principled defense of prior probability distributions that support induction.
Now, this paper isn't sheer nonsense. If you plow through it, sweating bullets the whole time, you can probably get information from it. I got about halfway before I decided it wasn't worth it. But I know academic fog when I see it, and one of my oldest rules of thumb is that if someone has to couch a concept in seventeen layers of horse manure, he's trying to pull something.