rand is not a philosopher i don't think we ever resolved one big problem with the article rand is not a philosopher the article continues to push the pov suggestion that she is indeed a philosopher which is an opinion only supported by her and her followers there is only one professor in all of academia that supports the idea that she is a philosopher and thus the article is pushing an extreme minority view as the truth we are essentially doing the complete opposite of what we are supposed to do with psuedoscience articles in an article about psuedophilosophy the npov warning will remain on this article until we truly resolve this dispute lgagnon a few suggestions for what we should do with this article change the infobox to template infobox writer remove all pov claims that she is a philosopher replace them with something along the lines of rand claimed to be a philosopher do not refer to objectivism as a philosophy a term such as ideology would be more neutral remove categories that refer to her as a philosopher lgagnon also i'd like to point out this line from the article rand viewed herself primarily as a novelist not a philosopher lgagnon response to suggestions there are too many conceptual difficulties with lgagnon's suggestions again we need good grounding not unsourced opinion to begin the distinction between philosophy proper and pseudo philosophy requires a fleshing out of criteria don't conflate anglo american analytic philosophy with the ubiquitous belief system development that preceded it or you can scrub virtually all continental systems endless varieties of existentialism s from the category of philosophy in fact the analytic of north america is merely a method for doing philosophy it eschews systems as such due to the influence of empiricist positivist skepticism going all the way back to david hume recall hume awakened kant at least so kant relayed from dogmatic slumber philosophy has not been the same since further though we speak of belief systems since the decline of the middle ages and the notorious rote of the trivium quadrivium these systems have been increasingly secular and secularized in knowledge and value emphases in that respect objectivism is no less than its equally original equally american conceptual cousin pragmatism indeed lgagnon's very student musings about the exact status of objectivism in this regard remind one of the reception pragmatism suffered and suffers still by comparison to earlier theocentric philosophic systems william james famously claimed that the very first real lecture on philosophy that he ever attended was the one he himself taught ergo ideology would not be a neutral mode of reference with regard to objectivism anyway that loads the controversial objectivism as cult smack into the supposedly neutral explication of the system it utterly distorts the sourcing and external material that is required by wikipedia it loads original opinion research of the most expansive sort it fails to unpack the place of reason in the randian corpus oh incidentally many very many philosophers in the analytic school disdain the continentalists as philosophers they used to refer to them when favourably disposed as philosophes a la that great continental trio of the enlightenment rousseau voltaire montesquieu othertimes analytics would dismiss your average continentalist as a philosoher manque ayn rand did not consider herself primarily a novelist she explicitly addressed the issue of the novelist philosopher distinction and with characteristic disdain sneering at what she perceived to be the implication that one ruled the other out she could not have been more univocal on the symbiotic connection she saw between the two this is very serious indeed aoluwatoyin