who likes ayn rand's philosophy of objectivism? who doesn't, why?

Question

who likes ayn rand's philosophy? what do you get from it? do you think its a sound theory or unsound? why? thanks

Answer 1

Robert Nozick defended her. Ayn Rand was an author of fiction. She did not have an academic background in philosophy so her arguments often came without context, were fallacious, or failed to address the social discourse of her time. Which doesn't mean all of her ideas were in the end wrong...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nozick

Answer 2

I don't remember it in its totality. Does she treat human kind as an end in our selves for each other. I think she was basically anti superstition/religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Aristotle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Nietzsche

"Nietzsche
In her early life, Rand admired the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and did share "Nietzsche's reverence for human potential and his loathing of Christianity and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant,"[33] but eventually became critical, seeing his philosophy as emphasizing emotion over reason and subjective interpretation of reality over actual reality.[33] There is debate about the extent of the relationship between Rand's views and Nietzsche's, and over what seemed to be an evolution of Rand's view of Nietzsche. Allan Gotthelf, in On Ayn Rand, describes the first edition of We The Living as very sympathetic to Nietzschean ideas. Bjorn Faulkner and Karen Andre, characters from The Night of January 16th, exemplify certain aspects of Nietzsche's views. Ronald Merrill, author of The Ideas of Ayn Rand identified a passage in We the Living that Rand had omitted from the 1959 reprint: "In it, the heroine entertains (though finally rejects) sentiments explicitly attributed to Nietzsche about the justice of sacrificing the weak for the strong."[34] Rand herself denied a close intellectual relationship with Nietzsche and characterized changes in later editions of We the Living as stylistic and grammatical."


"Political and social views
Rand held that the only moral social system is laissez-faire capitalism. Her political views were strongly individualist and hence anti-statist and anti-Communist. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of rational egoism and individualism. Rand, as a champion of rationality, also had a strong opposition to mysticism and religion, which she believed helped foster a crippling culture acting against individual human happiness and success. Rand detested many prominent liberal and conservative politicians of her time, including prominent anti-Communists, such as Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan, Hubert H. Humphrey, and Joseph McCarthy.[40] She opposed US involvement in World War I, World War II,[41] and the Korean War, although she also strongly denounced pacifism: "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Political_and_social_views

She was a political realist, for which I agree with her, but faliled to criticize the communist movement on the failure to identify its own principles.