On the contrary: she developed independently, for example, many of the criticisms that philosophers like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam were beginning to raise against conventionalist theories of reference and necessity - criticisms that in their more familiar form are widely regarded as among academic philosophy’s most significant achievements of the past fifty years. I don’t mean to imply by this latter remark that Rand was a philosophical lightweight, however. I find myself in general agreement both with Doug Rasmussen’s explanation of the reasons for Rand’s enduring and growing popularity, and with his characterization of Rand’s work as on the one hand (contrary to her detractors) inspiring and philosophically insightful at the big-picture level, while on the other hand (contrary to many of her adulators) sometimes careless at the level of “details, counter-examples, and context.” As I’ve written elsewhere, she “imagined (and was encouraged by her followers to imagine) that she had worked out an engineer’s meticulous blueprint when much of what she had done was only an impressionist’s sketch.” And while my views over the years have increasingly diverged from hers in numerous details, the fact that I remain an Aristotelian in philosophy and a libertarian in politics surely bears the impress of her influence. Like many others, I discovered Ayn Rand around the age of 15 her writings were my introduction to the field of philosophy, thereby setting me on the path to my present career.
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