system
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human
Why is Ayn Rand looked down upon by the philosophical community?

I noticed that the consensus among philosophy departments in academia.(Similar to how most psychologists look down on Freud or most Economist look down upon Marx.) That Objectivism is a bad philosophy undeserving of a substantives rebuttal. I wonder why this is? Is it mere disagreement on her teleos, or something else?
gpt
I think most philosophers are more likely not to have Rand anywhere on their radar, rather than looking down upon her. Though, when external circumstances put her on the radar, it's probably fair to say she isn't usually received favorably.

But it's not clear why we would expect her to be well and favorably known in the philosophical community in the first place. She didn't pursue an education in philosophy, didn't pursue any teaching positions in philosophy, and didn't pursue scholarly publications in the field. So even at first glance, we wouldn't expect her to be a known and significant quantity in philosophy.

Besides these sorts of considerations, there are some problems, in the first place, with her methodology. When philosophers appraise a piece of writing meant to make a scholarly contribution they, like other academics, are inclined to look for clearly stated theses, being defended by independently appraisable evidence and argument, and situated in relation to the problems facing the field in question. And this isn't what one tends to find in Rand. At the level of methodology, one typically gets the impression of reading an editorial or journal rather than scholarly work. And again we would expect this to place her work outside the scope of the academia simply on methodological considerations.

Besides this, there are issues of substance. For instance, where she discusses other philosophical work, most infamously that of Aristotle and Kant, she gets the details of this work egregiously wrong. And the methodology issue is again significant here: because we don't get citations or references to other scholarship, which might otherwise help us make sense of what is going on, we're confronted with what seems to be off-the-cuff editorializing which fails to make any significant contact with the material it's ostensibly about.

Besides all of these concerns, it's not clear what from her work could count as a significant contribution to our philosophical understanding. Her work is often a source from which many young people first get exposed to a certain strand of conservative economic and political thinking, and she is probably most widely known in this context. But these sorts of ideas have able defenders among philosophers whose work doesn't suffer from the faults Rand's does.

And this is significant, to counter the canard that the academia doesn't like Rand simply because it cannot tolerate fiscally conservative ideas. Philosophers like Nozick and Narveson have much more ably defended such ideas and have never been disregarded the way Rand has. Indeed, significantly, it's often from these very sources that we get the most sustained philosophical criticism of Rand: see Nozick's "On the Randian Argument" and Narveson's "Ayn Rand as Moral and Political Philosopher."

That said, she certainly remains significant as a popular writer, which is far from a negligible accomplishment, and though rather on the fringe there are some philosophers who are constructively interested in her ideas.