Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was a Russian conservative philosopher, considered by her followers to be the greatest philosopher of all time, and by ignorant Marxists to be a fool. Other contenders for the title of greatest conservative philosopher are Kant and Aristotle. Rand believed she had rediscovered Aristotle after centuries of neglect (she was apparently ignorant of the whole of mediaeval scholastic philosophy), and conservative science fiction author Norman Spinrad wrote The World of Null-A, imagining a nightmare scenario in which Rand had not rediscovered Aristotle. Rand's nickname was "Avida Dollars", because (contrary to Christian morality) she believed that making money for yourself was the supreme good. This led her to reject Kant's categorical imperative, opposing it on the grounds that Aristotelian logic made synthetic a priori statements meaningless. Rand called her philosophy "objectivism", because she didn't know the name was already taken for another philosophical concept.