> On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper?
Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover. Sure, that's an example, but by no means an atypical one. She dismissed nearly everything after Aristotle, usually on superficial grounds. Such wholesale dismissal of the established field, such grandiosity of claims (especially in the face of such shallow thinking) has direct parallels with pseudoscience.
> I would personally say that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies
...for a definition of "philosophy" you have pretty much quoted verbatim from her work, but without admitting that or even acknowledging the existence of alternative perspectives? You do see the problem with that, don't you...?
> Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false.
No. They can't. That's the whole point of pseudoscience - if their claims were verifiable but wrong, it would just be forgotten. But pseudoscientists make unverifiable claims precisely in order to claim that because their claims have not been disproven, they should be given parity.
As for teaching Thales, how does one teach that Socrates was an advance if one does not teach what he was advancing from? Similarly, the Rutherford model of the atom is still mentioned in science classes - by your logic it should be forgotten as pseudoscience, but it wasn't. One cannot teach science without teaching that models are superseded by better models as they are created - that is the very nature of the scientific process. And the reason science and philosophy were commingled until a couple of centuries ago is that it's at the heart of the philosophical process too. One rejects models because one can demonstrate that an alternative model better fits the observable reality; one doesn't superficially reject them without bothering to understand them first because one finds their implications in disagreement with the conclusions one is seeking to prove!
