I wouldn't know whom to vote for myself. Think of this as asking: which of these folks brings the most disrepute on to our discipline by being associated with it?
UPDATE: Wow! Philosophers really loathe Ayn Rand. With over 300 votes cast, it's 71% for Rand, 24% for Derrida, and 4% for Strauss.
ANOTHER: Tad Brennan (Cornell) writes: "I think the disproportionate turnout for (against!) Rand is just a function of the recent week's news (with republican congressmen reading "Atlas Shrugged", utterly unproductive rich people "threatening" to remove their non-productive selves from the economy
by "going John Galt", etc.). If you had asked this question during the run-up to the Iraq War, when the neo-cons were basking in the Intellectual Seriositude of being the descendants of that brilliant philosopher, Leo Strauss, then the numbers would have tipped the other way. It's just a reflection of what's in the press at the time." Perhaps that's right.
A FINAL UPDATE (MARCH 14): So, with some 1500 votes cast, it's Ayn Rand by a landslide (75% of the vote), following by Derrida (21%), and then Strauss (4%). Of course, it would be nice if the media just stopped referring to any of them as philosophers. For Rand: "novelist" or perhaps "libertarian crank." For Derrida: "literary theorist." For Strauss: "political science professor" or "well-known academic cult leader."
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