What makes someone a “philosopher”?

I know a lot of people consider Stefan Molyneux a philosopher and an equally large number of people consider him an idiot. 

I’m pretty sure I can figure out where the line of distinction is between an idiot and one of decent reasoning ability but I’ve never really figured out where the non-philosopher crosses into the realm of philosophers. 

Technically, isn’t anyone who has had a conscious thought pandering in philosophy? And as the saying that I just made up goes, once a philosophizer, always a philosophizer. 

I agree that Molyneux isn’t the greatest philosopher we’ve seen and technically. He supposedly focused his master thesis on the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Hobbes and Locke but his masters was in History. Technically, I’m more of a philosopher than he is, since I actually hold a bona fide, state-certified degree in philosophy. Then again, pretty sure Socrates and Kant and the rest of these “philosophers” didn’t have a degree in philosophy. Armatures. 

We can even take it meta from here and talk about how this blog post itself is nothing more than philosophizing on the philosophy of philosophers. Okay, that one hurt my brain. 

I’ve just always wondered how we make the distinction between philosopher and non-philosopher. Do we consider Ron Paul to be a philosopher? What about Ludwig von Mises? Keynes? On second thought, fuck Keynes. What about Obama, surely he has a new philosophy for what America should be. Is he a philosopher? 

Is there a RateMyPhilosopher.com? It links, therefore it is? 

And can one really be a bad philosopher or is it simply a case of promoting a bad philosophy? Does bad even exist? Can’t one simply be different? Isn’t the only justification or subjective judgement we can rely on self-contained and self-actualized, hence making the opinion (and existence) of others irrelevant? 

Okay, now I’ve gone too far.