Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by? If they can't use it correctly in such a basic case then who can?

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staticman2 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Did the Duke philosophy teachers claim they were using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?

And did all the philosophers at all the other colleges convene and announce they were also using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?

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Dylan16807 7 days ago | parent [-]

> Did the Duke philosophy teachers claim they were using philosophy to determine if someone was raped?

I don't think that matters very much. If there's a strong enough correlation between being a reactive idiot and the department you're in, it makes a bad case for enrolling in that realm of study for educational motives. It's especially bad when the realm of study is directly focused on knowledge, ethics, and logic.

Note the "if" though, I haven't evaluated the parent's claims. I'm just saying it doesn't matter if they said they used philosophy. It reflects on philosophy as a study, at least the style they do there.

How much that affects other colleges is iffier, but it's not zero.

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staticman2 7 days ago | parent [-]

One week ago, if I asked you "how do we determine if modern philosophy is useful?"

Would you have pondered for a little while, then responded, "Find out how many philosophers commented on the Duke rape case of 2006 and what their opinions were, then we'll know."

	▲	Dylan16807 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Never in a million years. But if you said the departments were very disproportionately represented on different sides, I would think the main reasons would be either random cliques or that it shows something about critical thinking skills taught by those professors, or both, and I would be interested to hear more with the idea that I might learn something deeper than gossip.
	▲	username332211 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Often, after you've figured out who's guilty, you'd need to look for more evidence until you find something that the jury can understand and the defense counsel can't easily argue against. I've seen people make arguments against the value of modern academic philosophy based on their experience with professors or with whateversampling of writings they've come across. They usually get nowhere. That's why I wanted to ground this discussion in a specific event.

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Vegenoid 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Which group of people giving modern training in philosophy should we judge the field by?

... all of them? Or rather, the body as a whole. Pointing at one set of faculty at one university 20 years ago and using that as the sole point to say "modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful", is just not useful.