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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."

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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.

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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