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We, as a society, have spent a bit of time discussing whether or not we can despise the man, yet love his art (lookin' at you, Bill Cosby). It's a problematic question. Akin to this debate is the fact that philosophers can have vast, sweeping, (yet often as not unseen) influence on how people view the world around them, regardless of whether or not they took that 101 level philosophy class in community college. So a philosopher's ideas may still spread far and wide even if the philosopher himself is abhorrent. So if a philosopher did something horrible like, oh, I don't know, let's say he wrote down his anti-Semitic views and openly sided with the Nazis. Yeah. let's let that be our hypothetical test case. Well, in the world of academia, in theory it's the ideas that matter, not the person or persons expressing them. So if a racist philosopher's ideas are useful and widely applicable in a number of ways, are they still worth using even if the man who created them was...shall we say...problematic? A better question would be this: if these ideas continue to be useful, how can we ever stop using them, assuming that we ever decide to not use ideas which come from problematic persons (which I don't think we'll ever be able to do).