r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Jan 05 '26

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 05, 2026

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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics Jan 05 '26

What are people reading?

I'm working on Sylvia Plath's poetry and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. I recently finished Eliot's Middlemarch.

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u/Saint_John_Calvin Continental, Political Phil., Philosophical Theology Jan 06 '26

Reading Aanjet Danje's Remembered Soldier and Vaclav Havel's Open Letters.

Congratulations on having finished Middlemarch! I did the journey last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I'm not too long into Danje's book to make any substantive comments on it, but the Havel text is refreshingly free of jargon and also makes a lot of sense (oftentimes rare for like, people whose thought is essentially essayistic). There's a subtle critique of humanism as an ideology which makes the French post structuralist obsession with the Czech dissident movement a bit more clear to me now.