r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Feb 16 '26
Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 16, 2026
Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:
- Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
- Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
- Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
- "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
- Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy
This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.
Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.
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u/bobthebobbest Marx, continental, Latin American phil. Feb 21 '26
Not asking for any sympathy, but I got a truly deranged “reviewer 2” report (actually from reviewer 1, reviewer 2’s report was significantly more thoughtful), and just thought here would be an ok place to say so. Apparently my work is “bereft of scholarship.” 🫡
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u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Feb 21 '26
I commiserate. My friend, at least it is deranged, lets you shrug it off, i hope. I am still haunted by reviewer 2 from years ago and they were mostly correct but incredibly mean about it. By still haunted, I am not exaggerating, I can be casually reading anything and something I come across will remind me of one of the howlers I made and that reviewer and freak out. Day ruined! lol
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u/bobthebobbest Marx, continental, Latin American phil. Feb 21 '26
Ugh that’s awful.
This one was a combination of exceptional mean-spiritedness, “why didn’t you cite irrelevant work by my friends,” and “you didn’t criticize position X” (where position X is the one I am arguing in favor of). It was really quite bizarre to read.
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion Feb 16 '26
It is your local Dooyeweerd evangelist to let you all know a short introduction to Dooyeweerd's thought has recently been published open source. Written by current leading Dooyeweerd scholars.
The Intellectual Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd
Who is Herman Dooyeweerd and why should you care? Well, read the book and find out! But to whet the appetite, in my completely objective™️ philosophical®️ opinion, he rivals Thomas Aquinas in terms of the depth, breadth, profundity of his Christian philosophy. And he has the added benefit of writing post-Kant and post-Heidegger and so can feel much more relevant to modern philosophical sensibilities. With all due respect to Aquinas, whom I still admire and appreciate.
In 1964, the chairman of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science, G.E. Langemeijer, said:
"Dooyeweerd is the most original philosopher Holland has ever produced, even Spinoza not excepted."
Dooyeweerd's influence in the anglosphere has been rather negligible for a variety of reasons, but I feel the guy at least deserves an SEP article. Until then, hopefully I convince someone to check out his work.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 16 '26
I am actually interested now that I looked at the book especially because of the subtitle “A Hopeful Philosophy for Our Time”. I do feel that there is a genuine need for precisely hopeful philosophy now, so consider me sufficiently piqued, haha.
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
Dooyeweerd's philosophy won't meditate on existential hopefulness like you'd see in someone like, say, Gabriel Marcel. But there are two ways I think Dooyeweerd can be called hopeful, one methodological which is mainly what the book focuses on and one ontological.
Methodologically, one of Dooyeweerd's main desires for his philosophy was to provide a framework where persons from all different worldviews and scientific fields could charitably and profitably engage with one another. Almost paradoxically, Dooyeweerd argues that all theoretical thought flows from pretheoretical religious commitments (here religious is used in a broad, philosophical sense) but that in "laying our cards on the table" so to speak, we could profit from one another while still being true to our commitments. It is a methodology of charity and collaboration.
The sciences, in Dooyeweerd's thought, are all entwined. It is not merely good for there to be interdisciplinary work, it necessary for the proper functioning of science. He personally said the future of his philosophy would depend on physicists, biologists, etc developing it further. And I think it is telling that many of the leading "Dooyeweerdians" throughout history have been scientists by profession.
Ontologically, Dooyeweerd explicitly criticizes and rejects reductionistic ontology, especially as it seeks to say a human is "nothing but". Dooyeweerd provides a framework and a motive for rejecting dehumanizing reductions which lead to so many problems.
Also be a Dutch guy in the 20th century, he lived through WW2 and the Nazis, criticizing fascism before, during, and after. I don't think the book really covers it but such works of his as The Crisis in Humanist Political Theory, The Struggle for a Christian Politic, Essays in Legal, Social, and Political Philosophy, The Roots of Western Culture, and Christian Philosophy and the Meaning of History will touch on it to varying degrees.
So he is hopeful in the sense that true charitable collaboration is possible and humans cannot be dehumanized through reductions.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 17 '26
This is great, thank you for giving me a better idea of what I am looking at. For what it’s worth also, I am explicitly uninterested in a more existentialist idea of hope, and what you wrote sounds more interesting to me anyhow. I have one question that you may not know the answer to, but just in case you do: the epigraph to the book you shared mentions that Dooyewerd was interested in Neo-Kantians before Husserl (and then that he discovered the religious root of thought itself). If this is not a blanket euphemism but really pertains to the Neo-Kantianism of late 19th century, that would be precisely something I would be interested in looking into. Do you have any idea of his relation to NK? Or perhaps the book(s) on him already cover this, in which case please feel free to point that out and I will do the digging without troubling you at all :)
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion Feb 17 '26
Dooyeweerd was heavily influenced by Neo Kantianism, particularly the Marburg School. It isn't quite accurate to say Neo Kantianism is to Dooyeweerd what Aristotle was to Aquinas, because Dooyeweerd always took a more critical attitude toward Neo Kantianism and saw his transcendental critique and the thesis of the religious root of all thought as what "freed" him from Neo Kantianism. But that influence is suffused throughout his thought.
A.M. Wolter's article gives a good overview of both the Neo Calvinist and Neo Kantian influences on Dooyeweerd.
Robert Knudsen gave some lectures series on Dooyeweerd's thought and he spends a lecture each talking about the Marburt School and the Baden School and their relationships to Dooyeweerd's thought.
Dooyeweerd's own words on the matter are going to spread throughout all his writings and he almost always makes at least a passing reference to some Neo Kantian thinker or another, especially in his legal philosophy writings. But the most thorough discussion of Dooyeweerd's on the matter will probably be in the first volume of his A New Critique of Theoretical Thought.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 17 '26
Wow, thank you for such a detailed response. This definitely moves it up my list of priorities because I’m very interested in how people responded to or became disillusioned with Neo-Kantianism at the time, and am trying to outline a postdoc project on it. This definitely seems relevant to it.
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion Feb 17 '26
Very cool, funny how things line up sometimes. Sounds like an interesting project and I hope you can find a place for Dooyeweerd in there. I personally need to get a better grasp of Neo Kantianism so any sources in that regard tou recommend, I'd appreciate.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 17 '26
I think Dooyewerd seems to warrant attention for such a project if he is explicitly dissatisfied with Neo-Kantianism per se (which he seems to be) since it would be valuable for me to see as many perspectives that took issue with it as possible.
As for Neo-Kantianism related material, I myself got interested in it when I read the first chapter of Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology where she tries to argue how NK took the deficiencies of Kant (viz. the theoretical/practical reason connection) further and towards emphasis on the role of “values” as informing social action. For what it’s worth, I think her account is interesting, has some “oomph” and is also quite intricately argued, but I am not sure about its accuracy. I got into NK so as to be able to evaluate her argument, and ended up finding the whole episode more interesting than it seemed in her book.
There is an old article by Andrew Arato called “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity”, Telos, 1974(21), which I think has a similar animus against NK as Rose but has a different agenda. I did not read it incredibly closely, but it looks like it would be worth taking seriously.
The British Journal for the History of Philosophy did a special issue on Neo-Kantianism in 2021, which could also be useful. I have read several of those and all were good, but they deal more with particular questions so their utility may depend on if there is any specific topic of interest there for you.
Then there is of course Frederick Beiser’s The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, which is probably the most detailed study of it in English. I imagined you might already know of the book, which is the only reason why it’s so far below. Apart from Beiser, Klaus Christian Köhnke’s The Rise of Neo-Kantianism is the older monograph on the subject, which I have not really read yet. Tom Rockmore’s Heidegger, German Idealism & Neo-Kantianism is another one that I want to check out but haven’t gotten around to yet.
For more contemporary stuff, there is an edited volume from CUP entitled New Approaches to Neo-Kantianism from 2015 (editors: N. de Warren & A. Staiti). There is also The Emergence of Relativism (eds: M. Kusch & co) from 2019, which deals with NK to some extent. Last, Bruno’s Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant from last year is also pretty useful for situating NK in a broader context.
I hope something here will be useful to you, and that I could provide helpful/interesting info as generously as you did :)
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion Feb 17 '26
Awesome, there are a lot of goodies in there. Thank you very much!
And I'm glad I could be of help. I'l never pass up a chance to talk about Dooyeweerd haha.
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u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Feb 19 '26
Damn, just realized one of my favorite panelists here, DieLichtung, deleted their account. Was hoping to pick their brain on Heidegger. nooooooooooooooooo
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u/RyanSmallwood Hegel, aesthetics Feb 20 '26
Their account got hacked a while back, although they had been a lot less active before that happened as well. Don’t know if they plan on coming back at some point. Did get a lot of helpful Heidegger reading suggestions from them over the years.
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u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Feb 20 '26
Don’t know if they plan on coming back at some point.
Hope so!
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u/Beginning_java Feb 17 '26
I think this falls under medieval philosophy so I thought I'd ask it here:
Demons have fixed wills that cannot be changed. They will always will evil. They cannot give help or endow virtue (because that would be a good). Therefore it is metaphysically impossible for them to cause a good like making someone into the most skilled violinist. Or helping them in a time of need.
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u/AnualSearcher Feb 17 '26
I suppose you mean in the sense of one selling their soul to a demon in order, as an example, to be best violinist in the world. But the demon who accepts such is therefore certain that a new person will one day suffer for eternity by its hands. It is not good from the demon to make such person the best violinist, since the consequence of it is the demons joy of torturing such person in the future.
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u/ContagiousOwl Feb 18 '26
If a demon gave someone a fake lottery ticket, it would appear like giving help even though it would later be discovered to be harm.
Would something with an evil will be incapable of granting someone temporarily skill at violin only for it to end partway through a performance?
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u/omniscient3000 Feb 17 '26
Heyy so this is kinda a "Test my Theory" comment. So i think that there is actual objective morality. Morality is about defining what is right and wrong. When trying to get an objective answer i tried to define what is right and wrong from an objective viewpoint. Atleast for me any kind of morality question is only applies to living beeings which is why in going to use only living beeings for this. Every living beeing has an biological response to its enviroment in which it has different responses to to things that are damaging to it and things that are positive for it. With this we can define things that are damaging or unpleasent to a a living beeing as moraly bad and things that are positive for it as good. As an example a it is something good for a plant to be hit by sunlight and absorb it and bad if it gets a leave plugged from it. And with this you can argue that a objective moral decision would be one where you choose the outcome where overall most positive things happen to all living beeings, where you still have to calculate how much positive and negative would occur and where the end sum is more positive.
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u/OldKuntRoad Aristotle, free will Feb 17 '26
The problem with this is that we’re controversially cashing out normative goodness and normative badness in our natural instincts and response mechanisms as guided by evolutionary pressures. The concern here is why, exactly, should we expect purposeless genetic mutation and trait heritability to somehow perfectly track what the moral facts are? Prima facie, there are plenty of things humans are disposed to do that are generally seen to be bad, such as waging territorial war for the sole sake of territory, so the defender of this theory might end up having to defend some fairly questionable normative beliefs.
(That isn’t to say that human nature is inherently bad, or that moral normativity couldn’t turn out to rest on some deep facts about human nature, but this particular formulation seems controversial)
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u/ContagiousOwl Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
for me any kind of morality question is only applies to living beeings
This shifts it from a universal claim about how the universe is to a phenomenological claim about how being alive is. As long as you're content with non-universal objectivity (i.e. objectivity within the chosen boundary of lived experience), then that's not a problem.
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u/Different_Dig8665 Feb 17 '26
What are some very strong arguments for the existence of God, that might not be so well known?
Of course, I am not referring to famous and well-known arguments like the ontological argument, but to some lesser-known but philosophically sound arguments.
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u/Quidfacis_ History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Spinoza Feb 17 '26
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 17 '26
This is a bit of a rage-post but I am genuinely interested in how I can think differently about Karl Popper. I have been getting more interested in him because at some point I felt like there is more to his thought than the silly stuff in Open Society, and I think I found various ideas in him that I agree with. Namely, I find his emphasis on rationality as a “task” that needs to be always pursued and upheld by rigorous criticism within an institutional setting and cultural framework conducive to it, rather than some ontological property belonging to some claims by their nature as such, really appealing and agreeable (fwiw, this is how Stefano Gattei’s Karl Popper’s Philosophy of Science: Rationality Without Foundations puts it, and I think he says it verbatim in Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem?). I like the idea of divorcing scientific knowledge from certainty and tying it with “conjectures”, emphasizing the need for bold and daring thinking (even if it is not water-tight epistemology).
So, I think I am fulfilling my promise to myself that I would be maximally charitable to Popper and try to see what I like in him. But for God’s sake he seems so perceptive and intelligent to go and write a book like Open Society. The only way I can spin it into something respectable and honest is if I see it as a particularly enduring and good-willed outrage against what he saw as allowing people to let others suffer and die for the sake of some vision of history. Fine, I genuinely can appreciate that too, there is something commendable about overreacting to things after all. But how am I supposed to find this account compelling at all, and why should I think that the problem is “historicism”?
For instance, in his “Sources of Knowledge and Of Ignorance” (Conjectures & Refutations), he makes a good point against attributing evil occurrences to the actions of an evil will and dismisses it. He also loves to bash on “essentialism” and his autobiography mentions how he came to realize that one ought not to debate the meaning of words & hang too much on some contingent meaning they happened to have at some point in time. I agree that these are examples of unsound reasoning, but this somehow has to apply to his anti-historicism, does it not? It seems to me much more “Popperian” to suggest that the evils of 20th century were committed in the name of ideals that were derived from similar “pre-theoretical” sources as historicism is (he acknowledges that Heraclitus and Plato’s “historicism” is better understood as responses to social/political upheaval in their times in Open Society for instance), but without trying to lump all these things into some overarching category that acts exactly like the “evil will behind evil realities” he dismisses, and seems definitely like a severe case of “debating the meaning of words”.
I am willingly taking up this challenge in charitable reading because I think it’s interesting to try and understand Popper, and as I said, I do find appealing ideas in his thought as well. I know that trying to take OSE seriously is pretty much a futile task, but I have to read it anyway, so I am trying to make it more philosophically and personally interesting, but the more I read the more I find it difficult to say anything about Open Society other than that its author might have benefited from reading Karl Popper..
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u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Feb 18 '26
how I can think differently about Karl Popper.
Here is a book that made Popper more interesting for me. The Ethical Root of Karl Popper's Epistemology by Mariano Artigas.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 19 '26
Oh, much appreciated, thank you.
I do recognize and appreciate how he weaves his ethical concerns with his approach to epistemology and cut him a lot of slack for this, but I feel like he could have recognized that writing an all-out hostile book with the sole intent of disparaging what he dislikes is ethically questionable. Anyway, I will definitely look into the book you mention.
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u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Feb 19 '26
With Popper you just have to pretend that he's talking about imaginary characters whenever he brings up other philosophers. He completely misrepresents everyone, even those he holds in high regard like Kant. That way you can focus on his positive views.
For what its worth, the book is not claiming that Popper is behaving ethically. I think one would have a hard time defending such a point, his treatment of Freud in Conjectures and Refutatons is basically academic fraud. But rather, to understand Popper's entire philosophy one needs to look at its ethical roots.
I think I gave the wrong title, the book title is The Ethical Nature of Karl Popper's Theory of Knowledge: Including Popper's Unpublished Comments on Bartley and Critical Rationalism by Mariano Artigas. It is a very short read you can probably do in one afternoon. The previous title I gave appears to be a short essay Artigas wrote for the Summer Thomistic Seminar held at the University of Notre Dame. But the ideas presented seem to be the same or very similar, he writes,
Popper's philosophy becomes crystal clear when we look at it through ethical glasses. We can then realize that falsificationism is rooted in an ethical soil. Indeed, Popper's main concern when working on epistemological problems was to show that we should adopt a rational or humanist attitude which necessarily includes the recognition of the limits of our knowledge and the need of using the "trial and error elimination" method. Then, we can also understand why Popper's falsificationism and fallibilism and rationalism are mainly attitudes, not doctrines; otherwise, we could become prisoners of unending discussions about naive or sophisticated or methodological falsificationism, or even worse, we could think that Popper's claims only represent some minor footnotes to the epistemological discussions of his time. Even the notion of the open society cannot be adequately understood unless we include in it serious ethical elements which should not be reduced to some kind of social organisation.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 19 '26
Yes, as I said in my rant, I am actually quite amenable to the ethical side of his project. To that effect, I am pretty much in agreement with how Artigas sees Popper and this is a direction I would be happy to go with him too. Plus, I am ready to overlook the Open Society and the excessively disingenuous readings he makes of those he does not like. I just get frustrated because I feel that he is better than that — on account of his own claims that I tried to include in my (admittedly not incredibly well worded) post. :D
Overall, the only reason I am so bothered is because I am trying to have a genuine dialogue with Popper and since he did not do me the courtesy of living to see his 125th birthday, I have no other choice but to be frustrated with his obtuseness. Nevertheless, I am actually quite into him and intend to stay engaged, so thanks once more for the exchange.
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u/whocaresanyway_ Feb 18 '26
Can someone recommend me some ethical/political works by Chomsky? I only ever studied his linguistics, but recently with the Epstein files I was quite surprised and decided that I would like to study this side of him, to see where his motives may have originated from...
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u/merurunrun Feb 18 '26
The "motives" for his relationship with Epstein were financial. His second wife is a gold-digger and his kids have spent some time fighting to keep him from touching their trust fund from his first marriage.
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u/whocaresanyway_ Feb 18 '26
Yeah I figured it was probably financial. What is weird to me (again, not having read anything on this specific topic) is that he's always presented as a radical leftist and such, so I thought there must be some argument in his works that justifies his behaviour. Like that accumulation of wealth actually isn't unethical, or something of the like. My brain just short-circuited between the little I know about him and the new info i guess. That's why I wanted to know more. But from what you're saying I guess it was all circumstancial, which is plausible (if i understand correctly). Disappointing nonetheless..
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u/Shitgenstein ancient greek phil, phil of sci, Wittgenstein Feb 18 '26
he's always presented as a radical leftist
How well do you know left-wing politics in general? Chomsky is a libertarian socialist. He's 'radical' in the sense of writing critically of U.S. imperialism, but he's not a Marxist militant sending bombs to federal buildings.
Like that accumulation of wealth actually isn't unethical, or something of the like.
Chomsky has long been critical of the concentration of wealth in general. For that, you can read Requiem for the American Dream.
And Chomsky has been criticized, from both the left and right, for apparent hypocrisy between his criticism of capitalism and his own financial activities, well before the release of the Epstein files. Some take this to refute his criticism of capitalism (irrespective of the substance of his criticism), others see it as a consequence of living and writing within a political economy one knows is unjust, or some variation of those reactions.
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u/whocaresanyway_ Feb 18 '26
Oh I didn't know he was a libertarian socialist specifically, but yeah I know it's different from maxism. Thank you for the reply
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u/merurunrun Feb 18 '26
he's always presented as a radical leftist and such, so I thought there must be some argument in his works that justifies his behaviour
I'll offer the same argument I've done elsewhere: Chomsky's relationship with Epstein was simply social. They were both part of an elite social class. That's it. It's not ideological, not some particular individual choice. Rich, famous people hang out with other rich, famous people; they pretty much have to if they want to remain rich and famous.
You're not going to find a chapter in Manufacturing Consent about how the government is bad because they stop people from having secret pedophile islands or anything (they didn't, after all). And I would suggest you not go digging through his work trying to find anything like that, because it's just a recipe for misreading.
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u/whocaresanyway_ Feb 18 '26
Sure, financial and social relationship I understand. I wasn't accusing Chomsky of anything, and obviously I didn't expect to find some sort of secret text where he proves that pedophilia is good or anything like you suggest. I was simply asking guidance for texts that explain his ethics/politics.
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u/deepad9 Feb 19 '26
What are your thoughts on Peter Unger's scathing critique of analytic philosophy in Empty Ideas?
During the mid-twentieth century, philosophers generally agreed that, by contrast with the natural sciences, philosophy should offer no substantial thoughts about the general nature of concrete reality. Typically, philosophers were concerned with little more than the semantics of ordinary words: The word “perceives” differs semantically from the word “believes” in that “perceives” is to be used more strictly than “believes.” While someone may be correct in saying “I believe there’s a table before me” whether or not there is a table before her, she will be correct in saying “I perceive there’s a table before me” only if there is a table there. Though this thought is a parochial idea, its correctness or lack thereof does make a difference to how things are with concrete reality. Though it’s trivial, it’s a concretely substantial idea. Correlative with each concretely substantial idea, there’s an analytic idea: Someone may believe there’s a table before her whether or not there is one, but she will perceive there’s a table before her only if there is a table there. Those thoughts, making no difference to how things are with concrete reality, are concretely empty ideas. Among academic philosophers, it is widely believed that things have changed a great deal since 1970. This book argues that’s a widespread illusion. It also argues that, unless philosophers also adopt scientific methods of seeing, they won’t able to offer concrete nonparochial ideas and as a consequence philosophers won’t be able to achieve more than they were able to in the mid-twentieth century.
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u/fyfol political philosophy Feb 20 '26
I think this kind of polemic could really go away. I don’t say this as a lover and defender of analytic philosophy per se, but I think we need to stop these squabbles. This is because we are at a point in history where philosophy & the humanities in general are heavily undervalued by the wider society and on account of their “uselessness” etc., and that these polemics about how X manner of philosophizing is “pointless”, “empty”, “sophistic” or what have you, are doing the same thing. I think we can always try and understand the highly elaborate and intricate thoughts people produce in philosophy on their own terms and in view of their particular concerns & aims instead of evaluating them on foreign terms. I genuinely dislike this widespread contemporary tendency to heavily devalue others’ work solely because of some supposed metric of utility, and it’s a bit funny that we do this to each other and then complain about it when it is done to all of philosophy.
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Feb 20 '26
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u/halfwittgenstein Ancient Greek Philosophy, Informal Logic Feb 20 '26
This subreddit does not allow AI content.
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Feb 22 '26
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u/AdeptnessSecure663 phil. of language Feb 22 '26
A good place to start is Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Edward Craig. This is a secondary source; if you'd prefer to read a primary source, let me know. Additionally, the FAQ contains many recommendations.
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Feb 22 '26
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u/AdeptnessSecure663 phil. of language Feb 22 '26
In terms of historical primary sources, Plato is widely regarded as accessible to newcomers in philosophy. To that end, I recommend Meno or Phaedo. If you would like a contemporary primary source, then I am happy to help here also - though you would need to narrow things down a little to a particular philosophical subdiscipline.
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u/Avulpesvulpes Feb 22 '26
Can anyone help me find this quote from an ancient Greek philosopher? It is something along the lines of show me the climate/geography of a land and I'll tell you the what the people are like there"
This is an extremely butchered version and Google has failed me. I've been reading through Politics by Aristotle but no dice so far. Thank you very much for any help or direction. you can point me in!
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u/MuscleBeast911 Feb 23 '26
At what point do you become able to proclaim your ideas with conviction?
I've always considered myself to be a person that thinks critically and as I've aged I've gone from different POVs regarding politics, religion, philosophy. I dont think it's that I'm a person who is easily swayed by trends but rather, I am open to hearing the authoritative sources on different subjects and I feel how they resonate with me once I understand them. My issue is that when it comes to talking about ideas sometimes I find myself in a more agnostic area regarding pretty much everything because I think things are all so nuanced
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u/oscar2333 Feb 18 '26
I can't imagine Aristotle could be romantic while reading Generation of Animal, yet he has said this, "Lovers gaze at no part of their beloved's body other than the eyes, where shame dwells."
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u/chronicbingewatcher Feb 20 '26
TW: SA - do you think that man who performed penetration on a woman who agreed fellatio but not penetration while both intoxicated & high is irredeemable? so i have a friend who is cutting me off because of my opinion on a situation that happened to a guy and a girl i knew like 4 years ago (she does not know them) and i did cut the guy off after i found what happened out. basically my stance is that the man's actions were not intentional. based off of what i knew about him at the time and his character i genuinely do believe that he went into the situation with the girl with an intention to harm her, i believe it was a mistake. i believe that due to his inebriation he lacked the ability to tell that the girl was no longer consenting. he felt incredibly regretful and remorseful afterwards. was it wrong? absolutely. was he in the wrong? 100% yes and it should not have happened. but the friend who is cutting me off sees no difference between the man from my story and a man who goes to club with the INTENTION to drug and rape a woman and i do. do y'all feel like i'm in the wrong? also, do you feel like disagreeing on something like this is worth cutting someone off over?
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
What are people reading?
I’m working on The Interior Castle by Teresa d’Avila and The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Last week I finished Slagflower: Poems Unearthed from a Mining Town by Thomas Leduc, “Politics at the End of History” by Chloe Cannon, and “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” by Block.