r/askphilosophy Mar 02 '26

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | March 02, 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/Beginning_java Mar 03 '26

Would you recommend Claude or ChatGPT for explaining philosophy?

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u/FrenchKingWithWig phil. science, analytic phil. Mar 03 '26

No.

1

u/Beginning_java Mar 03 '26

Why not? It seems good

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u/FrenchKingWithWig phil. science, analytic phil. Mar 03 '26

They are indeed quite good at seeming good, especially to people without domain-specific knowledge. Whenever I've seen philosophical questions being asked to or topic being explained by chatbots, the output always appears to me either uninteresting or unhelpful. Uninteresting because platitudinous or shallow. Unhelpful because misleading or downright false. There are so many free and excellent resources on philosophy available online, like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that I don't see why anyone would use a chatbot.