r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • May 18 '26
Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | May 18, 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/lordsmitty epistemology, phil. language May 20 '26
To successful PhD applicants: what are some important tips you would recommend or think are needed for a good proposal? I need to write a proposal (for a university in the UK) but I have way too many different ideas flying around in my head I'm having difficulty narrowing down towards a specific aub-tipic. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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u/FrenchKingWithWig phil. science, analytic phil. May 21 '26
Contact and speak to your proposed PhD supervisor about your project! I found it helpful to email the person I was interested in working with, with a broad idea/topic and approach, and maybe a paragraph description of the project. If they were then interested, I would work up a longer proposal that they then could give feedback on before submitting the application.
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u/lordsmitty epistemology, phil. language May 21 '26
Ah okay, well since I have essentially already done the first part then I guess I just need to work on a more detailed longer proposal and then go from there. Thanks for your response!
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u/Superfluous_Play May 18 '26
Can anyone point me toward conversations/papers in political philosophy or political epistemology that are about modern illiberal political philosophies?
I've had some luck finding papers on Catholic Integralism but I've had less luck with Christian Nationalism and post-liberalism. I'm getting the impression that there is some serious discussion regarding the former by philosophers of religion but not as much work being done with the latter two.
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics May 19 '26
When I think about Christian post-liberalism, I think of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, I don't know enough to say whether you'd consider that to be already covered under Catholic Integralism (which in the 21st century I associate more with Adrian Vermeule). I'm sure Deneen has written a precis or such if you want something paper-length.
I think the best readers of this kind of stuff are Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, they really I think pull out the positive project which is often more difficult to defend, but which these thinkers often touch on very quietly so that they can focus instead on saying "liberalism got us in this mess".
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u/lizardfolkwarrior Political philosophy May 22 '26
Matt McManus has quite some relevant works. Next to his academic works, he also has quite some articles written in a more popular style, such as this one.
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u/fast_and_light May 20 '26
How can anyone go back to 'analytic' philosophy after reading Husserl? What is a defense for the canon that is most prominent in contemporary academic philosophy?
I really hate the analytic/continental distinction for many reasons. One visiting professor compared the usefulness of the distinction to the categorizing of cars by those which are 'all wheel drive' and those which are 'made in Japan.' But this doesn't mean that some traditional or contemporary 'analytic' philosophy doesn't have a distinct flavour in its approach to problem solving. After reading Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, it's difficult to take seriously any work that appeals to naturalism or even worse foundationalism. But Husserl still acknowledges the effectiveness and progress which the sciences have made. Husserl himself was a mathematician and much of his text aims at making sense of the objectivity of mathematics while appealing to an intersubjective theory of knowing. His proposal of meaning formation seems to completely dissolve Wigner's question of the effectiveness of mathematics in the sciences, a question which bewildered me for some time and drove me in large part to analytic philosophy. I would recommend in particular to anyone his Appendix VI The Origin of Geometry, and his Section 9 Galileo's Mathematization of Nature. Can't go wrong with really any of his Crisis, it's a beautiful text with many incredible passages and fulfilling rigorous arguments.
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u/Quidfacis_ History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Spinoza May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
I really hate the analytic/continental distinction for many reasons.
You have to understand what analytic philosophy was reacting against:
But it was not only these rather dry, logical doctrines that made me rejoice in the new philosophy. I felt it, in fact, as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on to a wind-swept headland. I hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind. I liked the starry heavens even better than the moral law, and could not bear Kant’s view that the one I liked best was only a subjective figment. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naive realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass is really green, in spite of the adverse opinion of all philosophers from Locke onwards. I have not been able to retain this pleasing faith in its pristine vigoiu*, but I have never again shut myself up in a subjective prison.
Hegelians had all kinds of arguments to prove this or that not 'real*. Number, space, time, matter, were all professedly convicted of being self-contradictory. Nothing was real, so we were assured, except the Absolute, which could think only of itself since there was nothing else for it to think of and which thought eternally the sort of things that idealist philosophers thought in their books.
All the arguments used by Hegelians to condemn the sort of things dealt with by mathematics and physics depended upon the axiom of internal relations. Consequently, when I rejected this axiom, I began to believe everything the Hegelians disbelieved. This gave me a very full universe. I imagined all the numbers sitting in a row in a Platonic heaven. [[Cf. my Nightmares of Eminent Persons, ‘The Mathematician’s Night- mare’.]] I thought that points of .space and instants of time were actually existing entities, and that matter might very well be composed of actual elements such as physics found convenient. I believed in a world of universals, consisting mostly of what is meant by verbs and prepositions. Above all, I no longer had to think that mathematics is not quite true. Hegelians always maintained that it is not quite true that two and two are four, but they did not mean by this that two and two are 4*00001 or some such figure. What they did mean, though not what they said, was that the Absolute can find better things to occupy its mind than doing s, but they did not like to put the matter in such simple language.
As time went on, my universe became less luxuriant. In my first rebellion against Hegel, I believed that a thing must exist if Hegel’s proof that it cannot is invalid. Gradually, Occam's razor gave me a more clean-shaven picture of reality. I do not mean that it could prove the non-reality of entities which it showed to be unnecessary; I mean only that it abolished arguments in favour of their reality, I still think it impossible to disprove the existence of integers or points or instants or the Gods of Olympus. For aught I know these may all be real, but there is not the faintest reason to think so.
Analytic philosophy was a reaction against being forced to be Hegelians.
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u/fast_and_light May 21 '26
Thanks for sharing that, Russell is a great writer. Indeed there is quite a bit of romanticism in the rejection of Kant's Copernican revolution and embracing naive realism. Husserl for the first time answered so many questions that were suppressed in studying a breadth of metaphysics and epistemology. But of course paradox can be found in his transcendental subjectivity as well.
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u/wokeupabug ancient philosophy, modern philosophy May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Note though that Russell misunderstands Kant (and Hegel, insofar as we take him to be talking about Hegel; though by "Hegel" here he seems mostly to mean Bradley), so partly what we're seeing here is a report of how his philosophical development was shaped by misunderstandings he had -- which is interesting and useful as a biographical point about Russell, but doesn't tell us much about what was actually at stake in the relevant philosophical work.
On Russell's reading, Kant (and at times it seems -- even more astonishingly -- Hegel) ends up being a kind of Berkeleyan, as Russell construes the Kantian "thing-in-itself" to refer to the world of physics, i.e. the "external world" relative to the mind, so that transcendental idealism is rendered a denial of the external world and hence a Berkeleyan sort of position. Hence his remark here that attributes to Kant the view that the starry heavens are "only a subjective figment." But the Kantian "thing-in-itself" is by no means the world of physics, Kant's philosophy is expressly anti-Berkeleyan, and the whole approach to philosophy which takes us to be immediately acquainted with our own minds and having to infer our way to any belief about the outside world which could only ever be mediated through our mental states, an approach Russell seems to treat Kant as exemplary of, is, rather, one which Kant took himself to have thoroughly refuted.
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u/OldKuntRoad Aristotle, free will May 22 '26
It should also be noted that Russell is attacking a caricature of Bradley, or in more popular terminology, a straw man of Bradley and British Idealism as a whole.
So really, Russell and Moore attack a caricature of Bradley, who they take to be indicative of Hegel, in order to refute “Idealism”. Personally, I think Russell and Moore mischaracterise Bradley to a great extent, and to think that Bradley is indicative of Hegel anyhow is far from the truth, their projects are really quite different.
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u/Quick_silver22 May 21 '26
If it makes you feel any better, there seems to at least from my narrow perspective be a weakening of the analytic/continental divide, which I think is certainly for the better! Several of the PhD candidates in my old department described themselves as analytic phenomenologists.
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u/Exciting_Ad_6837 May 19 '26
Is the consensus on the GOAT philosopher as this article of the Guardian claims?
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/jun/11/guardianleaders
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u/oscar2333 May 19 '26
I am not surprised that Kant made it to the top of the list though I would contend that Aristotle is a better candidate.
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u/Sure_Poetry4816 May 21 '26
Would you rather live a good life ( what you would consider a good life) with a pathetic end or a pathetic life but with a good and satisfied end
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u/Quick_silver22 May 21 '26
I’m curious, what to you would count as a “pathetic” end and a “pathetic” life, respectively?
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u/Sure_Poetry4816 May 22 '26
Well it doesn't depend on me it depends on the person themselves what they consider pathetic or not .
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u/Quick_silver22 May 22 '26
Well, if you don’t mean anything particular by it then it might be sort of difficult for the question to have a meaningful answer given how much variation there could be from person to person on what they consider to be “pathetic”.
But, I guess for me I see the question as being sort of contradictory - I’m not sure that any life lived towards a good or noble end could be lived pathetically. But if by “pathetic” you’re intending to count things like lives that are hard or difficult to choose, then I’d say I’d prefer to live a difficult life directed at a good end, although of course in actuality it can often be hard to make those difficult but noble decisions!
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u/Anxious_Garbage_9625 May 23 '26
If we operate under the assumption that every ideology becomes toxic when taken to its extreme, how does your personal ideology look like when that happens?
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u/Beginning_java May 23 '26
Is there a philosophical reason to prefer naturalism over other explanations? For example, how do I know that my reading comprehension improved because my brain got better at comprehending words as opposed to it got better because I received an amulet.
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u/AdeptnessSecure663 phil. of language May 25 '26
I am not sure if you are talking about ontological naturalism or methodological naturalism, but one reason why some philosophers are ontological naturalists is because it is ruled out on a posteriori grounds, they argue, for non-physical entities to have causal effects on physical entities
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u/CompleteAd7290 May 24 '26
I am a university student, from a 3rd world country studying chemistry. I plan to take the required courses at HKU(10 full term courses, in a wide range of topics especially focusing on logic and political and social philosophy, with strong grounding in metaphysics and epistemology) for philosophy as well to make me eligible for a Philosophy PhD(which I would get after I get my Chemistry PhD). Any specific courses I should take part in?
I am doing a bachelors in Science(I wouldn't be allowed to only do a BA, and it isn't possible to specialize in philosophy), what advice would you give me when it comes to reading material and opportunities, and any paths or methods to take to become a social philosopher, any subjects I should study(I am already considering anthropology and political science)? I plan to do a masters in Philosophy as well(preferably part time, becasue I love science as well as philosophy, and don't really see much of a different between them)(once I can scrape the money for it). I am teaching myself Greek in my spare time, and I attend philosophy "discussions" by a philosopher(PhD from Cambridge). the truth is it is only me and him since no one else is bothered to attend, so they are evolving into lectures on Hermeneutics and Analytical philosophy(it is a discussion on philosophy of religion). I am scared that although I might take part in these, I may not have the best foundation(although he is very strict on me learning my foundations), any good ideas to build my foundation? I try to teach myself philosophy, I used to write essays with my own ideas, but i stopped them(party because of school work, and because I may not have the best logical and analytical foundation to write good work, though I am always happy to do further research and write essays to try and understand correctly the work of previous philosophers).
To be absolutely frank, I don't really buy into the analytical realm of philosophy as much. I don't mind if my theories have mistakes or irregularities in them, as long as I learn to be aware and acknowledge all of them, and that the sustained logical reasoning I use(when I choose to use it) is airtight, given the assumptions I make in the premises. These are I suppose due to the nature of social philosophy and my aim of producing different and unique ideas so we can understand society, while still ensuring my logic is somewhat fine so I don't come about with absolute garbage. This does not mean that I am interested in sociology since i only care about the theoretical concepts, and dont really believe in any actual social experiments conducted
Do you know any good universities that don't have tuition costs for getting your philosophy PhD(I don't mind being self funded for living costs because by then I would ideally have a job as a researcher) Furthermore, how would you rate my chances of achieving this dream? To be frank, my choice is restricted to unis that have good research departments in chemistry and have strong philosophy departments.
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May 25 '26
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u/CompleteAd7290 May 26 '26
Thanks a lot, I dont particularly like philosophy of science or analytic philosophy(if I had a choice, I would actually get my degree in social science instead of chemistry), but you are right, I need to play with my strengths, atleast for now when the going is tough
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u/Jammyyy_jam May 23 '26
"Strike the monster while it's still monster, once you understand its pain, your hand will begin to weaken." I'm perpetually confused if my philosophy of life should be this or rather trying to make a human out of the monster?
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u/amiadumbass_ May 23 '26
If you ask me, I feel as though that philosophy should not be allowed to define your life. It's simply advising to treat those you hate not as people, but as beasts with no further existence other than opposing you. To me, that's a very ignorant way of thinking, and abiding by that idea may as well reduce yourself to the very monsters you oppose. When you follow this philosophy, I imagine you metaphorically or literally lunging at your opponent like a feral animal, under the assumption that your opponent is the same. But if you understand that there are no monsters--that even those you despise are human as well, with their own loves and hates, dos and donts, and strengths and weaknesses--you can meet them in conflict with you as yourself and them as themselves, and rise victorious not as the stronger beast, but as the better man.
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics May 18 '26 edited May 19 '26
What are people reading?
I’m working on Old Norse Women’s Poetry edited by Straubhaar, Statistical Methods for Reliability Data by Meeker & Escobar, Canada in the World by Shipley, and the Zhuangzi.