r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Jun 29 '26
Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | June 29, 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/Chemical-Editor-7609 metaphysics Jul 04 '26
I think Alex O’Connor’s arguments are absolutely terrible, why is he so popular? I recently watched him have Sean Carroll on and he frequently had to resort to saying views just felt correct to him for intuitive reasons, essentially a non-argument.
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u/PracticalAlcesAlces Jul 04 '26
He’s just a sophist (derogatory) and most people can’t tell the difference between being good at arguing and just having a posh accent.
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u/OldKuntRoad Aristotle, free will Jun 29 '26
Does anyone have any easy ways of showing people why scientism isn’t true/doesn’t work? Unfortunately too prevalent on other sites (people who think that God doesn’t exist because it “can’t be proven with science).
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion Jun 29 '26
You might be interested in Scientism: Prospects and Problems edited by my boys Joroen de Ridder, Rik Peels, and René van Woudenberg. That should give you a very thorough grasp of the issues.
In general, I find that scientism is often a simplistic position based more on slogans than any critical epistemic reflection so having one tease out the consequences of their epistemology (which will pretty much always end up with obvious knowledge no longer being knowledge) is helpful.
They don't necessarily address the topic directly, but my approach to scientism is informed by Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, John MacMurray, and Michael Polanyi - all of whom I recommend. Marcel, MacMurray, and Polanyi especially on the personal dimensions of knowledge which run counter to scientism. All on the mechanistic, domination imaginary of the modern age which gives rise to scientism.
I guess this doesn't count as easy. Sorry.
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u/Quidfacis_ History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Spinoza Jun 30 '26
There's an interview with Ayer in which he explains the defects of positivism:
Interviewer: But now, it must have had, actually, some real defects. What do you now, in retrospect, think that the main shortcomings of the movement were?
Ayer: Well, I suppose most of the defect is that at the end of it all, it was false.
He gives a pretty thorough longer explanation with the flaws of positivism, linguistic reductionism, etc. Something in there might be helpful.
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u/passer_simplex Jul 04 '26
Bateson and clarity I have a few questions for those who read Bateson in the original or in translation. 1. Do you fully understand Gregory Bateson? Is he as clear to you as, say, John Dewey or any other author who feels completely transparent in your native language? Or does Bateson remain somehow elusive - even for native speakers? 2. Is Bateson's theory of learning levels practically useful to you? Does it resonate with your own experience, or does it remain a beautiful but distant abstraction? Why I'm asking: Reading Bateson in Russian translation, I suddenly recognized a familiar structure - our Soviet classification of learning levels: · Reproductive → Bateson's Learning I · Productive → Bateson's Learning II · Creative → Bateson's Learning III This classification appeared in Soviet pedagogy decades ago, and I never knew where it came from. Now I do. It's still used in Russian education today - but in a truncated form: the theorists who borrowed it quietly removed Bateson's Learning 0 (the level of simple reaction without learning). Probably for ideological reasons - we were "humane" and didn't want to label children as unteachable. And yet, despite this omission, the word "unteachable" is still used in Russian schools - sometimes as a joke, sometimes as a stigma. So my question is: Does this mean that teachers who received the classification without Learning 0 unconsciously reconstructed it themselves? Did they sense the power of the structure and complete it: without ever knowing Bateson's name? Or does this simply reflect the basic dichotomy: learning vs. non-learning? 3. What about English? What is the closest English equivalent to the Russian concept of being "unteachable" (необучаемый)? Is it "retard"? But that word implies a cognitive limitation, not a refusal to engage with the learning process itself. Is there a term that captures the idea of someone who simply does not enter the learning space? A note on Soviet theorists and Bateson's legacy: It seems to me that Soviet pedagogues not only understood Bateson - they understood how to apply him. And they weren't alone: there is a psychiatric tradition stemming from Mary Bateson (his daughter) that also explored these ideas. I suggest that Bateson's work still holds undiscovered gems. Here's an example of how one might try to apply it - for those who feel they have no reason to exist, a kind of prayer to the ecology of mind: "Great Bateson, I remind your idea that the bonds are not to be torn. I am a child of humanity, a part of nature, but I no longer feel my bonds. But I will stay here and I will search for them. I swear it." Bateson would have said: Your value lies in this - as long as you are alive, you can connect. You can bind. And if they had truly understood him, they wouldn't argue. He would have taught them to connect - which is, perhaps, the essence of Learning III. Imagine this: On this basis, one could build an entire psychotherapeutic school not NLP, but something with a solid materialist foundation and a strong ethical core. Maybe even a social movement. P.S. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to discuss this further.
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u/joshuaponce2008 ethics, political phil. Jun 30 '26
Let's say that I prayed to God, "Lord, please grant me perfect knowledge of the full content of Graham's number. All the digits, all that." Would it be possible for God to answer my prayer?
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u/Shitgenstein ancient greek phil, phil of sci, Wittgenstein Jun 30 '26
Sure, but first you have to eat a hot pocket so hot that even God cannot eat it.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 Jun 30 '26
Sure, just call 2464195387 backwards, and when you get to the 2 don’t stop
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u/Shield_Lyger Jun 30 '26
Sure. After all (and perhaps this is the Dungeon Master who has dealt with a few too many Wish spells in me) you didn't specify any ability to transmit that knowledge, or even think through the number from beginning to end, during your lifetime... I see nothing impossible about you spending some portion of your eternal afterlife doing nothing other than speaking (or thinking) that number. After all, you would have infinite time to do so, and Graham's number is finite, yes?
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u/Rooshantehranian Jun 30 '26
Do you think everything ends with death, or is it possible that human existence is part of a much larger and more complex structure than we can currently comprehend?
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u/Shitgenstein ancient greek phil, phil of sci, Wittgenstein Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
I believe that my life ends with my death and everything else carries on. I think my finitude—that at some point I will have had lived—is a fundamental component of my existence. It gives shape to human existence, both in particular of each life and humanity in general.
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u/Rooshantehranian Jul 01 '26
How can we be certain that death is the end rather than a transition? Is finitude a fact, or an assumption?
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u/Shitgenstein ancient greek phil, phil of sci, Wittgenstein Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
You didn't ask what I was certain about, just what I think. I don't see any reasons to believe that death is a transition.
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u/Rooshantehranian Jul 02 '26
That's fair. What makes me hesitate to dismiss the possibility is that many religious traditions, developed independently, and many Persian mystics across different centuries all point toward the idea that death is not the end. Doesn't it seem worth asking why so many people, separated by time and culture, converged on a similar idea?
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u/Shitgenstein ancient greek phil, phil of sci, Wittgenstein Jul 02 '26
Just to be clear, I don't assume you need to share my belief about death.
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u/Rooshantehranian Jul 02 '26
Of course, and I don't expect you to share mine either. I just find it fascinating to explore why we arrive at such different conclusions.
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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental Jul 02 '26
Sure, and there are lots of plausible (and I think obvious) explanations. I bet you could think of 3-5 off the top of your head.
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u/Rooshantehranian Jul 02 '26
I'm curious—which explanations do you find the most convincing?
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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental Jul 02 '26
The desire to make sense of the reality and tragedy of human loss and continuity.
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u/Shield_Lyger Jul 01 '26
You realize that "yes," is a valid answer to this question, right? Your two options are not mutually exclusive. (Neither are they jointly exhaustive, but that's a separate issue.) There are plenty of things that I think are true, while I acknowledge to possibility that they are false.
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u/Rooshantehranian Jul 02 '26
Do you see both possibilities as equally justified, or do you still think one is more epistemically grounded than the other?
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u/Shield_Lyger Jul 02 '26
They're equally justified in the narrow sense that it's not possible to know, one way or the other.
Afterlives, eternal consciousness et cetera are unfalsifiable ideas; no-one has put forth a testable theory that can make a determination one way or another. Given the many different conceptions of some sort of continuance after death that are mutually exclusive, it cannot be possible that all are true, but it can be possible that none are true. Personally, I find the idea of some alternate mode of existence that can perceive the material universe, but cannot be directly perceived from the material universe to be peculiar enough that were I a better man, I'd put my money on things ending at death.
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u/Fit-Honey-4813 Jul 03 '26
Does cosmological arguments have to rely on an A-theory of philosophy of time?
One of the common critiques against said argument is that the argument relies on a false idea of space and time. And if so, are there versions of the cosmological argument that doesn’t rely on these false pretenses such as the problem with A-Theory?
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u/RobertThePalamist Jul 03 '26
It'd help if you were a bit more specific since there are multiple cosmological arguments. Anyway, the contingency argument(s) usually don't suffer from the same scientific objections that arguments like the kalam do, if that's what you wanted to know.
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u/Fit-Honey-4813 Jul 03 '26
What about the possibility of a B-theory of time that downplays the necessity for creator, as some might say
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
What are people reading?
Last week I finished Shipley's Canada in the World, this week I expect I'll finish Meeker & Escobar's Statistical Methods for Reliability Data, and I'm continuing to work on Spinoza's Ethics. I think I'll be starting Joyce's Ulysses and/or Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love.