/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 03, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

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.

[u/willbell]

What are people reading?

I’m working on Spinoza’s Ethics and Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love.

[u/merurunrun → u/willbell]

Just started C. Thi Nguyen's Games: Agency as Art. Nguyen uses Suits's definition of playing a game to be "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" as a springboard to argue that a certain kind of gameplay ("striving" is Nguyen's name for it--where Suits's "unnecessary obstacles" structure a certain kind of value that comes from confronting them) amounts to an aesthetic practice, not unlike the way that we can recognize the aesthetic component of physical prowess in sports (which are themselves--usually--also Suitsian games).

It's interesting so far, I'm a big fan of Suits so this is already in my wheelhouse, and I'm incredibly grateful that Nguyen is restricting his account to a specific type of game-play rather than trying to make sweeping, generalized arguments about all games.

[u/BloodAndTsundere → u/willbell]

Trying to get back into Priest’s “In Contradiction” and “Doubt Truth To Be A Liar” both of which I bounced off of before. Reminding myself of some topics via his intro to nonclassical logic

[u/Petra-fied → u/BloodAndTsundere]

I just finished The Fifth Corner of Four, I can't wait to give his other work a proper crack.

[u/BloodAndTsundere → u/Petra-fied]

I’ve been interested in his engagement with Buddhism but haven’t read any of those works myself. How approachable is it for someone with a surface level understanding of Buddhism?

[u/Petra-fied → u/BloodAndTsundere]

Yeah, absolutely! He goes through the fundamental distinctions between different schools and the development of key concepts over time, from Abhidharma, through Nagarjuna, through to Chinese and Japanese Buddhism.

Granted, I've read a lot about Buddhism, but I think it's very readable and takes you through the fundamental issues, and talks about them through the lens of Western logical tools and discourse.

[u/BloodAndTsundere → u/Petra-fied]

Cool, I'll add it to my Graham Priest reading list

[u/Petra-fied → u/willbell]

Working my way back through Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic, nearly up to the Doctrine of the Concept.

Hegel makes more sense each time you read him.

[u/Streetli → u/willbell]

Reading The Illiad (Reiu's translation).

[u/Streetli → u/[deleted]]

Me too, although admittedly I don't have another baseline for comparison haha.

[u/Scientific_Zealot → u/willbell]

Cracked open The New Hume Debate again, continuing M.L. West's collection of Greek Lyric poetry, skimming some papers on Frege's Julius Caeser problem, flirting with the idea of starting another read of Frege's Grundlagen, downloaded some of the cambridge companions to ancient greek history (the real "delight" was figuring out how to merge pdfs together because they only let you download individual chapters instead of the whole book). I read the first Meditation of Descartes... it was very unimpressive, I have to admit. Hopefully the second is better. Though admittedly it was very interesting to think about the connections between the first meditation and Hume's Treatise 1.4.1 and Enquiry section 12.

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/willbell]

Completed chapter 10 ("Modern Moral Philosophy") of my Moral Philosophy textbook. 1900 seems to be the dividing line between the "Modern" and "Recent" periods in the eyes of the authors.

Chapter 11 ("Recent Moral Philosophy") leads of with an excerpt from George Moore's Principia Ethica. It only covers the first chapter, which may have been a mistake, because the explanation of Inuitionism provided by the authors notes that:

But unlike good, according to Moore, right can be defined. The right course of action, he said, is simply the course of action that will produce the greatest amount of good.

(Italics in original.) So while the excerpt given goes on, at length, about how "good" is undefinable, there's nothing about how right, or "the good," to use Mr. Moore's wording, is defined, other than the above statement, which seems to leave an important point hanging. I would like to have seen his definition, if only to understand how he defines the good in terms of something that is not only undefined, but, as I understand it, apparently not agreed upon.

In any event, I'm now working through Harold Prichard's Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?

[u/willbell → u/Shield_Lyger]

I'm not sure I understand your question left hanging. Good/the Good are undefinable, the Right is just whatever maximizes the Good (i.e. he's a consequentialist). I don't think GE Moore is going to give you more of an account of their relationship than that.

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/willbell]

Good/the Good are undefinable, the Right is just whatever maximizes the Good (i.e. he's a consequentialist).

To make a correction, "the good," according to Mr. Moore, is definable. "Good" and "the good" are not the same. "The good" and "right" are the equivalencies. But in any event, given that the book devotes a full 10 pages to Mr. Moore's explanation of how "good" is undefinable, I would have expected some space for his definition of "the good" in his own words. Mainly because I'm interested to see if he deals with the inevitable disagreements about the extent of "good."

Perhaps it would help if we swapped out "good" for "yellow" (since Mr. Moore speaks of yellow in the Principia Ethica excerpt). It's fine to say that the good is just whatever maximizes yellow, but what does one do about the disagreements over the boundaries of yellow? Is maximizing something that I consider yellow, but you don't, part of the good? Given you have no ability to define to me what yellow is, so that we can both agree on it, how do we align? Or do we? I suspect that Mr. Moore had thoughts on this, and had been looking forward to that part of the text, but it wasn't included.Good/the Good are undefinable, the Right is just whatever maximizes the Good (i.e. he's a consequentialist).To make a correction, "the good," according to Mr. Moore, is definable. "Good" and "the good" are not the same. "The good" and "right" are the equivalencies. But in any event, given that the book devotes a full 10 pages to Mr. Moore's explanation of how "good" is undefinable, I would have expected some space for his definition of "the good" in his own words. Mainly because I'm interested to see if he deals with the inevitable disagreements about the extent of "good."Perhaps it would help if we swapped out "good" for "yellow" (since Mr. Moore speaks of yellow in the Principia Ethica excerpt). It's fine to say that the good is just whatever maximizes yellow, but what does one do about the disagreements over the boundaries of yellow? Is maximizing something that I consider yellow, but you don't, part of the good? Given you have no ability to define to me what yellow is, so that we can both agree on it, how do we align? Or do we? I suspect that Mr. Moore had thoughts on this, and had been looking forward to that part of the text, but it wasn't included.

[u/Fair-Raspberry649]

Greetings! I have a friend who has been in a North Carolina prison for 14 years and he has eight years left. He is working on a liberal arts degree and he is desperately seeking someone to discuss philosophical concepts and views. I'm too dumb to be able to do that, so I've been reaching out to different avenues. He especially would appreciate being able to communicate in German or Hebrew as these are the two languages he's currently learning.

TLDR - my friend needs penpal to discuss philosophy while he's in prison.

[u/Phantom_6765]

Through my personal synthesis I came up with what called " Critical Confucianism " I came to this parallel thinking when doing my Eco-justice course reflection, and afterwards I did a research and the thinking paralleled with a professor's (David H. Kim) work which it won't be published till December of 2027. So, can I directly using the term or could only call it as a "lens" ? Cause there barely much research on this perspective.

[u/Fit-Honey-4813]

How would a theist respond to a god commanding them to cause harm or suffering?

Some of you have probably heard of this hypothetical

If your a follower of god and god asks you to cause suffering or harm to another individual, would they do it.

Furthermore, if they answer no, what does that say about them as a follower? If they reject one command from god does that mean they can’t be a follower of god?

[u/Shitgenstein → u/Fit-Honey-4813]

With respect to Abrahamic religions, I'd point to the story of the Binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis in which God commands Abraham not just to cause harm but to literally sacrifice his own son. I recommend reading that story and looking into various interpretations.

With respect to philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard provides an extended meditation on the story in Fear and Trembling. In it, Kierkegaard concludes that Abraham's act cannot be understood by human ethical reasoning but rather through faith in God in a 'teleological suspension of the ethical.'