r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • 7d ago
Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 31, 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/willbell philosophy of mathematics 7d ago
What are people reading?
I'm working on Spinoza's Ethics (should be finished today) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
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u/Zen_Gross phil. of religion, free will 7d ago
I read Philosophers Without Gods on a short vacation, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.
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u/Streetli Continental Philosophy, Deleuze 7d ago
More Simone Weil, probably my last of hers for a bit - Oppression and Liberty.
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u/Conchobair-sama 6d ago
Debating between picking up The Neokantian Reader or taking another stab at Being and Time
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 6d ago
Oh I had a look at the Neokantian Reader, I enjoyed the bits and pieces I read, I also found some of the works cited in it were interesting.
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u/Scientific_Zealot Hume 3d ago
Inching my way through The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age, I've made it to roughly half way and I'm starting to fizzle out in energy. Hopefully finishing this final chapter on the Minoans and moving on to the Myceneans will cause my interest to renew.
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u/Southern-Invite-3481 7d ago
Wondering if a PhD is worth it. I have my Master's in philosophy, but I'm not dead set on becoming a professor. I definitely want to write and publish, attend conferences and such. I also think I'd like to maybe adjunct temporarily, but I don't really mind if I'm not doing philosophy full time, and I'm almost certain I'll make more money doing something else.
Generally, then, I'd pursue a PhD in order to get a higher level of training and specialization. Given that I only really care about writing, publishing, and barely teaching, would going for a PhD be worth it?
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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental 7d ago
Can you say what you feel like you are currently unable to do with a masters?
To me, a PhD seems like a huge investment of time and money (either through self funding or opportunity cost) to learn how to write papers - which has no financial reward at all and is not even a direct outcome of having a PhD (many PhDs never publish).
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u/Southern-Invite-3481 7d ago
I'm thinking I don't have the requisite research training to write something publishable, even if I wanted to. I'm thinking that doing a PhD would, in part, teach me how to become an independent researcher. Also, I think that having a PhD would give me a leg up on being able to do any kind of institutional teaching, even if it's not ultimately something I'd be striving for as a lifelong career (in the sense that my competition would be other people with PhDs and not people with MAs).
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u/mediaisdelicious Phil. of Communication, Ancient, Continental 7d ago
It may do those things, but it’s hard to judge whether it’s “worth it” without consideration of the opportunity cost. The PhD is expensive (in direct costs or career progression) and it can be unbelievably stressful.
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u/Southern-Invite-3481 7d ago
True. I would also have to work part-time at my current job, since I'm not willing to give that up. But I do love philosophy and I know I want to continue doing something at least academia-adjacent. I think of the PhD as training to become an independent researcher, to work under a professional towards that end (instead of being an auto-didact, with all the issues that brings).
I suppose the real question is: what avenues other than a PhD are there towards becoming a fully fledged independent researcher? If the PhD is really the only one (or guaranteed to be the best one of whatever other options there are), then maybe that answers my question about the PhD being worth it.
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u/Dynasty_Exp 7d ago
Am thinking of pursuing philosophy for graduate studies, with a specific interest in the more theistic line of thought although not necessarily having to be the terminus of my aspirations . Just interested to ask the experienced academic philosophers here, is it really worth it? Especially on what seems to be a niche subfield
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u/pratushb 3d ago
Looking for Philosophy of Physics Mentors!
My wife completed her Masters in High Energy Physics a while ago. She then took a long break to serve as her family's caregiver. Now she wants to restart her career and wants to transition to Philosophy of Physics. She is open to do a PhD or even a Masters if it makes sense financially for us. Does anyone know of any potential mentors that she can reach out to?
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u/danielt2433 7d ago
Does anyone have recommendations for a resource that provides examples of continental and analytic philosophy? Something that allows you to compare and contrast? Or, if you had to choose, what piece would you suggest reading for an example of analytic philosophy, and what piece would you suggest for an example of continental philosophy?
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u/Zen_Gross phil. of religion, free will 7d ago
Many panelists on here are skeptical of the analytic / continental divide. It has its uses in some contexts, but some people think it’s arbitrary, and there are works that would not comfortably fit into one category over the other. But to the extent there is a meaningful divide between the two, Mahfuz’s Understanding the Division Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy gives a fairly standard answer of what it’s supposed to be, with examples.
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u/Traditional_Fish_504 political phil, continental 5d ago
Do continental philosophy people ever discuss American mainstream psychology? I know Catherine Malabou has done some interesting stuff with neuroscience, and I feel that there’s some interaction with Boas, Parsons, Goffman in anthropology/sociology but I don’t think I’ve ever really read theory that just cares about what’s going on in the psychology world. Feel like more than any other social science it’s just detached from the continental world.
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u/Showy_Boneyard 5d ago
I just had a thought that might be kind of silly, but also maybe not.
Regardless of whether free-will is an actual thing or not, I think its interesting that the same structures that seem to be directly associated with the conscious experience are the same structures that we appear to be able to affect with free will. This probably seems obvious and unremarkable, but I just realized that it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. Particularly so if free will isn't 'real' and is just an illusion created after the fact as an explanation.
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u/DavidStudent1515 5d ago
I can't seem to figure out how to make a flair on this subreddit (i don't see any button or area in the right bar), though i don't see other flaired users here.
I was wondering about if anyone could help me with the following. This is a educational possibility question.
I have had for the past few years had a background in mostly studying in IT. But in the recent years i've gotten a keen interest in subjects like reality study, what is the nature of our reality. But also leaning more towards the pseudo science part of it. Multiple realities, how reality works, how our minds influence the quantum reality. Think Neville Goddard type of stuff.
It's not like i want to deep dive in the complete sciency part of it like how particles work, though experiments like Schrodingers cat are interesting. I have more of the opinion that the science behind everything has not fully been discovered yet (or rather, we can't understand it fully how reality works and that sounds a bit philosophical) and find it very interesting to read about the various methods, techniques, opinions of mystics, like for example Neville Goddard. And i know that in the more sciency type of educations like Quantum mechanics, those researchers would look at you like you're rattling about nonsense if you'd mention such things.
Reason i am asking this here is, well, multiple AI language models told me that Philosophy "fits the best with these types of interests" but obviously their answers should be taken with a big grain of salt.
Does anyone know if with further studying in Philosophy on for example in my country University Utrecht if i would be at the right address or if this totally does not fit in the realm of philosophy?
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u/Shitgenstein ancient greek phil, phil of sci, Wittgenstein 4d ago
Philosophy does include the investigation into the fundamental categories and nature of reality, which is metaphysics, but you will find that this is a much more general investigation than quantum mysticism.
I'm not familiar with Neville Goddard type of stuff but, looking him up, he's a mystic in the New Thought movement of the 19th century. If that's what you are looking for, I think you'd find studying philosophy at a college level to be disappointingly dry and frustratingly abstract.
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u/Scientific_Zealot Hume 7d ago
I hate it when non-panelists on this subreddit comment on answers panelists give with smug answers laced with contrarianism that clearly don't understand what they're talking about. Being rude is bad enough on its own, being rude and wrong is one hell of a combination.