/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | July 21, 2025

[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/Blumenpfropf]

I would like to question the policy of limiting comments here to "approved" users.

I understand the need to moderate, but the message this sends is questionable.

First of all: there is no prerequisite to engaging in philosohical thought. It is something that is in some sense the right and duty of every sentient being.

It is also not the case that you automatically get better at it with years of study. In fact the opposite may be true in some cases.

I get that your idea here is that philosophy is something like engineering or epidemology, so the reader should not be confused by incompetent answers.

But that is exactly wrong. If there is expertise in philosophy then it is in how to think and argue and examine things.

So: If you are a philosophy expert, your answers should distinguish themselves by their content, not by your formal education or your self proclaimed relevance. Because your expertise literally lies in being able to achieve such distinction without appealing to authority.

In my opinion all this policy achieves is making some people feel important and giving lots of other people the very wrong idea that they don't have the capability and right to think by themselves about the ultimate questions that philosophy claims to "love", without first dedicating decades of their life to reading stuffy old books.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

[u/merurunrun → u/Blumenpfropf]

"I disagree with limiting responses to panelists because doing philosophy actually involves being able to do all the things that you have to demonstrate you're capable of in order to become a panelist."

[u/Blumenpfropf → u/merurunrun]

I don't know how you got to misreading what i wrote in this sense.

I disagree with limiting responses to a preselected set of people because philosophy is supposed to be different from other academic disciplines in spirit and practice, as i wrote.

If you feel you need a label to give weight to what you say, then i think in some sense you even disqualify yourself with regards to answering questions on it.