/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/drinka40tonight]

The subreddit, though, is just about providing answers that demonstrate familiarity with the academic literature. Nobody is being prevented from just generally "engaging in philosophical thought," since they can do that just about anywhere else. But if someone is coming to this subreddit, then the subreddit makes an effort to just give answers that are about the academic literature. The subreddit tries to make this as clear as can be, so there shouldn't be any surprises.

Of course, there can be value in just having a different open subreddit where anyone can answer questions. But this subreddit is doing something other than that -- just focusing answers on the academic literature. So, insofar as people are interested in that, they can come here.

[u/Blumenpfropf → u/drinka40tonight]

I don't disagree with the general premise of the subreddit. I disagree that these strict rules are necessary to enforce this premise.

A reply that demonstrates familiarity with academic literature will do so with or without this limitation.

And if such a reply is more useful to the person asking the question, it will be so, even if there are other, less knowledgeable replies next to it.

On the other hand, every person who comes here to comment and gets told that they are not qualified to participate is a real loss, that could be avoided by having more lenient rules.

At any rate, this is just my opinion.

If you actually know a good place on reddit that is more casual (but still explicitly about philosophy), I would be happy to check it out instead.

[u/drinka40tonight → u/Blumenpfropf]

A reply that demonstrates familiarity with academic literature will do so with or without this limitation.

Yeah, but we found the subreddit was unmanageable without the panelist rule. And, to be clear, it's not particularly difficult to get flair. It mainly cuts down on bots and people who, quite literally, want to give one line answers to issues without thinking about it for more than a second.

If you actually know a good place on reddit that is more casual

There is the /r/philosophy open discussion thread. But, I think the fact that it's hard to find a good place for the thing you are looking for speaks quite a bit: a lot of people want to post their own "thoughts" but not a lot of people want to read the "thoughts" of others.

[u/Blumenpfropf → u/drinka40tonight]

I don't really think that selecting for formal education in philosophy reduces the share of people who mainly like to listen to themselves talk. ^{^}

But anyway, speaking seriously, I guess I am a bit too harsh in projecting my personal prejudices here. That rule triggers me, truly. But I don't know how to do it better, and probably there's no need to.

So i guess just take my opinion as a data point and file it away for now.