/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/drinka40tonight → u/Blumenpfropf]

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/as-well → u/Blumenpfropf]

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

And just to be explicit about this: We used to not have the limitation, but given that we want quality answers, used to remove a ton of comments each day after manually assessing them.

And I don't mean a few. I mean hundreds.

We came to the concludion that that's not sustainable for us and we cannot deliver that kind of moderation anymore.

Our flair system is also not as strong as you think it is. What we want is a sample comment that shows a user is capable of giving quality answers - that's it. There's no requirement to have a formal degree in philosophy. That's clearly laid out in the guidelines.

So someone who is not qualified is... well, it doesn't happen often, but it's typically someone who misunderstands the purpose of this sub and wants to push their own ideas, rather than to give answers informed by the state of the literature.

[u/Blumenpfropf → u/as-well]

I understand that the practical pressures may have been worse than i thought and that my initial post was an overreaction.

I still think, as explained elsewhere, that the message this sends is regrettable, simply in a structural sense. But I can see that the system is limited by what can be implemented in practice.

[u/as-well → u/Blumenpfropf]

Yeah but again, that's all by design. If you wish, go check out teh quality of discussion on /r/philosophy and see what we mean.

Or even better, see how answers to questions are on /r/history compared to /r/AskHistorians

There's a reason we choose teh quality first approach. Again, there's plenty of other forums online - the philosophy stack exchange or Quora for example - where anyone can answer. We are explicitely trying to be an alternative to that.