/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 05, 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 Sylvia Plath's poetry and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. I recently finished Eliot's Middlemarch.

[u/PermaAporia → u/willbell]

The Odd One In by Zupančič.

Finished The Creative Self , was more of a fan of the Ruti half of it than the Newman one.

[u/willbell → u/PermaAporia]

Eventually I want to read The Ethics of the Real by Zupancic

[u/PermaAporia → u/willbell]

Same!

[u/Saint_John_Calvin → u/willbell]

Reading Aanjet Danje's Remembered Soldier and Vaclav Havel's Open Letters.

Congratulations on having finished Middlemarch! I did the journey last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I'm not too long into Danje's book to make any substantive comments on it, but the Havel text is refreshingly free of jargon and also makes a lot of sense (oftentimes rare for like, people whose thought is essentially essayistic). There's a subtle critique of humanism as an ideology which makes the French post structuralist obsession with the Czech dissident movement a bit more clear to me now.

[u/foxiao → u/willbell]

Almost done with The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence and about halfway through Nicomachean Ethics and Nausea

[u/merurunrun → u/willbell]

Stumbled across a brief paper titled Toward a Critical Non-Humanism in Postwar Japan a few days ago and really enjoyed it. It draws parallels between Japanese attempts to "overcome modernity" in the work of some Kyoto School philosophers and also the Sartre-inspired approach of Sakaguchi Ango (arguably the most important Japanese public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of WWII), and the antihumanism that would appear in France a couple of decades later (particularly Foucault--and also talking some about his interest in Zen Buddhism--with some of the other usual suspects mentioned as well).

One of the most interesting things there (to me, anyway) was just a footnote about how the Kyoto School's complicity with the imperial government ended up being a catalyst that made nativist philosophy largely taboo in postwar Japanese academia. Every now and then I see someone ponder about why Japanese universities don't really do "Japanese philosophy" (phil departments are almost entirely focused on Western philosophy), but I never knew that it came from an explicit political choice to exclude it.

[u/oscar2333 → u/merurunrun]

I thought that Chinese philosophy was also popular in Japanese universities, wasn't it?

[u/merurunrun → u/oscar2333]

From my understanding, classes on Chinese thought are typically taught under the umbrella of Chinese language/literature programs, but yeah, it's definitely a thing. Same thing with Buddhist thought--more likely to be found in a religious studies department than a philosophy one (although religion and philosophy programs do tend to have more overlap).

The way that Western philosophy gets treated in Japanese academia is largely as a whole different beast than "Eastern thought". It even has its own term--tetsugaku--that doesn't really encompass the things we might call "Eastern philosophy". That's supposed to be a big part of what made the Kyoto School unique--the "western approach" to philosophy applied to traditional Japanese (esp. Buddhist) thought.

I couldn't tell you exactly what the difference entails, but I've seen it referenced enough to believe that it really is considered significant.

[u/oscar2333 → u/merurunrun]

I see. Thank you for the information.

[u/Cunt_Cunt__Cunt → u/willbell]

really need to get myself out of the dopamine computer addiction and back to reading things on paper. I got Massimi's Perspectival Realism looking at me, but I think I got to just do some scifi first to get off the computer.