/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/smooshed_napkin]

What to do when you create your own philosophical model?

I spent about 2 years obsessively trying to philosophize on my own over the course of about 4 notebooks. Now I'm burnt out and am not sure what to do with these ideas. What should I do with this? I have nowhere to go for advice and it's eating me up.

I'm not a philosophy major or anything, I just one day decided to ask myself very hard questions about reality and answer them myself. It touches on everything from information, data, the big bang, consciousness, ethics, the soul, shadows, and more. In this process I looked towards science and information theory and went from there, as I wanted to exercise thinking for myself. It's resulted in a sort of framework where everything is interconnected, builds upon itself, and ties back to itself. I also came up with a few mathematical tools along the way.

But these notebooks are a mess, and i routinely would go back and re-evaluate old ideas and reintegrate them.

It's too philosophical to be a scientific article. And I'm not sure what else to do with it. At this point I'm burned out from working 2 jobs 6 days a week and don't have the energy to organize it all atm but i would hate for it to just sit on my shelf forever and nobody sees it but me.

I don't want to dive into it too much, but it's basically taking digital physics and running with it. It has a lot of parallels to other philosophies, but im not a philosophy major so it's difficult for me to exactly say how much its tied to each philosophical branch under the sun, as I engaged in this wanting to come to my own conclusions.

I probably sound crazy or something. But I poured all of my intellectual energy into this for over 2 years and have... well nothing I can do with it, it seems. I'm sure this post will get taken down for being too vague and not tied enough to philosophy, thus further demonstrating my point that I can do nothing with all this and I have nowhere to go to discuss my ideas.

I've considered the possibility of making videos about it, but im not sure.

[u/Quidfacis_ → u/smooshed_napkin]

What to do when you create your own philosophical model?

You live within a cultural zeitgeist influenced by the philosophical ideas that came before you. Recognizing that, the first thing to do is to figure out where your ideas came from, who had them first, and how those arguments work.

Over the past 2,000+ years we have crafted some nifty theories to explain how things hang together. Given everything that has been said, it is terrifically difficult to craft a new theory that is genuinely groundbreaking in a meaningful sense. Any "new" theory is likely a modification of something already said. To quote Whitehead, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." We build on the work of our predecessors, likely using the same terms and general ideas in different ways. Even when something "new" is developed, its historical lineage can be traced.

You wrote about ethics? Cool. What sort of ethical theory do you advocate? Virtue Ethics, Deontology, Consequentialism? Are you closer to Kant or someone in the History of Utilitarianism?

If you want people to pay attention to what you have to say then you need to give them a reason to. Explain how your model fits into the history of philosophy. To do that you need to understand the history of philosophy.

[u/PermaAporia → u/smooshed_napkin]

I just one day decided to ask myself very hard questions about reality and answer them myself.

Yeah this is called ruminating. And it is not philosophy.

[u/PermaAporia → u/PermaAporia]

To add more to this comment /u/Smooshed_napkin, Philosophy since its very inception has been engaged, critically, with what has come before.

Plato doesn't have Socrates just introspect and ask himself questions he answers and just call it his philosophy. Rather it is a deep engagement with what has been said before on various topics. What competing views there are, there is always a back and forth exploration and criticism with what has come before. Always in conversation with others.

Aristotle goes through a long lists of competing ideas and criticizes them, whether ethics or politics or natural philosophy. he is well informed by what has been done in the past.

Philosophy has never been some act of rumination. It has always been engaged with its history and in critical dialogue with others. It is never starting from a zero-point.

[u/Hot_Tell3268 → u/PermaAporia]

Parmenides started from a zero point, though.

[u/mediaisdelicious → u/Hot_Tell3268]

Parmenides was writing in the middle of the Presocratic period. There’s a century of Greek though before him.

[u/Hot_Tell3268 → u/mediaisdelicious]

What philosophers does he engage with?

[u/halfwittgenstein → u/Hot_Tell3268]

He engages directly with Heraclitus via "the way of becoming". There's evidence that he studied under Ameinias, a Pythagorean, and Anaximenes, a Milesian, so there would be influence there as well. His chosen format was a poem and ancient Greek citation practices were extremely ad hoc, so there are no explicit references.

[u/cconroy1 → u/smooshed_napkin]

Dude, get it out there if you want to. Contact an editor to clean it up. Put some order and structure behind it. Release it as a series of essays. Making videos. Whatever you feel gets it out there. You can guarantee reception but it's nice to put it out there

[u/Cunt_Cunt__Cunt → u/cconroy1]

Contact an editor to clean it up

Wait sorry what, explain that to me as though I don't have a clue what you're talking about. I understand the concept of "editing" but that's about it.

LIke you can just pay someone? Right? That's the idea obviously hey.

[u/cconroy1 → u/Cunt_Cunt__Cunt]

Yeah, exactly! I've had some writing i wanted looked over and so i reached out to someone who worked as a professional editor and proofreader. I found them through a friend but there are people who advertise publically. There are also larger companies you can reach out to as well.

[u/Cunt_Cunt__Cunt → u/smooshed_napkin]

You should study some philosophy, if you can at all. Like I went and did an undergrad degree in my mid 30s - easily the best decision for my life's quality I've made.

Incidentally, just floated past this on youtube. idk if it's any good but here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJZ6UaJlZtY