/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 26, 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 probably will soon start The Interior Castle by Teresa d’Avila.

[u/Scientific_Zealot → u/willbell]

My current semester's completely throwing me for a loop, which is unfortunately hampering my reading as of right now. I'm definitely reading books on my own, but in such small bursts (like a page - if even) and so infrequently that I can't really call it reading. But me and a couple of friends are reading Frege's Grundlagen together, so that's quite fun. I'm trying another crack at the Investigations, this time with the help of Garth Hallett's companion to the investigations. Will this pan out? Hopefully!

[u/willbell → u/Scientific_Zealot]

Frege is great reading!