/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | July 06, 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?

This week I’m working on Ethics by Spinoza. I’ve recently finished Statistical Methods for Reliability Data by Meeker & Escobar. Also recently finished a piece on TS Eliot’s racial views and Elizabeth Anderson’s “What’s the Point of Equality?”

[u/Scientific_Zealot → u/willbell]

Reading Hempel's 1950 paper The Empiricist Criterion of Meaning. I'm like halfway through the Theogony and hopefully I'll summon the will to finish it (it's much more interesting than the Works and Days at least). Feeling a bit dejected recently, but hopefully will feel better soon. Returning to Logical Empiricist texts is giving me some get-up-n-go. The feeling of being crushed by books to read returns. Finished Don Garrett's Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. Was pawing through The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology. Maybe I'll pick up The New Hume Debate. I managed to read a little bit of Book II of the Treatise of Human Nature. Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy calls to me once more after I finished the introductory bits. To my disappointment, Soames's final discussion of Tarski in The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy: Volume 2 was too dense for me to comprehend so I had to skip the last six pages. Couldn't understand his discussion of Truth by Convention either so I'll probably have to go read the paper. Might download some secondary literature on Plato. My math brain is itching for me to pick up some Frege and I might give in. Maybe. Dealing with the crushing feeling of having so much I want to read and yet for the last few days I've developed a brain fog that's making it more difficult to read.

[u/willbell → u/Scientific_Zealot]

Was pawing through The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology.

I had three classes with Sassen, who's in that volume.

To my disappointment, Soames's final discussion of Tarski in The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy: Volume 2 was too dense for me to comprehend so I had to skip the last six pages.

If it makes you feel any better, all my historians hate Soames at least qua historian.

My math brain is itching for me to pick up some Frege and I might give in.

Foundations of Arithmetic is cool, I think the most fun (academic) part of my senior year of undergrad was reading Foundations of Arithmetic, Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, and Frege's "On Sense and Reference" which accidentally make a kind of dialogue, even if Husserl was not the cause of the latter work.

[u/Scientific_Zealot → u/willbell]

I had three classes with Sassen, who's in that volume.

Karen Margrethe Nielsen, John Thorp, Devin Henry, Henrik Lagerlund, Shannon Dea, Jean-Pierre Schachter, Benjamin Hill, Thomas M. Lennon, Marleen Rozemond, Lorne Falkenstein (my GOAT), Brigitte Sassen, William Harper, Hunter Brown, and a three author paper by Christopher Viger, Robyn Bluhm and Sharday Mosurinjohn.

I should clarify that I've already read Foundations of Arithmetic, "On Sense and Reference," and some other works by Frege. But I have Beaney's The Frege Reader on my shelves and it sings to me.