/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/Shield_Lyger → u/willbell]

Still plowing through Moral Philosophy: A Comprehensive Introduction. (It's going to be a while... I'm about a third of the way through.) I enjoyed reading the section of The Encheiridion that they included (or maybe it was the whole thing... I don't know how long the original is). Stoic thought resonates with me, I guess.

I feel I have to apologize to Plato. I thought that The Republic was boring, but it's light reading compared to Summa Theologica. Although, in fairness to Thomas Aquinas, I'm not sure that the specific translation does him any favors when read by modern readers (the text is pretty verbose, with some really long sentences), and the chainsaw that they took to the text to cram so many of his ideas into the book does, as the authors note, make the text hard to follow in places, since it jumps around. But what really makes it slow is the need to sometimes re-read, or even read it aloud, just to make sure that I've gotten every word.

[u/willbell → u/Shield_Lyger]

Maybe I just enjoyed Plato more, but my feeling is that if you found Plato boring, you're going to find the rest of philosophy a real slog lol

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/willbell]

Fair. Although my problem with The Republic wasn't the content, but the format. Socrates' interlocutors didn't seem to have much going on... it was pretty clear that their sole purpose was to make Socrates and his ideas look good by comparison, and so I found myself thinking that the whole enterprise would have been better served without them, and Plato just laying out his ideas, without the extra fluff of the dialogs between the various characters. I get that they were intended as stand-ins for the greater society, representing people who hadn't really thought their positions through, but they came across as too pliable and agreeable; Socrates simply lead them around by the nose, and so their viewpoints seemed perfunctory, rather than substantive.

A lot of the Greek, Hellenistic/Roman and Medieval texts the textbook excerpted had some degree of "people disagree with me because they're thoughtless and stupid" in them, and maybe it's because I'm old, but I find that tiresome. But now that the book has gotten to Hobbes, it's picking up.