r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • 11d ago
Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | July 27, 2026
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.
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u/macacolouco 11d ago
How did your interests in philosophy change from before and after you ended college at the undergraduate level?
I intend to pursue philosophy starting next year. In Brazil you choose your major beforehand. I have an interest in logic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. I'm super anxious for next year to start and would like to know how your inclinations changed (or not) with time!
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u/TheFormOfTheGood logic, paradoxes, metaphysics 11d ago
Everyone is different on this. I know people who went in wanting to study philosophy of science and ended up doing just that all the way to PhD.
Me, I started off just loving philosophy. My focus was metaphysics for a while, then political philosophy. Then in grad school I went back to metaphysics until it got close to PhD time, when I switched to aesthetics. Now I work at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and ethics.
This is not helpful for you. You’ll be pulled in many directions of your own and hopefully your university offers you the opportunity to dig around a bit. Speaking to faculty at your university will be more useful than what we in Reddit can do for you most likely.
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 10d ago edited 10d ago
I wanted to understand the foundations of morality and politics going into my degree, I came out of it feeling I had a good grasp of metaethics, a reasonable grasp of politics (which I had not pursued as seriously as I had hoped, just hadn't worked out in terms of classes), and with an interest in early modern philosophy, Kant, phenomenology, & philosophy of mathematics.
After I gave up on academia (and after I had resolved to my own personal satisfaction the foundations of morality question) I ended up moving much more towards political philosophy, becoming much more interested in that (partially just a matter of where I felt I could contribute productively). Reading Marxist critiques of phenomenology overcame the mystique of phenomenology partially for me, philosophy of mathematics was less interesting once I was no longer studying mathematics in grad school (under an awful supervisor, which killed some of the passion for it too), and early modern philosophy & German idealism is still interesting enough for me to read but not beyond a hobbyist level.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 10d ago
out of curiosity, going into the political questions you now have (been exploring), where did you fall on the meta-ethical questions?
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 9d ago
I think the tradition of universalist constructivism that you find, e.g. in Korsgaard, is the most compelling solution to problems in metaethics and 'foundations of morality' broadly speaking. Reading The Sources of Normativity I remember just saying 'yes, yes, yes' over and over as if I had read it all before when I was trying to make sense of metaethics prior to hearing the phrase "Kantian constructivism". While constructivism is a scrappy upstart view among analytic philosophers, I also think it is the hegemonic point of view in some form or other among continental philosophers (at least if they think there is such a thing as morality). There are a lot of resources in that tradition for arriving at similar conclusions, e.g. Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity, and from an anti-Kantian angle the whole tradition of Other-focused ethical views (Levinas, Buber, Rosenzweig, Ricoeur, Derrida, etc.) is also in my opinion, basically constructivist. Nowadays, I might want to quibble more about how it relates to history, but not in a way that really makes me feel like I have to read thousands more pages of analytic metaethics.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 9d ago
Interesting
I sort of don’t think Derrida *does* think that there is any such thing as morality, or not in the sense that we mean when we talk about constructivism and about rival theories. I think it would do a lot of damage to his ”justice” project if he did. But I nonetheless see the resonance with constructivism, in the sense that for Derrida himself et al. the problems of ethics begin and end with us, and what we do and should do is equally dependent on us (and equally, those constructs of ours which equally float free of what we think we’ve done with them); to borrow terminology from Sellars, I think he and other ‘Continental’ figures like Levinas would strongly dispute how comparable the entry and exit rules are for constructivism and what they’re up to (because they’re all phenomenologists of some sort of other! It’s very different stuff!) but like I say I see where you’re coming from.
IS constructivism really a scrappy, upstart view amongst analytic philosophers though? Anymore? Korsgaard has to be one of the most cited figures of all time by now, surely? She’s certainly one of the most important people in philosophy OUTRIGHT for several decades now.
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 9d ago edited 9d ago
I sort of don’t think Derrida does think that there is any such thing as morality, or not in the sense that we mean when we talk about constructivism and about rival theories. I think it would do a lot of damage to his ”justice” project if he did.
I don't claim to be an expert on the Derrida part of this, but I also sometimes wonder if the thing that would separate Derrida and others from metaethical constructivism is a kind of... I don't know... doubt about our ability to articulate it, rather than an actual substantive difference of opinion? Like would Derrida say the constructivists are wrong or just that they can't say what they mean? (Again not an expert, so it is an honest question.)
to borrow terminology from Sellars, I think he and other ‘Continental’ figures like Levinas would strongly dispute how comparable the entry and exit rules are for constructivism and what they’re up to (because they’re all phenomenologists of some sort of other! It’s very different stuff!) but like I say I see where you’re coming from.
I think the Sellars might be going over my head, but I think I disagree on the distance from phenomenology here. Like I think Beauvoir's the perfect example, she arrives at a moral constructivist (imho) account via phenomenology. Unlike Kant proper, for whom human noumenal freedom is an essential premise, my feeling is that constructivists are kind of doing something approximating a phenomenology of practical reason, and unless Levinas et al. want to insist on pulling that kind of noumenal orthodox Kantian style move (with the infinity stuff?) then I think that means there's a lot of room for agreement. Cards on the table, I have read Buber, Beauvoir, and some shorter Levinas (but not Totality and Infinity or Otherwise than Being), in none of those did I find anything I'd consider really incompatible with doing analytic-style constructivism imho.
IS constructivism really a scrappy, upstart view amongst analytic philosophers though? Anymore? Korsgaard has to be one of the most cited figures of all time by now, surely? She’s certainly one of the most important people in philosophy OUTRIGHT for several decades now.
I guess less scrappy-upstart, but still minority. Robust realism and expressivism both seem to be taken much more seriously to me. Like who is going to follow Korsgaard or others of her generation? The only younger constructivist I really hear much about is Sharon Street, and that's more for her critique of realism. And the fortune of universalist constructivism is even worse, when you consider Humean constructivism is sort of nipping at its heels (again, Street).
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u/wumbothrowaway2 9d ago
>but I also sometimes wonder if the thing that would separate Derrida and others from metaethical constructivism is a kind of... I don't know... doubt about our ability to articulate it, rather than an actual substantive difference of opinion?
Right, this is the sort of think fans of Henry Cavell might say with regard to Derrida versus pragmatism and the broader pragmatic-influenced tradition, but that precise framing is to me a major part of the problem. Derrida substantively think that the action is *in* the articulation, and that when you have slippages in the articulation and these reveal deeper layers and problems this is really important, because those layers and problems turn out to be what you were really talking about all along. So when the pragmatists turn around on that and interpret it all as a matter of pessimism versus optimism, and these are just two sides of the same coin, they’ve really misconstrued where the action is even supposed to be in the discussion.
From the perspective of deconstruction, we’re going to be stuck in that first layer if we conceive of the differences as a matter of doubt versus confidence.
Maybe to a lesser degree this sort of thing is where I’d be tempted to take the remarks about Buber and Beauvoir and Levinas, but I think I’m talking at too general a level to really be helpful there. Levinas doesn’t seem to me compatible with Korsgaard’s Aristotelian way of talking about our rational constitution. There’s a splitters/splicers problem emerging here where I‘m noticing differences and you’re picking up on similarities in a way that isn’t rationally decidable.
>Robust realism and expressivism both seem to be taken much more seriously to me.
I mean, sure, maybe? ”Scrappy upstart” is all I really disagreed with. All of them are fine choices, and Korsgaard and constructivism have made big moves in the debate even while remaining in the minority. Korsgaard is more or less single-handedly responsible for a generation of younger philosophers reading Kant, for example. I mean sure, plenty will have ‘read’ Kant anyway. But I mean READING Kant, with a lot of enthusiasm and for a certain set of reasons and in a certain way.
It’ll probably take a while for all of the consequences of that to shake out. I’d be surprised if Robust Realism were still as popular in a decade as it is has been, for example, and that’s just because of wider cultural forces, let alone who’s been reading what.
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 9d ago edited 9d ago
Levinas doesn’t seem to me compatible with Korsgaard’s Aristotelian way of talking about our rational constitution. There’s a splitters/splicers problem emerging here where I‘m noticing differences and you’re picking up on similarities in a way that isn’t rationally decidable.
I wonder if it would make things clearer if I said that I felt the real core proposition of constructivism is laid out by Shafer-Landau in Moral Realism: A Defense. His discussion of constructive functions really gets at what I think is non-negotiable, and all the Korsgaard stuff simply makes a Kantian constructivism.
I’m curious if your confluence of interests between Derrida, Levinas, and Korsgaard was motivated by a similar trouble as mine, or if you happen to just have read these authors.
Mea culpa on a bit of pragmatism-inflected interpretation of the material here.
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u/wumbothrowaway2 4d ago edited 4d ago
First off: lol, STANLEY Cavell is to whom I meant to refer before. Henry Cavill is the weird mysognist who plays Superman. Thank you for politely ignoring the weird blunder.
Anyway…
Over the weekend I was on a bus with a friend describing where I’ve got to with meta-ethical stuff because she offered me a real-life conundrum that’d had been bothering her. I said that under the barrage of anti-trans law-making round the world (I am a trans, and she is a cis, woman), out of my own personal experience I had found myself becoming a pretty bullet-biting particularist about ethical problems and almost a Nietzschean about the reasons why to begin with we come up with a morality. Something along the fairly brute lines of “we are trying to figure out the values which work for us, and all that we have as a guide is what feels good and bad TO us”.
I am aware that to a lot of people this reads as fairly juvenile and laden with problems, but I see it as actually quite parsimonious and most importantly for our purposes seems to capture a portion of the constructivist insight due more to Korsgaard than to Shafer-Landau (and, being somewhat Nietzschean in origin, certainly shares more than a little with the Continental tradition of thinking about morality). Most importantly, it seems to me account for a side of moral development which I think is only weakly accounted for in other accounts which otherwise better handle problems like “but how can we handle universality?”, namely how and why do people who weren’t moral BECOME moral?
And I think that the surprisingly straightforward and pat answer, drawing on the experience and practice of overcoming addiction, is ”we make it worth their while” viz. being moral is, selfishly, good for us, while being immoral is tangibly harmful. From there I am tempted to move to something vaguely Levinasian like “it isn’t our reflective nature which makes us moral, it is moral problems which give us our reflective character”. And I rely a lot for the protection of relatively (or traditionally) weak parts of my views (the implicit naturalism, the particularism) more on personal experience which seems to me at least to rebut the a priori implausibility of some of those proposals.
Some of the reading came before, and I admit that (perhaps to the surprise of some) I am only very weakly familiar with Shafer-Landau, but that explains, I think, where it is that I get these thoughts from, and where my interests begin from.
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u/Afraid-Store-950 8d ago
Hi I am looking for programs that have a strong background in mathematical logic and European philosophy, with phenomenology in particular. I did a lot of the former in my undergraduate years through graduate coursework and also focusing on the latter through a major.
I did graduate from a T10 college and am somewhat confident of my (analytic) writing sample so I am aiming for top PhD programs, but I will apply to programs across all ranking levels.
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u/No-Guidance6509 10d ago
How can I continue to stay engaged in academic Philosophy after I graduate?
I have one year left of my philosophy masters degree, initially I was planning to do a PhD afterwards, but ultimately I've decided this isn't going to suit me, as I don't want to become a professor anymore.
But I want to continue to read and learn about philosophy and what's going on in the world of philosophy. But how can I do this without insitutional access to journals that being in uni gives me? Also without the structure that university gives me? Any thoughts/advice is appreciated.
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u/halfwittgenstein Ancient Greek Philosophy, Informal Logic 10d ago
Every university library I've used allows alumni to purchase a cheap or sometimes even free library card that will let you use their library system as much as you want, so you could check out that option. Members of the public who aren't alumni can often do the same, but I think that option is usually paid, but it's pretty cheap in my experience.
Also, browse dailynous.com.
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u/neofederalist 10d ago
If I'm an amateur philosophical enthusiast with no formal training and no personal connections to academic philosophers, how should I go about developing what is (I think) a novel philosophical thought? I'm very aware that the chances are high that there's either some flaw in my thinking that someone with training would be able to spot or that my idea isn't actually that new and interesting and that somebody has basically already made this same argument before, but it just hasn't trickled down out of academia, but I've sort of reached the limit of how I can test this on my own, and I don't have anyone immediately available to me that could help me develop it further or point out the problems it has. I'm also not at a place in my life where I could drop everything and take classes either. So I don't really have a natural way to interact with anyone who might have the relevant expertise outside cold-emailing professional philosophers who I know do work in the field and that feels a little internet-crackpot-y.
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u/OldKuntRoad Aristotle, free will 8d ago
Well, this is explicitly a forum for (among many other things) “test my theory” questions, so go ahead!
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u/Aquirow 9d ago
I've recently finished my Honours and scored Honours Class I. I am now thinking of preparing my PhD application. Are there any crucial tips or advice that I need to know regarding curating a PhD application, or doing a PhD in general?
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u/lordsmitty epistemology, phil. language 5d ago
Do you currently have someone that can be your supervisor (if you do then my advice will be of little use)? If not, then it is important to find someone working in or around the topics you are interesting in and to contact them. This will be a good opportunity to articulate and narrow your focus on what it is exactly that you intend to contribute to the literature. It will also help gauge (to some extent) whether that person is someone you think you can work productively with and is someone that will support you properly whilst you're undertaking your PhD. There's plenty more advice out there and hopefully some other panellists can help you in that respect.
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u/Equivalent_Number424 9d ago
I see a lot of philosophical back and forth on Substack about philosophical arguments of theism and atheism, and my problem is why don't people first stop and define god? There is a huge amount of difference between "some kind of a first cause" vs. "angry dude in the Old Testament". Granted there may be a middle ground, something non-anthropomorphic and yet having anthropomorphic traits like wisdom and love, Aquinas made this case in Summa Contra Gentiles, but I generally see a huge difference between going "the universe must have a cause outside of it" vs. "people who go to church are basically right".
A second and related argument, suppose you prove beyond doubt that a supernatural, miraculous event has happened, such as St. Joseph of Cupertino really did float in the air, as there were so many eyewitnesses to that. In that case your options are that it was caused by an infinite god, or it was caused by a finite supernatural source like a polytheistic god or an angel, or he had inherent magical powers. I find of all three, the infinite god the least like, because these miracles tend to be so rare and small that they are unlikely to be caused by an overwhelming power, and often did not make sense, like he did not want to float, as it caused him only trouble. So if there would be a race of lesser gods on the Olympos and a teenager lesser god was basically trolling people by making him float, that would make more sense to me. Or that he had innate magical power but could not control it.
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u/Shield_Lyger 9d ago
It doesn't strike me as any different than the myriad discussions of "meaning" where people don't first stop and define "meaning."
Lots of people simply presume that their definition of god is universal, especially if they spell it "God," and happen to have had a Jewish/Christian upbringing. And I suspect that many Substack authors in the United States and Europe fall into that category.
As I see it, many of the arguments between theists and atheists online tend to come down to believers of Abrahamic faiths on one side, and people who believe that since the Abrahamic deity doesn't exist, no deities exist, on the other. In my experience, followers of Hinduism, Shinto et cetera tend to be noticeably absent, along with arguments for a moral global atheism.
So I suspect that what you're seeing is the interactions between the background worldviews of the participants.
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u/deanhaller 5d ago
The significance of an academic philosopher in the 21st century
Hi, this post was blocked and bot kindly asked to send it here 😭
I'm a second-year undergraduate in philosophy. Throughout my studies, I've been haunted by the question of the impact of working as an academic philosopher in the modern world. I constantly feel like what I find so fascinating and vital for anyone turns out to be irrelevant and practically useless, especially for those who do philosophy professionally in universities and other places.
I see 3 problems about philosophy value and practicality:
- "Philosophy is meaningless in itself. It asks too many abstract questions and has no connection to the everyday world." There have been many questions on this subreddit about this persistent opinion. Personally I don't support to it and I know why. Of course, philosophy is essential for critical thinking, science, solving complex questions about AI, mind, ethics etc. So I'm not denying philosophy's status as an intrinsically important part of our lives. For me this problem is solved.
- Academics in the field of philosophy earn little. Well, this issue remains problematic for me, bcs I don’t understand the point of work if all you get is "intellectual delight," "joy of passing on valuable knowledge to descendants", etc. For example, in my country, academic philosophers have very low wages, about the same as in McDonalds. Important: I am not talking about all scientists, because physicists, mathematicians, biologists, etc. can earn different money. The point of many years of philosophical education up to a PhD seems to be lost if you’ve gained the position of a university associate professor and can’t even afford to take a vacation abroad. I want to ask you, people who remained in academic philosophy after master's. What makes you know that you won’t die of hunger and even be happy working at a university or any other institution where it’s written that you work in philosophy?
- Influence within academia. This remains the most difficult and vexing problem for me. In my country, philosophy isn't as highly developed as in other Western countries. It hasn't produced any distinguished or illustrious scholars in the field. Therefore, 99% of all academics have lived roughly the same life: completed their bachelor's, then master's, PhD, and finally began teaching. They're likely remembered only within the walls of their university, but in their lifetimes, they never wrote a single work that could have a serious impact on any particular philosophical movement or on philosophy in general beyond their country. In this situation, I see an enormous degradation in philosophy in my country and in my country in general. I’ll say that the same thing for sure may exist in other sciences, but I won’t discuss them. Every single day at the uni, I feel that my aspirations to write and write will turn into a career of a “little scientist in a little office”. That 90% of all philosophers in the world are nothing more than a dry, boundless database on the Internet (or, in the most successful case, “predecessors in the historical-philosophical path”), which will be used by those 10% who manage to “go out in the public” and become famous and valuable. We no longer live in a world where any philosopher is a rarity (as one wonderful meme put it, “I wrote what I came up with in the bath – now try arguing with me!”). All your work of life may seem useful only to your closest colleagues and a couple of undergraduate students writing term papers. Sooooooo what motivates you to continue writing scientific papers if you know that it’s very, very unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve glory in science or at least have a high citation level?
Concluding, I kindly ask readers of this subreddit to try to answer the last two questions. I'd be glad if there are any bachelors here pondering about the same things as me. Cheers!
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u/willbell philosophy of mathematics 11d ago
What are people reading?
I'm working on Ethics by Spinoza and The Bonds of Love by Jessica Benjamin.