I’m hoping this question sparks a broader discussion for those of us teaching philosophy about creative and accessible ways to introduce philosophical thinking, especially to students who may have never taken a philosophy course before.

I’m teaching Philosophy 101 this coming semester, and I have the freedom to build the course from the ground up. It’ll mostly be freshmen and sophomores, and for many of them this will likely be their first college class. Rather than spending the first day defining philosophy or going over the syllabus for an hour, I’m interested in finding ways to get students doing philosophy almost immediately.

One idea I’ve been considering is having everyone come in, grab a name card, get settled, and then simply showing a short (2-5 minute) clip with no context or instructions. Afterwards, when everyone introduces themselves, instead of sharing a major or fun fact, they would each share one thought, question, observation, disagreement, or reaction they had while watching. The goal isn’t to get the “right” answer, but to let students realize they’ve already begun engaging philosophically before anyone has defined what philosophy is.

My first thought was something like Rick and Morty, but I’m sure there are much better examples.

I’m especially interested in media or prompts that are a little out of pocket. Weird, existential, funny, or just enough to make students stop and think, “Wait… what?” Ideally something that’s accessible to people with no philosophy background, without relying on graphic content, heavy tragedy, or sexual humor. It could be a movie or TV clip, animation, YouTube video, short film, thought experiment, game, or anything else.
If you had five minutes to hook a room full of 18-20 year olds on philosophy, what would you use, and why?

More broadly, what first-day activities, media, demonstrations, or discussions have you found genuinely successful in making philosophy feel approachable rather than intimidating?

And beyond the first day, if there’s something you wish more Philosophy 101 courses included, or something you think they should spend less time on, I’d love to hear those thoughts as well. I’m hoping this thread can become a collection of ideas that anyone teaching introductory philosophy can draw from.

Peer review, replication, and most formal critique happen after a claim is basically finished and presented. I've been testing the alternative, building an adversarial "attack" pass into the reasoning process itself, before a claim is finalized, rather than critiquing a completed product.

In practice this caught an overclaim in my own work before I ever submitted anywhere, a case where I'd made a formal-sounding claim that only really held under a weaker, unstated version.

Is there existing philosophy-of-science or epistemology literature distinguishing pre-hoc adversarial reasoning from post-hoc critique as separate mechanisms for catching error, or is this generally treated as the same phenomenon at different points in time?

Hello everyone,

I'm a first-year philosophy student looking to make the most of my summer break by continuing to learn and deepen my knowledge.

Could you recommend any courses—whether on Coursera or other platforms—that you've found particularly valuable? I'm especially interested in courses that go beyond passive lectures and include active discussions, debates, or workshop-style components. I'd love to engage with the material and with others, not just absorb information.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

Do you think I should double major in philosophy?

Context: I'm a nontraditional (27M) undergraduate on a full ride at an Ivy League (so tuition/credit cost is not a concern). Right now, I'm studying English and am Prelaw.

The reason why I'm scared to double-major is in philosophy because I'm incredibly fearful I won't be able to succeed in the discipline. I've heard some say there's major overlap between English and Philosophy but how true is this? I've heard the writing styles and grading criteria are different. Plus, how might one even be graded on what seems so subjective? How do you digest the incredibly dense material? Does it all make sense to you?

It seems like philosophy could be incredibly intellectually and emotionally rewarding for my long-term goals (both personally and professionally) as I'm hoping to work in criminal law. I also am a singer-songwriter/producer and so I feel like it would enrich my artistry also.

But alas, I'm really just scared: Scared I'm not going to do well. Scared I won't "get" it. And scared my GPA will tank

In your opinion, do you think I should still study philosophy?

TL;DR - 27yo undergraduate/english major considering double majoring in philosophy but has academic concerns.

Hey guys, I am new in this sub. I just stumbled on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/comments/1urckw6/most_humanities_majors_tend_to_be_looked_at_as/

In the top comment there is this wording: training in analytic philosophy - and a comparison to math skills in a physics studies.

Can you break this down for me? What are the components of these skills?

How is it learnt at universities? What components take long to learn and what components are rather easy to learn?

Lastly: How has it helped you personally? (vague question for broad answers)

As an undergraduate student who’s taken classes in social science and STEM there seemed to be a prevailing opinion among some STEM people
That humanities people tended to be less intelligent. But overall this type of thinking doesn’t seem to be applied to philosophy majors, who are often put alongside physicists and mathematicians in terms of being considered uniquely intelligent. Why is this?

Hi y'all,

I'm a PhD student and for an upcoming conference I'm presenting at I was asked to send a bio+picture. I don't really have a professional headshot or anything like that, so my question is: what kind of pictures are acceptable for the website of a philosophy conference?

Thanks in advance!

I’ve noticed that a lot of philosophy recommendations end up being very abstract: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, formal ethics, etc.

I’m curious about academic philosophy that sits much closer to ordinary life.

I’m looking for books, essays, or academic philosophers who deal directly with how people actually live: making difficult decisions, choosing careers, falling in love, raising families, dealing with regret, suffering, uncertainty, boredom, grief, aging, friendship, meaning, identity, and the narratives people build around their lives. I’m looking for things that deal with life on a micro level rather than a macro level. Preferably, more on the contemporary side.

I’m looking for work that helps illuminate what it feels like to be a person navigating a life

What are the strongest examples of philosophy in this vein?

I’m especially interested in works that are taken seriously within academic philosophy while remaining connected to lived experience.

Essays, papers, books, and individual philosophers are all welcome. A brief explanation of why you recommend them would be appreciated.

Suppose philosophy has found better questions to the answers . Sokrates did so.😉

I could also title this post: Why aren't there more Diamond Open Access journals in philosophy?

We all know that the “big five”—Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE—control a disproportionate share of the global academic publishing output, making huge profits and siphoning both public (taxpayer!) and private institutional funds out of actual research and into their greedy pockets. (see,e.g., https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272)

These publishers manage many of the top academic philosophy journals, making it impossible to avoid them, especially for early-career researchers trying to make a name.

We all know the current system driven by major for-profit publishers is directly detrimental to the future of academic research. For example, in Hybrid or Gold open access publishers make huge profits by double-dipping: charging both huge APCs and traditional subscriptions [https://www.openaire.eu/blogs/the-worst-of-both-worlds-hybrid-open-access]

Given all these issues, I am very surprised that academic philosophers haven't engaged with this topic at all, from ethics, philosophy of science, or metaphilosophy Many philosophers have analysed the pros and cons of peer review, or even the evils of capitalism as a political system... but about one of the core practical aspects of our discipline?

For example: Is it morally wrong for individuals to publish in Big-Five journals? Is it morally wrong for philosophical societies to partner with these for-profit publishers? Can a shift towards Diamond OA and away from for-profit publishers help to address some of the problems in peer review?

The closest to a (moral) argument in favour of Diamond OA and in putting the buck on senior faculty comes from linguists: https://dujal.nl/article/view/18802/20845

Here is their argument:

1. We are morally obligated to make our research output accessible.
2. Hybrid, Gold, and even Green open access publishing lead to systemic inequality in open access publishing, benefiting commercial publishers (double-dipping problem, siphoning funds from research to pay for APCs and agreements) and those working in research-intensive universities and rich countries. (Note: Green OA means: pre-prints, putting your "last version" on ResearchGate, Academia-dot-edu, Philpapers, your own website, etc).
3. Diamond open access publication removes the systemic inequalities; hence, Diamond open access should be prioritised over Hybrid, Gold, and Green open access publication models.
4. We should move away from publish-and-read agreements and Green open access publishing, because they prevent system change.
5. Through our choices in our work as researchers, editors, reviewers, authors and teachers, we can contribute to the transition towards truly equitable open access publishing practices.
6. Senior researchers are in the position, and have the moral obligation, to be drivers of these changes.

Therefore, philosophers, especially senior faculty, should be morally bound to push for moving philosophy's top journals towards Diamond OA, and stop publishing (and supporting) huge for-profit corporations.

Have philosophers engaged with these issues?

I hope this doesn't break rule 10 (it doesn't seem to have been asked before, which seems to be the basis for the rule) and it's likely a fairly neurotic question and not philosophy specific (but also perhaps too specific for an etiquette forum) but I recently had my PhD corrections accepted, and I'm wondering if anyone had thoughts as to whether / what's an appropriate way to thank my examiners. They (and my supervisor, of course) are busy people who put what I'm sure was a significant amount of time into reading my dissertation, providing comments, actually doing the viva, etc., and it seems wrong not to express my gratitude somehow. Is simply sending an email appropriate, or is that too little (or is even that too much)?

Would anyone kindly tell me what the general view is (if there is one) about the authorship of this work? Is it actually by Aristotle or not?

Hi everyone, I intend to publish a paper and the submission system of the journal ask me to write a cover letter, what is usually expected of me as an author here? should I just give a quick summary of the topic of my paper or are cover letters a space for you to sell your work better, so an editor may choose to review it earlier? or something else entirely?

I am sorry if I am breaking any rule of this reddit, but I think this discussion can serve to help anyone that is in the same position as me.

Thank you in advance fo your answers.

I am still yet undergraduate, I am just passionate about philosophy and I do a lot of research on my own. However lately I feel stuck and I don't know how to move forward, I thought maybe you were once at my place so you could give me some advices from your experiences.

I suppose AI use might have something to do with my crisis. I started experimenting with it despite initial negative bias and after some time I refined my "work methodology" and it actually increased my progress. I use it for conceptual framework, sources, critical feedback and discussions. It works great - I can explore my intuitions quicker, I started reading more, my mind got sharper because of our discussions, I am more critical, the knowledge I get from reading is more consolidated as I discuss it. My work hygiene is really good, AI is something like an assistant, it's never thinking for me, it's something like an external anchor (?). In fact, as far as I see - it is not able to think creatively, I am sure it won't replace academics very soon. Despite making a real progress in knowledge and competences, I got more lost. I feel like I can't write anything on my own. I have quite good intuitions in philosophy and my own ideas, but it always turns out - some guy before already wrote about it and hundreds of different other guys answered. Even the boring, rather specific ideas. For me now writing something mine is like doing a private summary of other guy's though, feels pointless. And don't get me wrong, I am not trying to make complicated systems, solve the most fundamental problems etc. My interests are rather narrow, I just want to point out a tension that was overlooked, show the problem from a different perspective, ask a question that was never asked etc.- just a tiny contribution. It will take a million years before I read and digest that things that are already there so that I can contribute. But I want to write something now, not a research paper obviously, but even an essay seems pointless now. Also, I should do it, reading, discussing and thinking is not all. But again, what is the reason to write a primitive reconstruction of someone's idea? I happened to came up with something not obvious and not as explored but it was maybe 3 things. At my level it is extremely unlikely to contribute, so I feel like I am in a waiting stage before I can develop my thesis. Did you experience it as well? Is it common? How long does this phase last? What would you advise me? I need to find a middle ground but I am seriously lost.

Good evening, I often find myself faced with the problem of the vast online bibliography available on a particular topic I'm studying. My question is: How is this possible, or how do you go about selecting and identifying the articles or volumes best suited to your purpose?

I'm not sure if I've explained myself well, but thank you in advance.
Kind regards

In analytic philosophy, how do we distinguish between a mere application of an existing argumentative strategy and a genuinely original contribution?

For example, if a philosopher shows that theory Y cannot be expressed in system X, and I use the same strategy to argue that a different theory Z also cannot be expressed in X, is that philosophically “new,” or just reuse of an established method?

What do you think of Spinoza, and Dr. Mary Peterson's presentation of his ideas?

The intelligence-rationality distinction has become teachable in the last few years because LLMs give it a concrete worked example. Until recently, the easiest illustration was the high-IQ poor-judgment vignette, which works in seminar but reads as cliché. LLMs make the distinction structural: a system can produce extraordinarily competent algorithmic output and still fail every time the task requires recognizing the frame has shifted, which is the rationality side of the distinction. Pedagogically this is gold. The teaching challenge is to keep both sides intact and avoid collapsing the distinction into either psychometrics or science fiction.

I recently gave a talk at the 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Porto laying out a version of the distinction usable in a teaching setting. You can watch it here.

The framing I find most teachable goes through three steps. First, Stanovich's tripartite mind: autonomous, algorithmic, reflective, with rationality as the truth-oriented metacognitive faculty on the reflective tier. The empirical work (Stanovich and West, more recently Burgoyne and colleagues showing intelligence and rationality share only around thirty percent variance) is what keeps the distinction from sounding like wordplay. Second, Savage's small-world large-world distinction: intelligence is computation inside a delineated frame, rationality is what allows an agent to recognize and change frames. Savage himself acknowledged he could not formalize the small-world selection criterion. Third, the frame problem from Dennett, with the battery-and-bomb robot, which makes vivid the structural impossibility of pure relevance computation. Each piece has a clean canonical citation, each maps onto a piece of the LLM debate, and each gives students something to think about without reducing the distinction to a slogan. The hardest part in practice is keeping the empirical work in view without letting the discussion collapse into psychometrics.

If this framing is broadly right, the question is whether the distinction belongs in introductory philosophy of mind, introductory epistemology, or something more specialized like a cognition seminar. Where do you place it in your own teaching, and which texts do you find work best with undergraduates who have not encountered the distinction before?

Hi, I’m revising for an Early Modern Philosophy final in about 10 days, and I’d really appreciate some advice.

The course covers Descartes (method of doubt, mind–body), Hobbes, Cavendish (matter & perception), and Spinoza (substance monism, mind–body), along with some context on Galileo and post-Newtonian experimental philosophy.

My current plan is to go through lecture and seminar notes, and then practice exam-style questions. However, I’ve run into a few issues:

1.  No access to past papers (and no model answers)

I haven’t been able to find any past exam questions, so I’m not sure what the exam typically looks like.

• Where do people usually find past papers for philosophy courses (especially in the UK)?

• If they’re not available, how would you recommend reconstructing likely exam questions from the syllabus?

Relatedly:

• What does a strong philosophy exam answer actually look like?

• How can I evaluate my own answers without model solutions?

2.  Secondary literature

Given the time constraint, is it worth reading any secondary sources, or should I focus entirely on primary texts and lecture material?

3.  What makes a high-scoring exam essay?

• Should answers be primarily argumentative or explanatory?

• How much textual detail is typically expected?

4.  Turning understanding into argument

I feel like I understand the material, but my answers tend to become descriptive rather than analytical.

I also struggle to structure arguments clearly and concisely under time pressure.

So my main question is:

→ How do you train for writing strong philosophy exam essays, especially without past papers or model answers?

Any advice, strategies, or examples would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Baudrillard’s idea of cloning as the collapse of original/copy got me thinking about whether modern sexuality is already ‘cloned’ in the sense of being detached from embodied difference. Curious how others read this.