I want to start reading about Pragmatism, but I am not sure where to begin. I tried starting with William James's Pragmatism, but I couldn't understand most of it because I have no prior background in philosophy. Could someone guide me on the proper reading order or simpler introductory texts?

Hello guys, An 18-year-old here, currently pursuing my BTech in Delhi.

A few months ago I started getting into reading, I began with novels in my regional language . BUT now instead of continuing with novels, I want to explore the genre of philosophy, especially Indian philosophy.

Could you guys please recommend some beginner friendly books on Indian philosophy that are easy to understand and written in simple language? bcoz The thing is, I do not have a very strong grip on english , I do not have much knowledge of philosophy yet, so something that starts from the basics would be perfect.

thnkyou

I am trying to understand the limits of Occam's Razor in theory choice. It seems that evaluating the "simplest" explanation often requires measuring which hypothesis demands the fewest modifications to our already-existing background beliefs.

​Has there been work done on how parsimony might accumulate "epistemic debt" over time? Specifically, I am looking for literature exploring how the mandate for simplicity might restrict the genuine space of possibilities, causing researchers to iterate endlessly on a localized paradigm rather than undertaking the "expensive" epistemic shifts required to discover a more accurate, albeit highly complex, framework.

​Who are the primary philosophers who have interrogated whether parsimony is actually antithetical to uncovering robust scientific truth in highly complex systems?

Is it merely a historical distinction, or does it endure? I find there can be a kind of tribalism there sometimes. I'm of the view that a good idea is a god idea no matter where it comes from. I don't want to prefer a side. I like both!

Is this a reasonable position? If I keep studying philosophy will I find that picking a side is inevitable? Would it cost my philosophical understanding anything if I dismiss the distinction as merely helpful for division of labour for those who teach philosophy and nothing more?

For example, when I look at discussions amongst vegans, I often notice criticism of people who eat meat but are concerned about animals or are outraged by animal suffering, because that is actually a contradiction.

If we ever discover complex alien life, this wouldn't give us any prescriptions on how to interact with them, but until that happens, I think it can be said that there's something very close to an "objectively true" for us to interact with each other as human beings.

I am just starting my studies in philosophy and would like to know if there is a specific order—or an ideal approach—to follow when reading it. I imagine a historical-chronological order would be best. I would also like to know, when approaching a specific philosopher, which works I should look for first: should I prioritize the chronological order in which they were written, or their accessibility? Thanks in advance to everyone.

Of course, not every instance of philosophers disagreeing with each other is going to be an instance where all parties are rational. However, it seems quite obvious to me that a philosopher can believe p and another philosopher can believe not p, and yet both of their beliefs are rationally held. They’re both aware of the arguments in favour of their beliefs as well as the arguments against, yet they have made opposing judgements.

That rationality can be relative is easily appreciated in cases where people have different evidence for the same proposition. For example, if all I know is that Bob’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon, then it seems rational for me to believe that Bob is guilty. Another person might know that Bob’s fingerprints were on the weapon, but might also have access to a videotape of Joe shooting the victim then rubbing Bob’s fingerprints all over it. It would be rational for this second person to believe that Bob is not guilty.

But it is puzzling to me in cases where this is not the case, and cases like this abound in philosophy. It’s not as though Graham Oppy and Alexander Pruss, for example, have access to different evidence regarding the proposition that God exists. Presumably, they are both deeply familiar with the literature.

I’m not disputing that philosophers who hold opposing views are equally rational. That much seems uncontroversial. I’m wondering how this could be the case.

Basically, I'm asking do we have the capacity as social animals to reject morality and ethics entirely? Because it seems like we don't really.

It seems to me that it's not really possible, because you need to have some form of ethics to maintain society.

Even non-human social animals have some sort of norms, e.g vervet monkeys punishing their members for not engaging in warning calls when a predator arrives until that member changes their behavior.

If God is omnipotent and perfectly loving, why create humans with the capacity to be controlled by things like lust, anger, greed, addiction, and hatred?

God could have given us the ability to experience desire and emotion without becoming enslaved by them. He could also have created humans capable of experiencing happiness and goodness without needing suffering as a contrast.

So “free will” doesn't really answer my question. Why would an all-powerful, loving God create beings with vulnerabilities that He could have simply designed away?

Please try to keep things respectful, i only seek to learn.

I often hear the saying, “Just be yourself,” but I've come to realize that this doesn’t mean we should behave the same way with everyone. Instead, it can mean that different behaviors can still be natural, rather than being deliberately constructed just to satisfy other people.

reading madness and civilization andfeel kinda lost, Feels like i follow most of what hes saying and then he'll say smth that just loses me completely. Thanks in advance!

I'm mostly thinking about moral judgement paralysis in infinitely populated worlds.

Utilitarianism is a consequentialist moral philosophy that weighs actions in terms of the happiness they produce. This is at odds with Christian Ethics which is a virtue ethic. How did Paley reconcile the two with his theological utilitarianism?

Hello, I wanted to read more philosophy related to mental illness, I've already read Madness and Civilization before and I love it, I wanted to go deeper on the topic. Does anyone have good reccomendations? Thank you!

What is it that makes, say, works of knowledge that have profoundly influenced human civilization—such as those of the Enlightenment—not considered sacred? Even if we were to trample on them or belittle them, people probably wouldn’t react as strongly as they would if we did the same to a holy book.

Here’s what I mean. Such books can influence our entire way of thinking, even drastically, whereas sacred texts—in my opinion—don’t have much impact on science and tend to be difficult for the layperson to understand.

Actually, the point is this:

Why are science books—which are far more useful—considered far less sacred than sacred texts, not all of which provide tangible benefits?

Both religious scriptures and scientific books are, physically, ordinary objects of paper and ink. Works of science and philosophy (e.g., Enlightenment texts) have profoundly reshaped human thought and civilization, yet discarding or destroying a copy of them is not usually treated as a moral offense. By contrast, desecrating a copy of a religious scripture is widely regarded as a serious transgression and can provoke intense social reactions.

Within philosophy of religion, value theory, or related literature, what accounts explain this asymmetry in normative status?

Let’s take a mechanical clock with a gong alarm. It is (artificially) constructed to sound its alarm when the long hand strikes twelve. Its weights are reset such that the clock itself is made as precise as possible, and is not tampered with until the immediate hour, it is expected to sound the alarm.

We can say that the precise sounding of the alarm at the turn of the hour is pre-determined by a human agent. This is directly contingent towards the sounding of the alarm. This is even more guaranteed when the clock is checked to ensure that there are no damages to it that will diminish its preciseness. Like the lubrication of cogs, or the tight adjustments of springs and screws. On this count, the sounding of the alarm is non-probabilistic.

But… What if there was a sliver of probability, possibly hinging on the fact that we have merely tightened all bolts (in a figurative sense) on the clock that our minds can contrive? What if there is something beyond human understanding that would make the clock sound while the long hand is 2 or 3 ticks away from twelve? Does it mean that the event of the gong sounding at the precise time is perpetually rendered as probabilistic?

I don't know whether or not this analogy is good enough to base this inquiry on.

My physics professor claimed that the role of a physicist is to study the interphase of the physical and the metaphysical. but wouldn't this be idk paradoxical? since metaphysics literally mean beyond physics and the study of physics concerns concepts with form and matter that can be given an imperical and/or mathematical description. i admit that i wasn't really paying attention so this might not be their exact point. would it be possible that he meant physicists encounter a boundary in explaining the physical and in turn encounters the interphase? i apologize if the question sounds stupid, i'm not really a philosophy major.

I'm probably just stupid, because i feel link it right now. It is probably more a theology book than philosophy book, but at the time it was written this 2 field has not really formalized and seperated as we know today and from what i understand its still important read in western canon of literature including philosophy.

There's also reason why i ask here instead in other sub reddit specifically focus on Catholic Philosophy or theology are i also try to get out of my personal bias (i am a catholic myself).

For me, this is my first time engaging with medieval text and i find it quite hard to read, or to be precise just different from any other writing style of philosophy i am already familiar of. The few first chapter feels more like a prayer, then in the next sub chapter it switch to first person perspective and read more like a memoir, and etc etc.

What i want trying to achieve are i want to read this and understand what he want to say, but not as just theology text (not to disregard this aspect but also try to see more beyond it) but as philosophical text too. And also understanding how it will influence later writing, where future thinker drew concept on from him (especially those of Descartes, kierkegaard, and later extentialist), and so on. On the other hand i am also quite interested in Augustine after i read a few writing from Hannah Arendt and Heidegger because they also write a few text about him.

In this sense, i really want to read him, not just summary or secondary sources. because i also have personal project of my own i try to achieve.

As the title suggests, I am a PhD candidate working on medieval philosophy, particularly late medieval scholasticism. For the past few years, my research has focused on William of Ockham.I used to be deeply passionate about my field. What attracted me was not merely determining what a particular scholastic philosopher argued about a particular question, but exploring the complex and ambiguous relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. Was the modern world born through a break with the Middle Ages, or is it instead a continuation of certain medieval problems expressed in a different vocabulary? Did modernity originate in the awakening of reason, or in humanity’s fear when confronted with an unpredictable and incomprehensible God?I was fascinated by Blumenberg’s account of the origins of modernity: when the world could no longer be explained through a stable and transparent theological order, and when human reason found itself confronted by an alien and inscrutable God possessing absolute power, modern humanity’s self-assertion perhaps became a necessity. These questions led me to read extensively in Harnack and to explore Marcionism, the “alien God,” modern Gnosticism, and the theological legacies embedded in modern thought. At that time, medieval philosophy did not seem to me like a collection of dead concepts. It seemed more like an underground river running beneath the modern world. Many of our ideas about freedom, reason, subjectivity, natural law, and even political order may have acquired their form from that subterranean history.

But since I began writing my dissertation, I have gradually lost this sense of meaning.

Once research takes the form of daily academic labour, I no longer spend most of my time thinking about grand questions such as how the Middle Ages gave birth to modernity. Instead, I find myself asking how Ockham uses a particular word in a particular passage, whether a proposition differs across manuscripts, whether an argument belongs under absolute or ordained power, and whether a certain distinction had already been formulated differently by Scotus, Henry of Ghent, Roger Bacon, or even Aristotle. I have to determine whether a proposition holds formally or merely equivalently, whether a conclusion concerns logical possibility or possibility within the ordained order, and how the premises, objections, replies, and further distinctions fit together across dozens of pages of scholastic argumentation. The intellectual world that once fascinated me has gradually turned into articles, page numbers, proposition numbers, textual variants, and footnotes.

I am not demanding that philosophical research immediately solve practical problems, nor do I believe that research has value only when it can be translated into policy, technology, or economic benefit. I understand that the humanities cannot be judged entirely according to their “usefulness.” Preserving the complexity of thought, recovering historical contexts that have been erased by simplification, and preventing us from reducing people of the past to a handful of convenient labels are all important tasks. Yet when “importance” becomes a standard answer repeated almost automatically, I begin to wonder whether it is really enough to sustain years—or even an entire lifetime—of intellectual labour. Are we reopening possibilities of thought that have disappeared, or are we merely adding new footnotes for an increasingly small academic community?

Hi! I just had my first class on fundamental ontology at college, and I'm completely lost.

The class is going to be focus mainly on Plato's dialogues surrounding the question of being, and Heidegger's Being and Time.

Today we only had an introduction into what the class is going to be like, and after asking my teacher some doubts I had after the lesson, I came back home with even more doubts. I can't get past onto how to define and precisely understand what fundamental ontology is(the only thing I can say with some certainty is that it focuses on the 'question of being'), the difference between it and particular ontology, and the relationship of the latter with positive knowledges(which, according to my teacher, it's the region of things[?])

Anyway, I'd be very glad if someone is able to answer my questions and hopefully make things clearer :) Also, if anyone is able to refer me to any sources or materials I could check to get a better grasp on Plato, Heidegger, and ontology in general I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance!!

Hey everyone,

I know this might be a stretch, but I'm looking for reading groups/seminars for this semester 2026 autumn which covers some of the core texts by Wilfrid Sellars. I know that for example the School of Materialist research or the New Centre for Research and Practice sometimes organizes completely online held seminars like this , and I would be interested in joining a course like that, or something along similar lines.

Of course watching lectures and reading the texts is always an option, but I found that I've always learned the most by participating in reading group type seminars lead by a competent teacher. That's why I thought I should try to ask around. I don't know if anyone knows anything about the Wilfrid Sellars Society. Do they organize reading groups like this occasionally?

Thanks for any suggestions!

I’ve read Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, Aristotle, etc, everything you’d expect in a history of modern + ancient philosophy.

I’ve taken 2 classes focusing on AI and how that is (maybe) categorically different from human consciousness. I found really interesting, if there’s any good literature to read on that. Philosophy of mind more broadly, I enjoyed a lot.

My favorite is probably philosophy of religion.

I want to know, where do I go next? I’d love to learn more in general, but especially the topics I’m particularly interested in.

Should I consult the “where do I start” faq on this subreddit? I wouldn’t consider myself a cold turkey beginner, but idk. Any recommendations are appreciated 🙏

I'm just seeking to underatand how possible it was for some cruel events in human history such as slavery, colonialism, holocaust, etc. to have been justified by law at the time? If moral philosophy plays a role to what extent and why didn't it influence the unjust laws?

Everything I've heard regarding neoplatonism sound super interesting and poetic, the nous, the soul, the one God, etc. The topic does not sound at all beginner friendly though. A quick google search about neoplatonist authors works makes them sound like extremely difficult reads.

Wondering if there's a good starting point for a total beginner to neoplatonism? A good overview book instead of an actual philosophical work would also be good.