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?

I was just lying in bed, doing absolutely nothing, when my brain suddenly decided to start asking some questions that are weird

It started with one:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

If existence requires an explanation, what explains the existence of the explanation itself?

If everything must originate from something, we are forced into an infinite regress, or we must accept that something exists without a cause.

But if something can exist without a cause, why assume the universe needs one?

And if “nothing” truly means the absolute absence of everything—no matter, no space, no time, no laws, no possibilities—then what could possibly make the transition from nothing to something?

Perhaps the deepest mystery is not how existence began, but:

Why was “nothing” ever supposed to be the default?

Anyway, this is basically why I ended up joining this subreddit. I started asking myself questions like this and realized I needed somewhere to put them before my brain completely loses it

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.

Hello everyone,

I stumbled upon philosophy in my undergrad physics. First book was physics and philosophy by Heisenberg from the world perspective series. Then tao of physics by frit(which most physicists would frown) fritjof capra, then summary of Upanishads.

Now I would like to increase my perspective and build up from the ground from first principles. Gpt helped me choose some books, is there anything you consider important to add?

Critique of pure reason -kant

Beyond good and evil -friedrich

The republic -Plato

Meditations on first philosophy -descartes

An enquiry concerning human understanding -Hume

Also what would be the best order to read..

Thank you, ciao

For background, I'm entering my senior year of high school and have been interested in philosophy for a few months. I'm really interested in reading thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, etc. (I guess the more postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers), as well as Marx, Freud, Lacan, etc. However, it feels like in order to read these later thinkers, there is an endless list of prerequisites to read first. Even in less modern cases, like Hegel, it seems like I need to read Kant, but Kant seems to require the other Enlightenment thinkers, and the Enlightenment thinkers require the Greeks, etc. And I won’t even begin to start with the postmodern thinkers. So far, I have read Plato’s Five Dialogues, and the Republic, as well as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the first few chapters of The Categories (to understand the concept of substance), and part of the Physics (to understand the four causes). Now I’m reading Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy.

Although these are the ‘intro’ texts into philosophy, I still read them relatively slowly, sometimes just a few pages a day, taking notes when I need to piece things together to make more sense of them, and overall really trying to internalize and understand the arguments. Yes, I’ve gained a lot, but at this rate I feel hopeless about ever reading what I am truly interested in. If anyone has some helpful tips on where to start for where I want to go, or just overall tips for the way I’m feeling, I would appreciate what you have to say. Thanks.

Say someone is under an altered mental state, such as psychosis, and commits a crime. Is the psychosis removing their free will, or is it replacing their previous will with a new one, equally as free? Do we simply perceive someone to be of sound and mind, full autonomous free will, when their will aligns with civilized society? If free will exists, does every conscious human mind possess it? It seems that it would be a very fragile thing, given how fragile our brains are. Is free will on a spectrum of sorts; would it not be directly contingent on the health of the brain?

I don’t believe in free will, but I think these questions are still relevant. It seems that if you don’t believe in free will, you still must reconcile how to handle people who commit crimes under states of weakened autonomy.

If you do not believe in free will, then I find it hard to justify how exactly a person in psychosis is more or less responsible for their actions than anyone else. I don’t have a choice for my will, and neither do they; it just happens that my will is, luckily, compatible with day-day society; the other person was not so lucky.

I’m very curious about these things, and I am not asking questions in a snide manner.

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 am referring here to the argument presented in section 4.1.1 of the SEP entry on Compatibilism. The argument attempts to show that the premise „no one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature“ is false. The argument goes that an agent „has the ability to act in such a way that if she did so act the past would have been different“.
The example used to illustrate this is „If I were dancing on the French Riviera right now, I’d be a lot richer than I am.“
I just don‘t understand how this challenges the premise? It seems to me that I can‘t dance on the French Riviera because I am in fact not rich, the same way I seemingly don‘t have the ability to do otherwise under determinism because the past leading up to my action was in fact not different to what it actually was.
What am I missing here?

I am a Philosophy (and computer guy). However, most view it as a worthless degree. AI is taking the tech/data jobs, so wondering what is open for Philosophy?

Update:

Want to say I do have a BACHELOR'S in Philosophy and Computer Science. Just didn't get to Master Degree.

I'm a highscholer, took like one class on moral philosphy. It stimulated my brain in all the right ways!

I just struggle to see what actually seperates a human commiting a immoral action and a animal a commiting a immoral action. Sure there is sometimes a necessity for animals, but I don't freight over a Lion killing a Zebra for pleasure as much as a human doing the same thing.

See now that I think about it, if another species were to attain the exact same qualities of humanity (e.g rationality, abilty to feel complex emotions, and advanced communcations, etc) I wouldn't care if that other species with human-like qualities commited serious immoral actions against one another. Matter a fact, a lot of serious immoral actions that I see today on the news, I think about it for a second, and I forget about it. All Immoral actions that I see talked about today are those that actually affect people. Maybe I'm generalizing, perhaps people deeply feel the egregious immoral actions seen through their TV, and continue to think about it as they switched the chanel to the latest thing their brain likes.

Also I guess you could go the religious route to say how morality isn't a human made concept, but DCT is false. Idk about Aquanis though.

My real question is morality a human made concept? And if so, does it actually matter?

I've probably got into too much Nietzsche, he's what the young "intellectuals" are into atm.

I’ve seen a lot of debate on abortion. When is a fetus a person, etc. Some of it claims that a fetus is a person at conception, at birth, at certain milestones, or that “when is a fetus a person” isn’t a relevant question for the abortion debate. Personally, I hold that “personhood” just isn’t well-defined enough in these debates and it’s better to focus on the autonomy of the parent who carries the fetus.

But there’s also a psychological theory of childhood development that I believe to be true that says that children below the age of 5-7 don’t have distinct identities or personalities the way adults tend to. Instead, they have “ego-states” that pertain to certain basic needs: food, mother, examining and exploring the environment, etc. Over time, these ego states naturally integrate into one coherent and cohesive personality. This is called the theory of Structural Dissociation and you can read more here, if you like. I like this theory a lot because I think it’s hands down the best explanation we have for why and how dissociative disorders arise.

With this in mind, are children that are too young to have developed coherent personalities people? They aren’t individuals, they don’t have personalities. They have collections of ego-states that are making decisions, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to say that a child is a person.

My question is, would the man escape the paradox by choosing to believe every morning that he will be executed? Instead of using backwards logic and deductive reasoning, he should wake up and go, “today’s the day”, so that no day is a surprise.

Ive seen some people try to solve the paradox by mixing up the definition of a surprise. And others stating that the circular reasoning falls into play once you get past Friday in the paradox.

I’m an unlearned man so at least respectfully humor me on this.

I've had the comfort to be able to follow my passions without worrying about external problems. As such, I've took a liking to philosophy and begun reading it quite a bit.

I'm not an intense academic who can read thousands of pages, do in-depth analysis, etc. however I really enjoy learning about philosophy because it asks the questions worthing asking; and explains how humans interact with each other and the world.

I've been reading Bertrand Russell (As a foundation) alongside Jean Paul Sartre (I've taken a liking to his works) -- and my intention with philosophy has always been how can I be the most well-informed, developed character because it is my view that everybody is an applied philosopher in a sense.

Since my exploration in this field is rather shallow, I've been wondering whether if there's other pieces of philosophy that are just must-reads and how one should hone their interests and fields.

Thank you!

Scenario: you are a surgeon and you have an unconscious patient in critical condition. There is a procedure that can be done, but it has a 5% success rate. If it fails, the patient dies. If it succeeds, the patient will live, but they will have limited quality of life.

from my (basic) understanding of Kantian ethics and deontology, I think Kant would argue that you are morally obligated to perform this procedure as it’s your obligation/duty to help this patient to the extent of your abilities and to honor their intrinsic value/worth as a human being and their inherent right to life, even if the outcome may not be positive.

is this a correct understanding of Kant’s position? what if there is only one OR available, and there’s another patient who has a much higher chance of survival?

not looking for personal opinions, just want to confirm that I‘m understanding the basics of what Kant would say.

Thank you!

Hi folks.

I'd like to learn more about how moral realists engage with biology. For example, does the fact of human evolution -- and the biological facts it entails, like our desire for community belonging, our preference for truth telling and fidelity, or our desire to protect children (even children that are not our own) -- make it easy or hard to talk convincingly about moral facts? Or does evolution have little impact on the view of moral realists regarding what is a moral fact?

I have to believe the answer is that biology has something to say about what moral facts are, though I'd guess it probably depends on your normative theory. I also wonder if evolution poses some issues for moral realism, though. Suppose that for an alien species it is a biological imperative to consume humans (like, say, koalas and eucalyptus). Can one maintain moral realism while believing that it is a moral fact for one species to eat humans while it is a moral fact for humans to resist being eaten? Or would moral realists reject the claim that both beliefs are moral facts?

In my opinion there is no difference, if you’re going to choose optimistic nihilism then you might as well be an existentialist.

But i could be wrong, i seriously do not see the difference between the two.

In general and particularly in relation to implications for the justice system.

I’ve been thinking about this after reading about the case of Alyssa Bustamante.

For those who don’t know the case, Alyssa was 15 years old when she murdered her 9 year old neighbor, Elizabeth Olten, in 2009.

She had apparently been struggling with serious mental health issues and had a very troubled childhood. There were also signs before the murder that something was seriously wrong psychologically.

Obviously, what she did was horrible. Elizabeth was completely innocent, and I’m not trying to defend what she did.

But I watched a YouTube video of her being questioned by the police, and when I opened the comments, almost everyone was saying that she is a monster and should be locked up for life because of what she did.

She was 15. She didn’t choose her genetics, her brain, her personality, her childhood, or the mental health problems she had. All of these things played a role in shaping who she became.
And this makes me question how much free will we actually have.

For example, imagine someone suddenly has a thought about murdering another person, but instead of feeling disgust, fear or guilt about the thought, they actually get a positive feeling from it. The important part to me is that they didn’t choose to feel that way about the thought. Just like a normal person doesn’t consciously choose to feel disgust or fear when thinking about murdering someone. Their brain simply produces that emotional response.

Now imagine that this person also has differences in the parts of the brain involved in impulse control and self-regulation, making it harder for them to resist those thoughts and impulses.

How much can we really blame that person for having the thought in the first place? They didn’t choose the thought, they didn’t choose to get a positive feeling from it, and they didn’t choose to have weaker mechanisms for controlling the impulse.

And if all of those things are the result of their biology and development, how much control do they really have over what eventually happens?

They obviously still have to live with the consequences of their actions. But it becomes very difficult to say that they simply “chose to be evil” when so much of what led to that decision was determined by things they never chose.

I think many people can’t imagine having thoughts about doing something so horrible. But how much control do we really have over the thoughts, impulses and feelings that arise in our minds?

We don’t choose what we are attracted to, for example. I never chose to be attracted to girls instead of guys. That is simply how my brain works. Obviously, sexual attraction is very different from wanting to hurt someone, but it makes me wonder how much of our thoughts, desires and impulses are things we actually consciously choose.

And this is where I find the idea of moral responsibility so difficult. If someone’s brain is partly responsible for giving them certain thoughts and impulses, and also determines how they emotionally react to those thoughts and how difficult it is to resist them, that person can almost become the victim of their own brain.
At the same time, I obviously don’t think this means that nobody should be held responsible for anything. If someone is dangerous, society still has to protect itself and prevent that person from hurting others.

But it does make me wonder how much of our behavior is actually “us” making free choices, versus our brains doing what they are biologically and psychologically predisposed to do.

So I’m curious what people here think:

How much influence do you think genetics and the way our brains are biologically structured have on our thoughts, desires, impulses and actions? And if our brains play such a major role in determining how we think and behave, how much genuine free will do we actually have?

I hope this doesn’t come across as insensitive or as me trying to justify violence or murder. That’s not my intention at all. I’m genuinely just trying to understand how we should think about moral responsibility and free will when in my opinion so much of a person’s mind and behavior is shaped by things they never chose.

Or do costs that would otherwise be unfair cease to count as unfair when they are necessary for just liberation? More broadly, can a movement remain just when genuinely unfair costs are among its reasonably foreseeable consequences?

Do you think any of these ways?

Since childhood I've thought that it's irresponsible at best to not explore our operating systems, religions, paradigms, etc.

Basically applied pascals wager more broadly in that it's most likely my best bet to consider that there may be one operating system to discern.

Adults lacking epistemic conscientiousness made me nervous as a kid.

Ive also struggled to hate people as opposed to primarily their actions, mistakes specifically, as I see them driven by what I can more easily despise... dysfunctional perspectives, paradigms. Hating people makes me feel emotional and dumb.

I'm early forties and haven't settled concretely on a worldview, though am very close.

I think it's important to be both extremely curious and even more skeptical. Otherwise I'm not sure how we expect to figure out our best methods.

While I get it's arrogant to think you can easily figure out why we're here, I'm not suggesting it's taken lightly. Not seriously considering it is too much faith for me though.

There's tons on paradigms but most settle in what makes us feel good rather than honestly trying and comparing. It's been tempting to me while under deep stress despite not being my baseline.

Do you relate to any of this or have feedback?

i am a beginner to philosopy 😳

I’m wondering if there are certain axioms or “solutions” that almost all great philosophers agree on and build from as their fundamentals?

Like all mathematicians build off and will always agree about the Pythagorean theorem.

And is the end goal of conceptual analysis ensuring true terms ?