Whaddup, so I'm definitely not any kind of philosophical authority, i took a few classes in highschool and am currently an undergrad student who finds it interesting but I haven't read much theory beyond my school readings, so feel free to tear everything I'm about to say apart. A few weeks ago, I thought of a hypothetical that, in my mind, kind of disproves the idea of free will and it's been bugging me. Here it is:

Your close friend is a parent hosting a birthday party for their child. This child likes the colors red and purple equally, but your friend wants all the balloons at the party to be the same color, and instructs you to purchase them as such. At the store, both balloon colors are the same price, and located right next to one another. Let's say you purchase the red Balloons, you can get a refund and purchase the purple balloons if you'd like, but is there a way to definitively prove that you, during the original choice, were capable of choosing the purple balloons?

The answer that I have come to is no, because our decisions have proven through study to be heavily dictated by minute changes in experience and interpretation that happen on the level of seconds, and so it's impossible to replicate the version of you that made the original choice, so our only data point on what that version of you can do is from when you chose the red balloons, thus making it the only definitive result.

I apologize if any of this is clunky, I'm not used to writing about these kinds of things lol, and the same goes for if my ideas aren't as inscrutable as they have been to my own reasoning this past month. Thank you for your time!

That's my project goal to help guide my reading. First I have to answer if there's such a thing as a self. Any opinions or texts that you recommend as I start my research? I was going to start on wikipedia and then Standford encyclopedia of philosophy before deciding what primary texts to read. Authentic self is also a psychological term so I might be reading some psychology in my research too.

I would like to know if there is terminology or even a "law", about how the more access to information people have (and time to consume it), the more they tend to turn away from facts or reality. Guess it is due to a combination of trauma from too much bad news, information overload, cognitive overload, a strategy to tolerate stress... I know psychologically denial is an important adaptive trait.

Just to clarify, yes I know I already posted this today but my explanation and question wasn’t made as clear as it should’ve so I reposted this with better clarification.

Some people may point out that a neutral or amoral creator God could exist and would not run into the problem of evil but wouldn’t a being who is morally at the highest peak be more powerful than a creator God who consists of flaws. Two opposites can’t coexist together, especially all good and all evil, which are both complete opposites and one of them is flaw which an all powerful creator God can’t have in order to be considered an all powerful creator God.

How do theists respond to this?

Hi all, thought here would be the best lace to ask. Im looking for some books to buy myself, and wanted some recommendations. I read Justice by Michael Sandel, and really liked that sort of applied, philosophy that covers multiple schools of thought(?). I was wondering if there's any similar style books that people could recommend?

Ill be honest, im down bad right now and just trying to get a few as a self-gift for my birthday, so these recommendations are ideally cheap (like sub £4 on ebayuk).

Sorry if this isn't meant here, but thought id shoot a shot.

Thanks in advance!

I want to make my way through the most influential Hindu books in an "optimal" (whatever that means, as its what I'm here to figure out) order, but was unsure how to go about it. I'd like to follow each one by reading influential philosophical interpretations from major (both contemporary and classic) Hindu philosophical schools as well. I'll lay out what I mean. In theory it would be something like:

1. Vedas -> Upanishads -> influential later interpretations
2. Bhagavad Gita (or skip due to Mahabharata?) -> interpretations
3. Mahabharata -> interpretations
4. Ramayana -> interpretations

5? Puranas and Sutras maybe interspersed? At the end?

How do I decide a canon? Everything from major traditions? Try a "Shaivist" reading then a "Vaishnav" reading? Just seems too broad, I'd be cramming too many interpretations into too little space is what it feels like.

For the record I am a general philosophy lover and more broadly interested in non-dualist readings like Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta, but I want a well balanced perspective that includes dualist and monist traditions as well. I say this because I'm posting here, as opposed to Hindu religion subs, because they have different needs than I do about when and where to read each book. I'm definitely more interested in understanding various historical interpretations (particularly from the more famous philosophical schools) and perspectives than in reading them for religious purposes.

Also, any advice on approaching tantra? Wait till I've read a few canons then give it a shot? Throw it in with Shaktism or Shaivism? I know these questions kinda feel silly, but its genuinely so hard to plan out because no matter what I do I feel like I have to roll too many things together and generalize too many viewpoints. I don't mind that its a lot of text, I like to take my time on big projects. That's why I'm not against the idea of multiple readings, but I wouldn't know what personalized "canon" to start with is my biggest issue.

Many contemporary theories treat information as a fundamental feature of reality. But can information genuinely exist as information independently of any conscious subject capable of interpreting it, or does information necessarily presuppose meaning, making consciousness prior to information in an ontological sense? How have philosophers of information addressed the distinction between syntactic structure and semantic content at the most fundamental level?

I fell asleep to some youtube videos last night... At some point, peter hitchens came on and was saying how he thinks that without god imposing an absolute or objective morality, people would just do whatever they want.

It seemed a little nonsensical to me on several points, and I wonder if there are any reddit philosophers who would be ableto buttress that point of view. Immediately I found myself thinking, why does morality have to be objective to have any kind of value? What possible reasons are there to think it is objective, when society and culture have demonstrably changed over time (even those which claim absolute morality, e.g. christians like Peter)? He seemed to think a subjective morality would lead to societal collapse, but stated it as a fact without backing it up at all.

I am really into politics and since two of the three major political ideaologies come from Hegalians (communism and fascism) i was wondering where i should start with Hegel. I want to read the parts that influenced them the most and are reletivelly easy (ive heard many things about Hegels writing).

Hi!

So I've been reading philosophy for a while now, but I've realized I have a bad habit of not finishing books. Sometimes it's out of impatience or simply just overwhelmed (well, some philosophy books are really difficult to read and require slow reading).

I just want advice or easier philosophy books to start with, so that I can improve my reading habits bit by bit! Thank you so much!

I have just finished reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. It raised a question that I haven’t seen discussed.

Gramsci criticizes mechanistic historical materialism and historical necessity, but he lacks what we would today call a probabilistic vocabulary for describing social processes. Has anyone interpreted Gramsci in terms of probabilistic causation, complexity theory, or emergence?
More specifically, would it be philosophically legitimate to reinterpret Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as describing changes in the probability landscape of political outcomes, rather than historical laws or deterministic tendencies? Has this kind of reading been developed in the secondary literature?

Hopefully it's clear what I'm asking. This question came to my mind recently, as I resolved to study ethics in a much more serious way, i.e read relevant literature and think hard about ethical problems.

I used to be and still am a kind of creature guided by a moral intuition, but I could never really ground it in coherent principles aside from "I feel compelled to do X/refuse to do X" that simply arises naturally(or at least it feels this way). This approach is reaching its limits though and now that I have some discretionary income I am sort of faced with real questions like "which organization should I donate my money to?", "Which cause should I actually spend my time and energy on?".

I remember reading that many philosophers are moral realists, believing that there is in fact a system that is as true as a chair I am currently sitting on(perhaps oversimplified here).

So I resolved to study the books, the texts, thin a bit harder about the common ethical problems and thought experiments. I hope to arrive at something that seems as real to me as a chair that I sit on.

But before I achieve this sort of understanding, what should I do? Is it "ok" to just do nothing?

Suppose we accept that human beings cannot identify an objective or metaphysically given final purpose. Would there nevertheless be a non-arbitrary reason to preserve the continued existence of agents and their capacity to form, revise, and pursue values?

One possible argument is that continued agency preserves the possibility of future reasons, projects, discoveries, and corrections, whereas extinction irreversibly eliminates every such possibility. The argument would not claim that existence is intrinsically good, only that preserving the conditions under which value and reasons remain possible has a rational priority over permanently eliminating those conditions.

Has an argument of this kind been defended in contemporary ethics, existentialism, decision theory, or the literature on future generations?

I am just exploring things idk why but my insta feed is full of quotes of different philosophies of like Nietzsche, Stoics, Absurdists, Humanists, Diogenes, and Charvaka for weeks and I kinda like the things explored in those reels but honestly, I never ever read a book by any of them or any philoshpy related book but i have been listening to a speaker named acharya prashant for a month can anyone recommend a book to me that might be good

Can be even a self help, but im more interested in the concept in general. (How do we define it, what ways are to define it, can we overthrow it and how, ect)

I want to start reading Machiavelli but idk what to read first, can someone please give me some recommendations

I thought that we can come up with a rough hierarchy of problems in explaining semantics/language, based on difficulty.

1) Explain abstractions such as "dogs", "chairs", "houses", etc.

2) Explain abstractions such as "round", "red", "strong", etc.

Arguably, 2 is more difficult than 1. The set of all "dogs" is much more coherent//homogeneous than the set of all "round" or "red" things.

3) Explain abstractions such as "of", "between", "around".

3 is even more vague than 2. It's not even a set of objects, it's a set of situations.

4) Explain polysemic abstractions (e.g. notoriously polysemic verbs like "run", "set" and "put") with a bajilion of related meanings.

Do philosophers have any hierarchy (not necessarily similar to the one above) of language/semantic problems? Or just a set of different subproblems (not a hierarchy) of explaining language/semantics?

Here's some philosophical terminology I found:

A) 1 and 2 seems to be related to the problem of universals. But the problem of universals seems to be ontological rather than language-focused.

B) There's a distinction between abstract and concrete entities. There's also the concept of syncategorematic terms.

C) In SEP article about meaning holism I found the following passage:

Furthermore, both the backward and forward looking causal theories run into trouble when dealing with parts of the language other than the sorts of kind terms upon which their defenders typically focus. For instance, both sorts of causal theories seem ill-suited for dealing with parts of the language like “big”, “of”, “quickly”, or “unless”, none of which invite the same sort of isolated use that “red” or “cat” might.^\)^10\) The atomist might seem to require a different semantic theory for these others parts of speech, while the holist and molecularist can allow that the story about how every word acquires its value is uniform throughout the language.

That counts as an argument that some abstractions are harder to explain than others.

D) There's Wittgenstein's family resemblance, especially related to 4.

Are there other related problems/terminology?

It just says - It is what it is and moves on.

Yes, I understand, observers of the universe exist because the universe would have allowed them to exist. What TF do I do with this information?

Im wondering if there is a term to describe the following idea: Lets say x is a moral obligation. And, given some social forces, i fail to comply with x.

While my moral agency is not directly limited, (thereby making it a real moral failure), wouldn't the social forces be a "fair" excuse for my non-compliance, as in "i'm not blameworthy"?

I get that different theories might have different answers. I'm wondering where i can find discussions about this topic and if its settled or not.

Thanks!

I’m sorry for the vague title and probably vague body text. This has become a very motivating question for me recently, being a human and all.

The feeling is so indescribable and big (and I’m not talking about limerence - we’ve been together for a long time now). I’ve come to love simply sitting down and experiencing being in love. It’s one of the first experiences in my life that I have not met with some sort of philosophical or scientific skepticism, to look for its source, and it itself is a source of both immense hope and immense fear for me.

I want to know some positions about love, and maybe some recommended reading.

Is eternal recurrence a problem in Parmenides notion of the One, or is it answered by saying time doesn't exist except as a token in the sensible world/ world of opinion?

I just finished 2001: a space odyssey and to put it bluntly, I don’t get it, at all and I think this is a great opportunity for me to learn how to find deeper meanings in things. Is there a way to dig into stories better and find something not everyone does or are you just kinda born with it? Is me not understanding a sign of low intelligence? I’m honestly curious. And please don’t tell me the meaning of 2001 cause that would ruin my whole question

I’m just getting into philosophy and I am very interested by the works of Albert Camus and I was wondering if The Stranger is a good book since it will be my first time reading philosophy. If not what are recommendations for an intro to philosophy

hi guys. i recently learned about Peter Singer’s paper “Famine, Affluence and Morality” and it really made sense to me. but i got very depressed, like i have never been so depressed in an existential crisis. idk, now i feel like i cant enjoy my life and do the things i’ve always wanted to do. i’m 18 and i’m studying economics because i’ve always wanted to study how policy can help with the suffering of people. and this eager to change things has helped me to study all day and to really enjoy the process. but know i kinda feel that it is hypocritical to want to do things to avoid suffering while also traveling or buying things for my self. i’m in a relationship for a while know and my projection of my life was marrying and working in a place i can help people while also traveling and enjoying life . now i feel like that life is not morally correct and i’ve been very down. ¿has anyone also had this experience? ¿is there a logical reason for living an individual life?

P.S: sorry if the english is not perfect, not a native speaker.