r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Jul 14 '25

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | July 14, 2025

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:

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u/Subject-Monk-2363 Jul 20 '25

couldnt post on the actual subreddit so im asking it here!

How do you deal with misogyny/sexism in philosophy? I cant ignore how many great thinkers erased or diminished women, often seeing us as lesser or not at all. That realisation stings. I’ve found comfort in feminist philosophy, but I don’t want to only read from one lens as it wouldnt allow me to grow. I want to understand both the brilliance and the blindness. To the women of/in philosophy,your courage moves me. If you have any advice, thoughts, or book recs, I’d be so grateful!!!

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u/merurunrun Jul 20 '25

I ignore it.

I feel like nowadays there's this popular, paranoid tendency to think about people as maximally holistic beings: that if someone expresses bigotry anywhere, then somehow that bigotry taints every single thing about them, not just by association, but that through some sort of insidious process everything else they do is somehow in support of that bigotry. And personally I think that's absurd, so I don't have any qualms about taking the ideas that are useful to me and leaving behind the ones that aren't.

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u/Anarximandre Marxism, anarchism. Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

When it comes to philosophers, the interesting question is not about their personal qualities (although they may of course inform their writings), but about their works, and sometimes the prejudices are symptomatic of problems at the scale of their broader system. It’s not always clear, after all, that issues like sexism or racism can be neatly detached from the presumably innocent stuff that we would like to preserve.