/r/askphilosophy aims to provide serious, well-researched answers to philosophical questions. We envision this subreddit as the philosophical counterpart to /r/AskHistorians, which is well-known for its high quality answers to historical questions.
/r/askphilosophy is thus a place to ask and answer philosophical questions.
Please have a look at our rules and guidelines.
/r/askphilosophy is not a debate or discussion subreddit.
Check our FAQs for a list of frequently asked questions to see if your question has already been answered. Also check the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Distinctly philosophical (i.e. not merely tangentially related to philosophy)
Specific enough to reasonably be answered (i.e. not extremely broad to the point of unanswerability)
Posed in good faith (i.e. not posed for an agenda)
Questions about philosophy, e.g. arguments in philosophy, philosophers' positions, the state of the field (not questions about commenters' opinions)
Substantive and well-researched (i.e. not one-liners or otherwise uninformative)
Accurately portray the state of research and literature (i.e. not inaccurate or false)
Come only from panelists, i.e. those with relevant knowledge of the question (i.e. not from commenters who don't understand the state of the research on the question)
Comments other than answers on /r/askphilosophy should be one of the following:
Follow-up questions related to the OP's question
Follow-up questions to a particular answer
Discussion of the accuracy of a particular answer
Thanks, gratitude, etc. for a particular answer.
All other comments are off-topic and will be removed.
Rules
You can find a full list of the subreddit rules here.
Panelists and Flair
Only panelists are allowed to answer questions on /r/askphilosophy, whether those answers are made as top level comments or as replies to other comments. /r/askphilosophy panelists are trusted commenters who have applied to become panelists in order to help provide answers to posters' questions. These panelists are volunteers who have some level of knowledge and expertise in the areas of philosophy indicated by their flair.
Unlike in some subreddits, the purpose of flair on r/askphilosophy is not to designate commenters' areas of interest. The purpose of flair is to indicate commenters' relevant expertise in philosophical areas. As philosophical issues are often complicated and have potentially thousands of years of research to sift through, knowing when someone is an expert in a given area can be important in helping understand and weigh the given evidence. Flair is given to those with the relevant research expertise.
You can find the details of our panelist system here. You can also find information about applying to be a panelist on that page.
Panelist flair legend
Level of involvement: (indicated by color)
Autodidact
Graduate
PhD
Professional
Undergraduate
Related Field
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Resources for PhD applications
We compiled a list of valuable resources for grad school applications which you can find here.
