NOTE: The weekly challenges are suspended until further notice (probably at least until the new year.) You can see the rules and outstanding list of thinkers below. Please feel free to continue to suggest additional thinkers for next year.
Topic-of-the-week is a quick way to expand the scope of the site and generate new questions and answers.
How it works: One topic will be designated each week. The current topic is listed below. The most-upvoted five to ten questions in the tag are eligible for 'question-of-the-week' status.
How to enter: Ask a question relating to the topic of the week, and tag it accordingly. The question must not be closed or deleted to be eligible. Users may only win a topic contest once a month. Users will be informed of the month's topics in advance. (Note: For the time being, we are driving this contest within the community, and no prizes are currently planned. However, at the very least I will make sure questions of the week have a shiny new question-of-the-week tag, and that we celebrate the winner in a community announcement.)
Choosing the topic of the week: If you have suggestions for a future topic, please leave them as answers to this post. Topics must be trackable with a tag, meaning that specific authors, works and schools are encouraged. Basically anything that currently has a tag is probably fair game. Topics will be chosen based on either their timely and increased notoriety or to expand our content and scope.
What do you think? Please do provide feedback and suggestions! This will mainly be community-driven, and I want to make sure we're doing this in a way which encourages positive engagement and drives great content.
Most Recent Topic: plato (November 9-16)
Upcoming Topics:
- berkeley
- deleuze
- marx
- popper
- kant
- hume
- heidegger
- rand
- voegelin
- plotinus
- irigaray
- butler
- lonergan
- cixous
- husserl
- aristotle
- quine
- luxembourg
- kristeva
- locke
- arendt
- aquinas
- spinoza
- nietzsche
- bergson
- machiavelli
- de-beauvoir
- stoicism
- derrida
- leibniz
- hegel
- descartes
Completed Topics:
- epicurus (September 7-14) -- won by commando for What are some criticisms of Epicurus' "Death is nothing to us"?
- zizek (September 14-21) -- won by chris for What are the most significant contributions Slavoj Žižek has made to the field of philosophy?
- sartre (September 21-28) -- won by Seldom for Does Sartre's conception of consciousness imply the impossibility of a conscious computer?
- stoicism (September 28-October 5) -- insufficient entries
- leibniz (October 5-12) -- insufficient entries
- spinoza (October 12-19) -- insufficient entries
- presocratics (October 19-26) -- won by Jon Ericson for Is knowledge possible in the Heraclitean system?
- wittgenstein (October 26-November 2) -- won by Ryder Dain for How would Wittgenstein respond to Functionalist accounts of consciousness?
- hobbes (November 2-9) -- insufficient entries