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Most of the things I would call "philosophy" are in the main section "Topics of Social Importance". This section will be for discussions that probably wouldn't be as interesting to a general audience.
Related websites
- Edge.org - To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- This was the best resource I discovered while studying philosophy in college. I frequently raved about it to classmates and teachers. For any given topic I was curious about, it usually offered a much more in-depth treatment of a subject than I could find anywhere else.
- That being said, it is not written for the casual reader. You may need to put in some work to understand a given section.
- Reddit - Explain Like I'm 5 ← The questions here are generally not typical philosophy questions, but I like the concept of getting easy-to-understand answers.
- Good example thread: "Why do we like music?"
Important Foreword:
- it seems to me that a lot of philosophical debates end up boiling down to semantics. that is to say, a lot of the ideas people talk about ("truth", "justice", "love") are just words people use to refer to fuzzy things that don't have clear borders; people then argue about whether X qualifies as one of those words (based on their intuitions about the word in other situations) and there's no way to settle the debate.
- here's BF Skinner saying what seems to me to be a very similar point:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47tNyyqQoSU&t=6m52s
Misc Links:
Scott Aaronson (MIT EE/CS Prof) on Philosophical Progress
http://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/
...
Q: Should people pursue truth above all other considerations?
Probably not
Q: What should I do? How should I behave?
Q: What can a person really ever know for sure? How do I know I'm not in the Matrix?
FYI, in case you're interested: Philosophy has a division called "epistemology" that deals with this question.