table topics

Table Topics is the part of every Toastmasters meeting where you speak with zero preparation, and it's the part most people dread. The only cure is reps: answer enough surprise questions alone in your room and the surprise stops being scary.

These topics are picked to work like real Table Topics: concrete enough to start immediately, open enough to fill two minutes or ten. Pull one in the app, take your 20 seconds, and start talking out loud.

pull a table topic

• What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
• A hundred years after a person dies, nobody is left who remembers them. It is as if they never lived. If a life's meaning depends on the people who remember it, and we know that eventually no one will be left in the universe, was everything meaningless from the start?
• Diffusion of responsibility: why does nobody in a crowd step in to help, with everyone assuming someone else will? Why does individual conscience weaken as responsibility gets spread across more people?
• What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!
• Diogenes living in a barrel and telling Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight: what Cynic philosophy asks of us.
• The Zen idea of beginner's mind points at a paradox: the more you know about a subject, the more your mind closes to new learning. How can experts stay open?
• One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
• The Stoic divide between what is up to us and what is not, and where inner peace really comes from.
• The plank of Carneades: two shipwrecked sailors cling to a plank that can hold only one. If one pushes the other off to save himself, is it murder or self-defense? Does the instinct to survive suspend morality?
• Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.
• We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
• Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
• When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.
• The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
• Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
• Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
• Moral relativism: do right and wrong change from culture to culture, or is there a universal standard? When what is normal in one society is horrifying in another, who is right?
• Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
• The best way to disagree is to take on your opponent's strongest argument, not their weakest. Why has public discourse gone in exactly the opposite direction?
• The sorites paradox: take grains away from a heap of sand one at a time, and at which grain does it stop being a heap? If no single grain makes the difference, does the fuzziness of that boundary mean our concepts themselves are broken?
• Children who are taught philosophy improve at math, reading, and empathy. Why is philosophy still missing from most schools?
• Health is not everything, but without health everything is nothing.
• What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
• A single idea can change the course of a life. Which ideas have that power?
• True, profound peace of heart and complete tranquillity of soul are to be found only in solitude.
• Everything is content, once you start filming your life, the act of filming changes what your life is.
• To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
• When a community says 'we', who exactly does it mean? Its members change, its rules change, its home changes, yet we still call it the same community. What is the invisible thing that keeps a nation, a team, or a family the same over time, or is it just a name?
• Deontology: can an action be wrong in itself, regardless of its consequences? Even if a lie saves a life, why is the lie itself still counted as wrong?
• Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
• Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: swift Achilles can never catch the tortoise that started ahead, because by the time he reaches where it was, it has moved a little further. Do infinite steps make motion logically impossible, or is it logic that fails to capture reality?
• A baby has no memories of its earliest days, yet we say that baby was you. If an illness erased all your memories, would you still be the same person? Is it your memories that make you you, your body, or something else entirely?
• Why should one tell the truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?
• The ring of Gyges: if you were invisible and certain of never being punished, would you still be honest? Is morality just fear of getting caught, or something deeper?
• You think you understand something, until you try to explain it to someone else and realize you never did. Maybe knowing is not something in your head but something that only exists once it is put into words. So do you really know anything you cannot explain?
• All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
• You did not choose where you were born, your family, your language, or your first beliefs, and every choice you have made since was built on top of them. If you never chose your starting point, are your decisions truly free, or just a line of falling dominoes?
• How should you decide which problems are worth your lifetime?
• Buridan's ass: a donkey standing exactly halfway between two identical bales of hay cannot decide which one to choose and starves to death. Does perfect equality really paralyze free will and make decision impossible?
• Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
• If a hot dog is a sandwich then cereal is soup. Are categories about structure or about use, and does it matter which one we pick?
• No one does wrong willingly.
• The beginning is the most important part of the work.
• When everyone in a society believes the same falsehood, it becomes normal, and the one telling the truth is called mad. Which of the things you are most certain of today will people look back on in a hundred years and ask, how could they ever believe that?
• The ship of Theseus: if every part of the ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? Our cells are replaced too, so what keeps us the same person?
• The trolley problem: a runaway trolley is about to hit five people; pull the lever and it switches tracks, killing one person instead. Is deliberately killing one person morally different from letting five people die?
• Molyneux's problem: a person born blind learns to tell a sphere from a cube by touch alone. If they suddenly gained sight, could they tell which is which just by looking, without touching? Does knowledge transfer between the senses on its own?
• Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
• If you felt no pain, and no hunger even while starving, survival would become impossible. Maybe pain is not a flaw but the very thing that ties you to yourself. Would a being that never suffers really count as alive?
• A single ant is stupid, but the colony acts intelligently: it builds bridges, farms, wages war. If the 'mind' lives not in the ants but in the connections between them, does your mind live not in your neurons but in the connections between them?
• At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.
• Billionaire wealth could end extreme poverty many times over while half the world lives in it. Anger feels justified, but what would an actually effective response look like?
• I would like my books to be a sort of Molotov cocktail, or a minefield; I would like them to self-destruct after use, like fireworks.
• Inside a dream you never notice that the dream world is not real; everything feels perfectly solid. So how are you so sure you are awake right now? Can you point to any definitive proof that separates waking life from a dream?
• Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards.
• Would you sacrifice one person to save five, and does it change if that one person is your sibling?
• The lady or the tiger: a princess's lover must choose between two doors, one hiding death, the other a beautiful woman he would be made to marry. The princess knows which is which, and she signals him. Does jealousy win, or love? Is this a dilemma with no answer at all?
• The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
• Kant's formula of humanity: where is the line between using someone as a means to an end and respecting them as a person? Why does human dignity demand that we never treat anyone merely as a tool?
• There is a big difference between believing others are wrong and believing you are right.
• A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to inquire; and if not, he cannot, for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire.
• Can one be a saint without God? That's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.
• If enough people believe a fiction for long enough, it starts to work like reality: money, countries, corporations all run this way. Are these things, with nothing behind them but shared belief, actually the most powerful realities governing our world?
• The golden mean: is courage the balance point between cowardice and recklessness? If every virtue sits between two extremes, who decides where the middle is?
• I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
• Mary's room: a brilliant scientist learns everything there is to know about the science of color while locked in a black and white room. When she steps out and sees red for the first time, does she learn something new? Is what red looks like a fact that physics can never contain?
• I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time.
• Plato's theory of forms: how can an abstract shape like the perfect triangle be more real than the world we can touch?
• We are told hard work is the gateway to a better life. Maybe internalizing the work ethic is actually a trap.
• Naming is something like attaching a label to a thing.
• To be happy, you have to stop thinking about happiness; chase it directly and it runs away. Maybe the things we want most only arrive once we stop wanting them. Is desire, then, something that sabotages itself?
• The panopticon: does a person who knows they might be watched start policing themselves, even when nobody is looking? If the mere possibility of an invisible authority is enough to change our behavior, where does freedom begin?
• Optimistic nihilism, the idea that if nothing ultimately matters, we are free to decide what matters, and why millions find that comforting.
• Some fish live near the surface, others on the ocean floor, yet they never fight over 'this is my land'. Could property, borders, and deeds be entirely human inventions, or does nature run on some invisible form of ownership too?
• Neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death.
• Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
• In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit; we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought. The limit can only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
• Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
• Searle's Chinese room: someone follows the rules of Chinese and gives correct answers without understanding a word. If a system produces the right outputs, where is the line between understanding and imitation?
• Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
• Nozick's experience machine: would you plug into a machine that guarantees lifelong happiness inside a fake life? If happiness is not enough, why does reality itself matter so much?
• Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
• In a relationship, is it more important to be loved or to be understood?
• If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
• The first and best victory is to conquer self.
• What is the real difference between justice and revenge?
• Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
• I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.
• Repeat a word enough times and it loses its meaning, collapsing into pure sound. Maybe meaning is not inside the word at all, but something we pour into it fresh every time. Could it be that no word, by itself, ever says anything?
• The first time you learn something, the world changes; you can never return to the person who did not know it. Some knowledge remakes you irreversibly. If you could have chosen never to learn, would you have wanted to stay your ignorant former self?
• Schopenhauer's hedgehog dilemma: hedgehogs huddle together for warmth in the cold, but their spines force them apart, and then the cold pushes them back together. Since human closeness brings both warmth and pain, are we all endlessly searching for that ideal distance?
• If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
• It may be shameful to be happy by oneself.
• Peter Singer's drowning child: you would ruin your expensive shoes to save a child drowning in front of you, so why do you hesitate to spend the same money saving a child far away? Does distance shrink moral responsibility?
• He who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
• The social contract: do we obey the state because of an implicit promise we made to escape the chaos of nature? We never signed any contract, so why are we bound to follow the law?
• The great novelists are philosophical novelists, that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
• A main cause of philosophical disease: a one-sided diet; one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
• Should you treat your life as an optimization problem, or does that ruin the point of living?
• Utilitarianism: should the greatest happiness of the greatest number be our measure? If one person's suffering can be traded for the majority's happiness, what happens to justice?