I commend these topics to you. There is very little literature, especially by philosophers, on these topics. So your approach to them will involve looking at where current literatures come short of actually engaging these topics. Think about how you might approach one of these questions, and begin exploring some of the literature so that you're conversant with potential points of contact between empirical and philosophical issues.
How nature is organized across scales — and whether any one scale is the real or fundamental one. (This is the territory of Without Hierarchy: the world is scale-free, and these projects carry that claim into particular sciences and test it against its rivals.)
Microphysical processes run on time scales vastly shorter than the macroscopic processes they are supposed to compose. Why is the gap so enormous, and what does it reveal about the relation between entities at different size scales? Reductive pictures treat the macro as the micro merely aggregate, but rarely confront the temporal mismatch directly. Points of contact: non-equilibrium physics, relaxation times, the philosophy of time in thermodynamics.
Statistical mechanics is the discipline that explicitly relates micro and macro descriptions, which makes it the natural proving ground for scale freedom. Does the success of statistical-mechanical explanation actually vindicate reduction, or does it show macro-level regularities standing on their own feet? Much of the philosophy-of-physics literature assumes the former without arguing for it. The assumption is unwarranted.
From atoms to condensed matter to chemistry, our theories of what things are made of are layered. Does each layer earn its keep explanatorily, or is it a way station to a deeper one? The chemistry-and-physics reduction debate sits nearby but is fought over special cases; the general question of scale freedom in the constitution of matter remains underexplored.
Emergence and scale freedom both deny that everything reduces to the bottom level, yet they are not the same thesis — and the difference is subtle and worth getting exactly right. Emergentists posit novel higher-level properties; scale freedom claims explanatory autonomy without a metaphysical commitment to levels. Mapping precisely where the two converge and diverge is a project worth taking into greater depths.
The often-tacit reasoning that underwrites our practical and social lives. (This is the territory in the intersection of Reasoning in the Wild and A Social Theory of Freedom.)
Trust is usually analyzed as an attitude or a stance, but every act of trusting embeds reasoning — about the trusted party, the stakes, the alternatives. What is that reasoning, and why is it so seldom made explicit? The trust literature in epistemology and ethics is rich on the attitude and thin on the deliberation beneath it.
Philosophers have written extensively on what makes promises binding, and far less on the reasoning a promiser actually performs in undertaking the obligation. Reconstructing that reasoning may reshape the long-running debate over the source of promissory obligation.
Some reasoning does not merely conclude — it commits the reasoner, closing off options and binding future conduct. What distinguishes committal reasoning from ordinary inference, and how does a person reason their way into a commitment? This is nearly virgin territory.
The precautionary principle is debated endlessly in policy and risk theory, but the underlying form of reasoning — how one reasons well under deep uncertainty about possible harms — is rarely examined as a mode of reasoning in its own right. Points of contact: decision theory, risk studies, the ethics of uncertainty.
Goals are everywhere in our theories of action, planning, and artificial intelligence, yet the concept itself is strikingly under-analyzed in philosophical literature. What is a goal, as distinct from a desire, an intention, or a mere disposition? Cognitive science and AI use the notion freely; philosophy has not given it the foundational treatment it needs.
Where phenomenology meets the social life of objects: how our experience of things is shaped both by familiarity and by the meanings we — and others — read into them.
Live in the same house long enough and your very experience of it changes: it recedes, deepens, grows saturated with memory. How does repeated interaction with the same thing transform the experience of it over time? Phenomenology has the tools — habit, sedimentation — but has rarely trained them on this everyday transformation. Points of contact: the psychology of perception and habituation.
Dress represents the person, whether they intend it or not — but how it does so, and how that representation has shifted from earlier ages to our own, is a question philosophy has largely ceded to fashion theory and sociology. What does dress communicate, to whom, and how has the grammar of that communication changed? A philosophical account of dress as a representational system is almost entirely missing.
These grow out of work in progress that returns to the argument of A Social Theory of Freedom — that objectification and unfreedom are real events in the world, not illusions a sovereign subject talks itself into. Each asks what an emancipatory phenomenology of race needs from a theory of freedom, and where the existing literature stops short of supplying it.
i. Two species of objectification: constitution versus domination
Being seen and taken up by others is the condition of selfhood — and, in another mode, the very mechanism of subjugation. What distinguishes the objectification that makes a self from the objectification that diminishes one? The phenomenology of race has tended to treat all objectification as the wound, which makes it hard to say how the same structure — being seen — is also constitutive of selfhood as such. Points of contact: social ontology; the psychology of recognition and self-objectification.
Undoing the racializing gaze, George Yancy insists, would involve more than a cognitive shift, because the racism keeps a hold on the lived body. If racialized perception is sedimented as bodily habit rather than held as belief, what follows for how it can be changed? This connects directly to the familiarity question above: both concern how repetition settles into the body. Points of contact: the phenomenology of habit; the contested empirical psychology of implicit bias and perception.
Frantz Fanon describes the ordinary corporeal schema by which one inhabits space crumbling under the gaze and giving way to a racial epidermal schema. What is it for the pre-reflective sense of one's own body to be reorganized from the outside? Points of contact: the cognitive science of body schema, proprioception, and peripersonal space — empirical work rarely brought to bear on social experience.
James Baldwin's white innocence is a willed refusal to know what one's country has done — an ignorance that is chosen, and therefore culpable. What kind of accomplishment is motivated not-knowing, and how does a person reason their way into it? (A natural companion to the questions about trust and committal reasoning above.) Points of contact: the epistemology of ignorance; the literatures on self-deception and motivated cognition.
In Baldwin's strongest pages the evasion at the root of white supremacy is finally an evasion of death — mortality offloaded onto the figure of the other, who is made to carry what the self cannot face. Is the impulse to dominate partly a refusal of the body and its finitude? Points of contact: the experimental terror-management tradition on death-denial, meeting existential phenomenology.