How NOT to write a Philosophy Paper
Sometimes it helps to learn from the mistakes of others. Over the years I have taught this class, many students have sacrificed the opportunity to earn a good grade by offering bad examples of term papers, and I have compiled their mistakes so that you may benefit from them by not repeating their mistakes. I’m thoroughly convinced that enough mistakes have been made that no one else need add to the heap, and I’m skeptical that anyone will find a new mistake that I have yet to witness, anyway.
First of all, a philosophy paper is not about you. Philosophy papers are not autobiographies. So, sentences like “I think that such and such is true,” “I feel that such and such is wrong,” “it is my opinion that…” or “It has always seemed to me that…” have no place in a philosophy paper. Such statements are about you, and you are not a philosophical topic. You must argue for some position on some topic of philosophical importance. Your mother, your girlfriend and your family physician may care how you feel, and they might even care about your opinion (papers about opinion, by the way, are called ‘editorials’). However, your paper should be written for what some have referred to as ‘the disinterested, educated reader,’ which means that this reader has no personal reason to care how you feel or what your opinions are, and that he or she is also smart enough to know that people should not believe what they read merely because someone wrote it, but only for good reasons. It is your job to provide good reasons for your position, which philosophers refer to as ‘arguments.’ If you must refer to yourself in your paper, you can write “In this paper, I will argue that such and such is the case, based on the following reasons, which someone who shares my worldview should accept…etc.” Don’t presuppose that the ‘disinterested reader’ is familiar with the primary or secondary texts to which you are referring. I, as the instructor, am not the intended audience either, and I will be grading your paper based on whether, or not, someone who had not read the assigned materials in class to which you refer could still understand your arguments. By ‘disinterested’ reader, I don’t mean ‘uninterested’ reader, though it is your job to capture the reader’s interest by writing about an interesting topic and showing why that topic is interesting.
A particularly egregious self-referential display of a lack of academic honesty and humility that it has been my displeasure to witness is when someone once stated some unreflective opinion they held and then recurrently claimed that Aquinas agreed with them. Even if you thoroughly understand the positions of Aquinas (as the person in question did not) or some other important historical philosopher, if you find yourself in agreement with him, then you are agreeing with him, not the other way around. Anachronisms are tolerable, but arrogant ones are not.
Secondly, just as philosophy papers are not autobiographies, so also are they not biographies. So, “Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican Friar who lived from 1225-1274, taught at the Sorbonne in Paris, contributed to the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was canonized, etc…” is not important information to include in a paper in which you are arguing for or against one of his philosophical positions. It should be clear for the same reasons that philosophy papers are not history papers.
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Your philosophy paper should also not be about itself. So, sentences such as “this is an important topic that philosophers have been arguing about since the dawn of time” should not appear in anyone’s paper. If the topic is obviously important, such as the existence of God, of the human soul, of free will, etc., then you are merely wasting space by stating the obvious. If it is unclear that the topic is important, then it is your responsibility to show the reader why it is important through argument and example, not merely to state that it is.
By the way, mythical pseudo-historical clichés like “ since the dawn of time,” or “the advent of man” etc. should be avoided not only because they’re clichés, but also because they’re vague enough to be meaningless. If you can’t easily define a figure of speech, then it is likely just as meaningless to your reader as it is to you. If you write, “since the founding of Plato’s Academy,” or “since the Edict of Milan,” even if your reader doesn’t know the exact date or circumstances of these events, he or she can easily look the phrases up and determine what they mean. Not so for “the dawn of time.” In like manner, many of these clichés do double duty as abbreviations for certain worldviews and views of history that, like most worldviews and views of history, are controversial. “Since the time of cavemen,” “Since humanity began to use tools,” “since humanity began to walk upright,” and “since we evolved from primates” are all phrases which assume an evolutionary worldview. However, the origin of humanity is a very controversial subject and, though you may write your paper for or against any of the various positions on that topic, you cannot assume the truth of any particular controversial view by smuggling it into your paper under the guise of a cliché or any literary convention. To do so is to utilize what philosophers call a ‘suppressed premise,’ and it is a sign of intellectual dishonesty, as it assumes either that your reader automatically shares your view (which they very well might not) or that you can sneak it into your paper and influence them to agree with you unreflectively. It was intellectually dishonest when Carl Sagan used to do it in pseudo-scientific PBS specials and it is patently unacceptable in academic philosophy papers.
Regarding worldviews, everyone has one, and it is fine to start from some systematic cosmological theory that certain people accept and argue for or against some particular position connected to it without the need to argue for or against the whole system. One might want to assume that Darwinian evolutionary theory is true and argue that it implies a Nietzschean theory of ethics or that it is incompatible with Christian doctrine. Or one might want to assume the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo and argue that it follows from that account that Christians should be environmentalists and vegetarians. You can assume any worldview as long as you make it clear in the beginning of your paper that you are arguing from some First Principle or basic assumption. You need not even personally hold the view from which you mount your argument. Maybe you want to argue from some position in order to show that it implies its own contradiction, thereby refuting it. Remember that, whatever basic assumptions you hold, your goal should be to convince others who share your same basic beliefs/assumptions/first principles. If you’re a Christian, who holds some position not every Christian shares, but you are convinced that other Christians should share your position, then you can argue that your position is most consistent with the rest of Christian doctrine. The same goes for any religion or worldview that espouses certain claims that are not easily verifiable, but upon which many other important claims rest.
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Regarding papers for or against certain doctrines of systematic worldviews, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Platonism or Darwinism, remember that your term paper is not a book or series of books. So, you cannot write a 5-7 page term paper about why any of these worldviews are generally true or false. At best, you might be able to successfully argue for why one particular doctrine of any of these systematic worldviews is true, false, probable or improbable.
A word on quantifiers and other modal terms: Quantifiers and modal terms are not just fancy adjectives that make your paper sound more interesting. Quantifiers describe numbers of things, such as ‘all Romans,’ ‘every Greek,’ ‘some philosophers,’ ‘many politicians,’ ‘a few scientists,’ ‘most professors,’ ‘the one and only present heavyweight title champion,’ and so on. Too often politicians and other usual suspects of vague optimistic jargon make statements like “The children of today are the leaders of tomorrow.” Well, certainly some of them are, unless a surprising future occurs in which no one leads anyone else or the current leaders all turn out to be immortal and hence need no successors. Of course, it is also just as likely true that some of the students of today are tomorrow’s criminals, psychopaths, victims and homeless beggars. Jack MacIntosh writes regarding such vague statements that
The appropriate quantifier here [and in most empirical examples] is some or, even more accurately, if less inspirationally, a very, very few. Omitting quantifiers is a standard device of politicians, propagandists, and advertisers…You should be more honest. If you find yourself tempted to write something like “Philosophers have often held that …,” ask yourself how many? and even which ones? You might even ask when did they hold this view, and for how long? If you put in no quantifiers the chances of your argument being either fallacious or fatuous or both increase greatly.1
In the same way, modal terms refer to logical relationships between things. Modalities are concepts like possibility (and its negation, impossibility), necessity, probability and contingency. Logics for handling a number of other ideas, such as eventually, formerly, can, could, might, may, must are by extension also called modal logics, since it turns out that these can be treated in similar ways.2 Students who fail to pay attention to these important words make the mistake of thinking that they must argue that this or that position just IS the case, when it may very well be much easier to simply argue that their view is possible, probable or even that it is necessarily true only if some other small set of propositions which imply it are also true. Ironically, many mode- blind students find it impossible to successfully argue for their position without considering how strong of a claim they should be making. Some of the best philosophy papers have argued simply for the possibility of some certain position, such as Alvin Plantinga’s recent version of the Free Will Defense from his Nature of Necessity.
Vagueness and ambiguity: Although the meaning of empirical terms like ‘oxygen’ or ‘stainless steel’ are clear, you CANNOT use metaphysical words like ‘love,’ ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ ‘God,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘person,’ ‘nature,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ and so on without first clearly and thoroughly DEFINING them. The singer on the radio may think that love is some emotional feeling that resembles butterflies in one’s stomach and is occasioned by sexual attraction. However, NO ONE we will study in this philosophy class (mis)uses the word in this way. Love is regarded as a virtue in the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition and the Christian tradition 1 http://www.phil.ucalgary.ca/undergrad/howtowrite.html 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic
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(Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas) regards it as an infused theological virtue by which one is connected to God (a term that they also define very carefully). Every term listed above, and just about any word that refers to something that is not perceptible to the five senses, is used in too many ways to simply include it in a paper without defining what you mean by the term. One common and intolerably annoying misuse of terminology is the unreflective assumption that the term ‘mind’ means ‘brain.’ In everyone you will read in this class, ‘mind’ means soul. To the extent that the brain is examined at all, it is the physical organ used to store the information that the soul/mind recalls via the faculty/process of memory and is the primary organ through which the soul is connected to the body. The brain is a physical organ of the body and the mind/soul is a metaphysical entity. Once again, being specific is a virtue of a philosophy paper.
By the way, neither the dictionary, nor an encyclopedia and especially not a thesaurus should be used as the source from which your definitions for terms are derived, as English dictionaries tend to reflect the most current connotations that words absorb in the vagaries of common parlance. None of the historical philosophers we read in this class wrote in English, and although many of our English words come from their usage of terms, few mean the same in the common street language reflected in the dictionary. If you must use an encyclopedia for short summaries of philosophical terms, use only the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu) and only for a reference to aid you pedagogically. Once you know how a particular philosopher is using a word, cite their meaning from their own works (i.e the primary source).
Do not list a catalog of the various possible positions for and against some philosophical position only to conclude that you are not able to settle the dispute because philosophers haven’t been able to agree on it for centuries and, thus, a poor intro student like you cannot be expected to resolve the dispute in 5-7 pages. If you are not able to at least argue for the possibility that one position in a debate is preferable to the others, then pick a different topic.
Rhetorical questions: Don’t waste your time with them, unless you are very selective with them, and immediately proceed to answer the question you have asked. Don’t ask more questions than you answer, especially if the questions are not some unusually good ones you have arrived at by your own efforts. If you find some new way of understanding or approaching a philosophical topic, which raises questions by virtue of arguments you provide for your new approach, then maybe your questions can be seen as conclusions of a prior argument. However, rhetorical questions can never take the place of a good argument for a position.
Once you have argued for your position, you should put yourself in the mindset of someone who might object to your view, and consider what his or her counter-arguments might be. If you do your research well, you should be able to find some contemporary academic philosophers who agree with your position (or something close to it) and some who disagree with it. You can escape the curse of needing to ‘reinvent the wheel,’ so to speak, by analyzing the arguments of your proponent and your opponent alike, in order to determine where you stand in relation to both. Once you choose the best argument from your proponent (or, better yet, an updated version of it that is your own), you can see what sort of arguments his or her opponent has against that argument, include them as examples of objections to the position you and your proponent share, and then provide arguments against them. In this way, you have already
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proactively anticipated the objections to your own view and guarded yourself against them before any potential future reader can level them against you. In this way, writing philosophy paper is like chess, as you try to anticipate your opponent’s next move, and counteract it before they can make it. Look at the way that Thomas Aquinas does this in his writings, listing first all of the objections to his view, and then replying to all of them after he gives his own view.
Here is a list of several ways that you can approach a philosophy paper:
Criticize an argument; or show that certain arguments for a thesis fail Defend an argument or thesis against someone else’s criticism Offer reasons to believe the thesis Offer counter-examples to the thesis Contrast the strengths and weaknesses of two opposing views about the thesis Give examples which help explain the thesis, or which help to make the thesis more
plausible Argue that certain philosophers are committed to the thesis by their other views, though
they do not come out and explicitly endorse the thesis Discuss what consequences the thesis would have, if it were true
Revise some philosopher’s thesis, in the light of some new objection3
The worst way to write a philosophy paper is to fail to write about a subject that you care about! If you don’t pick a topic that is important to you, you will not be motivated to research the topic, will fail to learn enough about it to have something important to express in a paper, and you will inevitably end up writing a significantly worse paper than your abilities would otherwise allow. Everyone has a worldview from which a number of philosophical positions follow. If you are a member of some particular religion, then you can philosophically examine some of the doctrines of your religion. Just about everyone is subject to some political system or other, so you can critique any number of political views from the philosophical position with which you are most closely allied. Unless you are of the untenable opinion that everything that everyone ever does is always right, then you have a certain ethical standpoint from which you can argue against some unethical behavior that you believe should be prohibited or for some ethical position that you think should be upheld. In any case, keep searching until you find yourself at least interested, if not excited, about your paper topic and begin researching it and taking notes as soon as possible.
3 http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/courses/PHIL1000-110/ReadWritePhilosophy/WritePhilosophy.html