GUIDELINES FOR WRITING PHILOSOPHY PAPERS

These guidelines are designed especially for students in my introductory classes who are trying to write a philosophy paper for the first time.  They may nonetheless be helpful to students in other courses.
 

WHAT IS AN ARGUMENTATIVE PAPER?

The key to writing a successful argumentative paper is to have a clear thesis for which you are arguing.  Although typically it is best to state your thesis early in the paper, you should think of your paper as providing a sound argument for which your thesis is the conclusion.   After you have established your thesis, you should make sure that each part of your paper is concerned either with clarifying your thesis, offering arguments in support of your thesis, or addressing possible objections to your thesis or the arguments you offer in support of that thesis.

Avoid drawn out introductions in which you try to fix the historical context or suggest the grand significance of your topic. For instance, do not start papers with sentences like "Throughout the centuries philosophers have struggled to understand what knowledge is" or  "John Locke is a great English philosopher".  Get right to the point.  If, for instance, you are writing about Locke's theory of primary and secondary qualities, you might start with the following: "In Ch. XIX of an Essay Concerning Human Understanding,  Locke argues that physical objects have two distinct kinds of properties, which he calls primary and secondary qualities."  Long papers of ten or more pages may deserve a more expansive introduction.

Read your paper through before you hand it in.  Read it aloud, and you will catch more errors.   If possible rewrite it.  Most of the mistakes in writing are things that can be easily seen by any competent speaker of English, including yourself.  If you give yourself time to read through your completed text, you will find mistakes which you can easily correct.  Better yet, have your roommate read it.  If he or she can't follow it, I won't be able to either.

SOME MISTAKES TO AVOID

1. Don't plagiarize.   It is plagiarism to quote or paraphrase passages from texts without citing them.  Changing a few words or paraphrasing in a way that exactly follows an author's argument is still plagiarism.  If you are not sure, try writing without looking at the book you are discussing.  If you cannot, you are probably plagiarizing.

 
2. Don't use thesauruses.  One of the most common mistakes newcomers to philosophical writing make is to try to vary their word choice to make their papers less repetitive.  For instance, a person might try to substitute "true" for "valid".  While these words may mean more or less the same thing in colloquial English, it would be a BIG MISTAKE to use them as if they were synonymous. To switch words in the middle of such a discussion would invite confusion.

 
3. Don't use dictionaries.  Very often we will be concerned with the nature of certain concepts, and it may seem natural to look up the words in a dictionary.  Unfortunately, dictionaries do not offer philosophical analyses of concepts.  They can be very misleading.  If you are truly lost, you might look at a philosophical dictionary, or the Encyclopedia of Philosophy — remembering to make a citation if you use the material.

 
4. Don't cite the Bible or other sacred texts as evidence.  Because many of the topics in a philosophy course touch on issues of a religious nature, it may seem natural to appeal to religious authority.  Don't do it.  The reason people cite sacred texts as authorities is because they believe, as a matter of faith, that they are divinely inspired.  Such authority is only legitimate within a community of individuals who share this faith.  In philosophy, on the other hand, we are concerned with arguments whose legitimacy can be evaluated by anyone, regardless of their religious belief.

 
5. Avoid the Internet.  Quite apart from the fact that it is easy to plagiarize, the quality of sources on the Internet can be quite poor.  It is safest, when looking for background material to look at reference works, such as the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which can be found in the library.  In general, however, since you are writing critical papers, you should not need reference works at all.

 
6. Spelling.  I shouldn't need to say this, but poor spelling contributes to poor grades.  Use a spell checker.

 
7. Tense.  You should make sure that your paper has a consistent tense.  Generally philosophy papers should be written in the present tense.

 
8. Passive Voice.  As much as possible avoid the passive voice.

 
9. First person.   In philosophical writing, limited use of the first person is permitted, and generally first person is preferable to passive voice.  Use of the first person is best limited to those parts of a paper where you are describing things you plan to do, or summarizing arguments that you have made.  Overuse of the first-person too often leads you to offer unsubstantiated opinions.

 
10. Avoid "it is my opinion" and similar phrases.  This kind of construction invites you to make claims without substantiating them.  Your opinion is not interesting, per se, but only insofar as it is supported by arguments.

SOME COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. Should I include my own opinions?  The short answer to this is yes, but only to the extent which your opinions are supported by argument.  The goal of a philosophy paper is to argue that certain propositions are true.  It must therefore supply reasons  for accepting the propositions it defends.  Since you are not an expert in the field, the fact that you believe some proposition is not by itself any reason for the reader to accept that proposition as true.  You must work hard to try to figure out the reasons you have the opinions you do, scrutinize these reasons to see if they in fact support your opinions and, if they do, state these reasons clearly in your paper.

 
2. What can I suppose the reader knows?  This is a difficult question.  In general, you should take your reader to be someone roughly like you.  You may assume that the reader has basic knowledge of the philosophical concepts and issues which you discuss in your paper.  You should not assume that the reader has read everything you have read within the last week.  You will often find yourself in a position where you have to decide whether to discuss the meaning of some term.  In general you need to do so only where the exact meaning of the term has consequences for the issues discussed in your paper.  For instance, if you are writing a paper about Descartes' proof of the existence of God, you may remark that this is an a priori  proof without saying what a priori  means.  If, on the other hand, you are writing a paper on Kant's theory of a priori  knowledge, you had better clearly state exactly what Kant takes a priori  knowledge to be.It is a common mistake to allude in a single sentence to some particular example or passage from something you have read.  For instance, someone might write, 'Hume believed all ideas are derived from impressions except for his missing shade of blue.'  If you haven't read Hume lately, you'll have no idea what this means.  If the missing shade of blue is important enough to mention in your paper, spend a paragraph explaining what you are talking about, otherwise drop it.

 
3. What should my thesis be if I don't know which of two or more alternative positions are correct?    It is certainly acceptable to have a thesis which does not end up advocating one solution to a philosophical problem.  However, as always, you must have reasons for your position.  For instance, you might have a thesis in which you argue that none of a series of positions about something are adequate.  To defend this thesis you must show faults in each position.  You might also defend a thesis which says that aspects of several positions are correct, but they must somehow be combined.  To defend this thesis you would have to show the strengths of each position, and discuss how they could be integrated.  What if you really don't know what position is best?  Perhaps there is a reason.  For instance you might argue that we can't know which view is correct until we have more empirical knowledge.  (For instance, you might argue that you can't know which of two theories about mental states is correct until you have a lot more scientific knowledge about the structure of the brain.)

GRADING CRITERIA

 MARKS ON PAPERS

FORMAT

REFERENCES AND OUTSIDE SOURCES

Argumentative papers are not research papers.  Most or all of your paper should be devoted to your own ideas about texts we have read in class.  When your paper does take material from other sources, you must be careful to cite those sources.

There are a number of ways to cite sources.  You may use any citation source from a reputable manual of style.  The key issue is to make sure that your reader (namely, me) can easily find the sources and passages that you cite.

My preferred method for citation is the "Author-Date" system.  Within the body of the paper, a text is cited by author and date of publication, together with page number if a specific passage is quoted or paraphrased.  Complete bibliographic information is listed at the end of a paper in a "Reference list".  For instance, if you quote from p. 35 of the paper by Bertrand Russell called 'Why I am not a Theist' in Perry and Brantman's anthology Introduction to Philosophy, your in-text reference would be:

 (Russell 1925, 35)

The reference would be:

Russell, Bertrand.  1925. 'Why I am not a Theist'. Reprinted in Introduction to Philosophy,  J. Perry and M. Brantman, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Notice that the author is the author of the selection, not the editors of the anthology in which the selection occurs.

In longer papers, you should make sure that your references are complete.  In short papers (5 or less papers), you need not adhere to these standards, so long it is always possible for me to check your references.  In particular, if you are only quoting from a text that we have read, you may simply cite the text by author and page number — e.g., (Descartes, 155) —  and you need not include a reference list.  If there is any danger of ambiguity, for instance, if we have read two texts by the same author, you should include the author and date in the in-text reference as well as a reference list at the end.  Note that when you cite a text in an anthology, use the author's name, not the name of the editor.  If, in a short or long paper, you cite a text which has not been read in class, you must include a full citation for that text.

SOME MISTAKES TO AVOID

SOME COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. Should I include my own opinions?  The short answer to this is yes, but only to the extent which your opinions are supported by argument.  The goal of a philosophy paper is to argue that certain propositions are true.  It must therefore supply reasons  for accepting the propositions it defends.  Since you are not an expert in the field, the fact that you believe some proposition is not by itself any reason for the reader to accept that proposition as true.  You must work hard to try to figure out the reasons you have the opinions you do, scrutinize these reasons to see if they in fact support your opinions and, if they do, state these reasons clearly in your paper.

2. What can I suppose the reader knows?  This is a difficult question.  In general, you should take your reader to be someone roughly like you.  You may assume that the reader has basic knowledge of the philosophical concepts and issues which you discuss in your paper.  You should not assume that the reader has read everything you have read within the last week.  You will often find yourself in a position where you have to decide whether to discuss the meaning of some term.  In general you need to do so only where the exact meaning of the term has consequences for the issues discussed in your paper.  For instance, if you are writing a paper about Descartes' proof of the existence of God, you may remark that this is an a priori  proof without saying what a priori  means.  If, on the other hand, you are writing a paper on Kant's theory of a priori  knowledge, you had better clearly state exactly what Kant takes a priori  knowledge to be.
 It is a common mistake to allude in a single sentence to some particular example or passage from something you have read.  For instance, someone might write, 'Hume believed all ideas are derived from impressions except for his missing shade of blue.'  If you haven't read Hume lately, you'll have no idea what this means.  If the missing shade of blue is important enough to mention in your paper, spend a paragraph explaining what you are talking about, otherwise drop it.

3. What should my thesis be if I don't know which of two or more alternative positions are correct?    It is certainly acceptable to have a thesis which does not end up advocating one solution to a philosophical problem.  However, as always, you must have reasons for your position.  For instance, you might have a thesis in which you argue that none of a series of positions about something are adequate.  To defend this thesis you must show faults in each position.  You might also defend a thesis which says that aspects of several positions are correct, but they must somehow be combined.  To defend this thesis you would have to show the strengths of each position, and discuss how they could be integrated.  What if you really don't know what position is best?  Perhaps there is a reason.  For instance you might argue that we can't know which view is correct until we have more empirical knowledge.  (For instance, you might argue that you can't know which of two theories about mental states is correct until you have a lot more scientific knowledge about the structure of the brain.)