NEIL W. TENNANT
tennant.9@osu.edu
If you email me, please use the header PHIL [COURSE-CODE]: [YOURNAME].
Professor
Department of Philosophy
Two useful sources
- Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau, Doing Philosophy: A Guide to the Writing of Philosophy Papers, 3rd edn., Wadsworth 2005
- Jay F. Rosenberg, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners, 3rd edn., Prentice Hall 1996
Advice on writing essays Philosophy essays should be written in clear and grammatical prose. Their sentences and paragraphs should be so constructed as to make the line of exposition or argument easy to follow. Pay attention to correct spelling. Provide scholarly references, and attributions of quotations etc. as needed. A good essay discussing a philosophical problem will have the following ingredients:
- Problem statement: State the problem in an engaging way, making it vivid. Speak to the concerns of the reader, whether these be practical or theoretical.
- Exegesis: Give a comprehensive account of diagnoses and solutions offered by famous thinkers. This calls for interpretation against the historical contexts of their times; but you should be able to make them speak to current concerns.
- Comparison and contrast: Compare and contrast the resulting variety of views. Look for points of core agreement, and for points of extreme controversy. (It is the latter that are characteristic of the deepest problems in philosophy; which is why they are of enduring interest.)
- Criticism: Find the weak points in earlier views: Are they internally incoherent? Do they invoke false or insupportable assumptions? Do they commit fallacies of reasoning? Do they deploy confused concepts? Do they fly in the face of scientific findings? Do they violate strong intuitions?
- Catalog progress: Find the strong points in any or all of the well-known views.
- Creative synthesis: Try to arrive at a conception of the problem and a possible solution to it that pays due regard to both the strengths and the weaknesses identified in earlier views. If you are really bitten by the Philosophy Bug, you may even find yourself taking issue with points on which all previous thinkers had agreed!
- Anticipation of Objections: Try to think of ways a critic might try to find fault with your own account. Think up replies that can dispose of their worries. This process can be iterated; the pursuit of objection-reply-counterobjection-renewed reply ... leads to what philosophers call dialectical depth. An essay has dialetical depth 0 is it never anticipates any objections to the views it is putting forward. Try to attain dialectial depth of at least 1!
Beware of the material that is passed off as philosophy on websites not affiliated with universities; base your reading as much as possible on books and journals that are properly edited and published by reputable presses. Do not rely on any notes that might be commercially available and which purport to be notes taken on these lectures. No such notes have been authorized or edited by the instructor. Past experience has revealed that such notes tend to be marred by many errors and misunderstandings. Reliance on them is bound to affect your grade adversely.
AVOID MAKING ANNOYING GRAMMATICAL ERRORS
AVOID MAKING ANNOYING SPELLING ERRORS!
DO NOT COMMIT PLAGIARISM!!