Philosophy 220 Paper Guidelines and What follows is intended to help you through the process of writing a philosophy paper and to give you a sense of what I will be looking for when I grade your papers.
Topics
• Student may choose their own topics. Any topic addressed on the syllabus is acceptable.
• When choosing their topics, students should consider how they would address their topics in terms of normative ethical theories, theories of justice, and/or the metaphysics of persons.
• Some of the topics we are covering in this class are emotionally-charged. No matter how important a topic is to you, do not write on it if you will be unable to do so without appealing to your emotions at the expense of philosophical rigor.
Paper Proposals
• As indicated in the syllabus, students are to submit brief paper proposals.
• The purpose of this requirement is to assure that students choose topics that are appropriate for this course, to assure that students choose topics that can be effectively handled in approximately 10 pages, and to provide me with the opportunity to offer guidance to students as they attempt to write philosophically-informed papers in defense of their views.
• Proposals should be no more than 1 page in length.
• When writing your proposals, you should include a brief statement of your topic, a tentative statement of your thesis or theses (“tentative” because people sometimes change or modify their positions as they write papers), and a tentative list of sources.
Guidelines
• Your papers should be approximately 10 pages in length, though somewhat longer papers are fine. Title pages and bibliography pages are not included in the page count.
• Your papers should be double-spaced, except for long quotations, which should be offset and single-spaced.
• Use a standard 12-point font (e.g., Times New Roman or Cambria) and one inch margins all around.
• Number your pages. Title pages should not be numbered.
• These are relatively short papers. Keep background-setting to a minimum. Get to the point quickly.
• State your thesis, or theses, early and clearly, preferably in the first paragraph of your paper.
• Use the introduction to your paper to give the reader a sense of what to expect and to make the overall structure of your paper clear. State the position you will argue for and very briefly state the premises you take to support your conclusion (i.e., your thesis). It can be a good idea to include, as part of your introduction, a short paragraph indicating how you will proceed.
• Philosophy papers are not about how you feel about the issue(s) at hand. Do not tell the reader about your feelings.
o Avoid phrases like “I feel that…” and “Philosopher X feels that…” like the plague.
o Stick to arguments, be they your own or those of the authors whose views you are discussing.
• Your papers should be argumentative. Make your own claims and the claims you discuss clear.
• Show views you disagree with in the best possible light.
o It might be a mistake to do this in a political debate or in a court of law, but it is a virtue in a philosophy paper; you should acknowledge when those you disagree make good points, or least when they make points that deserve attention.
o Avoid the tendency of students—especially of students with little background in philosophy—to offer caricatures of views with which they disagree.
o If you show your opponents’ views in the best possible light and provide a well-argued defense of your own views or of views you agree with, you are more likely to do well on your papers.
o In short, do not beat up on straw men.
• Always keep the main point(s) of your paper in view. Don’t ramble. There’s plenty to say about any of the topics you might write on without including unnecessary filler in your papers.
• Keep in mind who you are writing for. The reader (i.e., me) wants to know that you know the meanings of the concepts you employ.
o Do not assume that it is unnecessary to define/analyze technical philosophical terms. To an extent, you could get away with this in something like a graduate-level course or in a course written with an audience of professional philosophers in mind, but it is unacceptable in a lower-level course.
o You need to show that you have engaged with the relevant material in no merely superficial way. These papers are not book reports.
• Don not start your paper by telling the reader that “So-and-so was a great philosopher,” or “For thousands of years, philosophers have debated whether or not p.”
o This should be obvious, but it is common enough that it is worth mentioning. It is also just plain bad writing.
• Where applicable, use examples to bolster your claims.
o If you can come up with examples of your own that is wonderful, but make sure that they are relevant and can do the work that you want them to do.
o If you use examples from the course readings, be certain to display a firm grasp of them.
• Use citations where appropriate. If you quote an author or take an idea from an author, include a citation.
o For this class, you may use either APA or Chicago style for citations.
If you choose to use APA style, you must include a bibliography.
If you choose to use Chicago style, you do not need a bibliography because bibliographic information will appear in your first citation of any source.
• If you choose to use Chicago Style, use footnotes rather than endnotes.
• Note that I prefer Chicago Style to APA style citations, but you will not be penalized in any way if you use APA formatting for your citations.
o Chicago style citations are somewhat more difficult to learn, but they are hardly as challenging as some have suggested. I learned to use this citation method in high school with no assistance.
o If you choose to use Chicago style citations, see The Chicago Manual of Style or my notes for citation formatting.
• Don’t aim for literary elegance. It is not a vice for a philosophy paper to be rather dry.
• Avoid informal fallacies. See below.
• When submitting your papers, follow the submission guidelines found in the syllabus, i.e., always include your names in the names of the files you are submitting, etc.
o Also, always put your names on your papers.
• PROOFREAD YOUR PAPERS!
Informal Fallacies
Informal fallacies are argumentative tactics that can be used persuasively even when an argument is unsound. Politicians and lawyers make a lot of use of informal fallacies, but they have no place in philosophy papers.
Here are a few of the more common informal fallacies:
• Argumentum ad populum (argument to the people): an argument that appeals to popular sentiments or prejudices. Philosophical issues are not settled by appeal to what most people believe. Appealing to popular beliefs is not always wrong, but it is easy to overstate the evidentially value of widely held beliefs. Offering an argumentum ad populum is no substitute for offering stronger evidence for a claim.
• Argumentum ad misercordium (argument to pity): an argument that plays on peoples’ feelings of sympathy or compassion. Such arguments are fine, e.g., when the Red Cross is asking for money. However, they are inappropriate in philosophy papers because they put emotional pressure on the reader. Furthermore, such arguments often mask weak cases.
• Fallacy of false cause (post hoc, ergo propter hoc): the mistake of arguing that because some event happened after some other even, the later event was caused by the earlier event. In other words, it is the fallacy of arguing that because two arguments are correlated with each other in a temporal sequence, the one is the cause of the other. Put more succinctly, correlation is not causation.
• Argumentum ad consensus gentium (argument from the consensus of the nations): a kind of argument (often much like an argumentum ad populum) that appeals to commonly held beliefs to support a conclusion. For example: “Most people believe in God; therefore, the existence of God is to be assumed.” One would need an argument for the existence of God (e.g., an ontological or cosmological argument) to justify the conclusion of this argument; having given such an argument, the premise, “Most people believe in God,” while true, would serve no useful purpose in the argument.
• Argumentum ad hominem (literally, argument against the man): an argument that attacks one’s opponent’s position on personal grounds. Such arguments are usually irrelevant to one’s case. For example: “Saul Kripke used to make a habit of sleeping with female students at Princeton; therefore, we shouldn’t buy what he has to say in Naming and Necessity.”
• Petitio principii (asking to be granted the “principle” or thesis to be proved): an argument that begs the question because it argues in a circle. Often, if not always, such an argument lifts the burden of proof form the arguer. For example, an arguer might ask to be granted the principle, “Euthanasia is permissible in some cases,” then reason back to the principle, “Euthanasia is permissible in some cases.” If the conclusion follows from the premises, the argument can still be acceptable, but it will not be acceptable if this is not the case.
• Argument from authority: an argument that appeals to an authority figure in the name of leading an argument to a preordained conclusion. For example, one might argue that abortion is wrong by invoking the authority of the Pope or that Platonic Forms have no place in an account of how things come to be by appealing to the authority of Aristotle.
• Slippery slope argument: an argument against some proposed course of action on the grounds that it might be the first step towards some bad outcome(s). Such arguments are often used by arguers to scare others into accepting their positions.
10
10 pages. I have the paper mostly written with the exception of a couple of pages that I have copied information from the internet in. I also have suggestions from the professor to use as resources for the paper. There must be at least 4 resources and the argumentative essay must be in APA or Chicago style format
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