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Philosophy essay writing guide

Introduction.

This guide is intended to give new students of philosophy some preliminary advice about writing philosophy essays at university. For many of you, writing a philosophy essay will be something of a new experience, and no doubt many of you will be a little unsure of what to expect, or of what is expected of you. Most of you will have written essays in school for English, History, etc. A philosophy essay is something a little different again. However, it is not an unfathomable, mysterious affair, nor one where anything goes.

Just what a philosophy essay is will depend a lot, as you'd expect, on just what philosophy is. Defining philosophy is always a more or less controversial business, but one way to think of what is done in university philosophy departments is to think of the difference between having a philosophy and doing philosophy. Virtually everyone "has a philosophy" in the sense that we have many basic beliefs about the world and ourselves and use certain key concepts to articulate those beliefs. Many of us initially come to thus "have a philosophy" (or elements of several philosophies) often only unconsciously, or by following "what's obvious" or "what everybody knows", or by adopting a view because it sounds exciting or is intellectually fashionable.

"Doing philosophy", on the other hand, is a self-conscious unearthing and rigorous examination of these basic beliefs and key concepts. In doing so, we try to clarify the meanings of those beliefs and concepts and to evaluate critically their rational grounds or justification. Thus, rather than having their heads in the clouds, philosophers are really more under the surface of our thinking, examining the structures that support - or fail to support - those who trust that they have their feet on the ground. Such examination may even help to develop new and firmer ground.

Doing philosophy, then, begins with asking questions about the fundamental ideas and concepts that inform our ways of looking at the world and ourselves, and proceeds by developing responses to those questions which seek to gain insight into those ideas and concepts - and part of that development consists in asking further questions, giving further responses, and so on. Human beings across the world have been engaged in this sort of dialogue of question and response for many centuries - even millennia - and a number of great traditions of reflection and inquiry have evolved that have fundamentally influenced the development of religion, art, science and politics in many cultures. The influence of philosophical thinking on Western civilization, in particular, can be traced back more than 2,500 years to the Ancient Greeks.

In philosophy, a good essay is one that, among other things, displays a good sense of this dialectic of question and response by asking insightful, probing questions, and providing reasoned, well-argued responses. This means that you should not rest content with merely an unintegrated collection of assertions, but should instead work at establishing logical relations between your thoughts. You are assessed not on the basis of what you believe, but on how well you argue for the position you adopt in your essay, and on how interesting and insightful your discussion of the issues is. That is to say, you are assessed on how well you do philosophy, not on what philosophy you end up having. Nonetheless, you ought to make sure that your essay's discussion is relevant to the topic. (See Section 5.2 below on relevance.)

It is hoped that you enjoy the activity of essay writing. If you have chosen to study Arts, it is likely that you will have a particular interest in - even a passion for - ideas and the variety of forms and genres in which ideas are expressed and explored. The argumentative or discursive formal academic essay is one such form, and one which can be a pleasure to read and to write. Thus, the assessment that is set in philosophy courses is primarily an invitation to you to pursue what is already (or, hopefully, soon to be) your own interest in writing to explore ideas. However, your immediate goal in writing an academic philosophy essay ought not to be to write a personal testament, confession or polemic. Rather, you should primarily aim at articulating, clearly and relatively dispassionately, your philosophical thinking on the topic at hand. Nevertheless, the kind and degree of personal development one can gain from taking up the challenge to think and to write carefully, clearly and thoroughly is certainly something to be greatly valued.

This guide is intended to help you get started in the business of writing philosophy essays. As you practise your philosophical writing skills, you will develop your own technique, and learn what is appropriate in each particular case. So you may well come to "work around" many of these guidelines. Nonetheless, it is important that you pass through that which you seek to pass beyond.* In addition to your own writing, your reading of other philosophers will help you to develop your sense of what constitutes good philosophical writing. As you read, note the various styles and techniques that philosophical authors employ in their treatment of philosophical issues. Practice and studying good examples, then, are the most valuable ways to develop your essay writing skills.

This guide is, moreover, only one of many publications that introduce philosophy students to essay writing. Some others you may like to consult include:

• A. P. Martinich, Philosophical Writing, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
• J. Feinberg and R. Shafer-Landau, Doing Philosophy: A Guide to the Writing of Philosophy Papers, 2nd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2001)
• Z. Seech, Writing Philosophy Papers, 4th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2003)
• R. Solomon, "Writing Philosophy", Appendix to his The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy, 6th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2001)
• S. Gorovitz et al., Philosophical Analysis: An Introduction to its Language and Techniques, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1979)

Also, the websites of many philosophy departments in universities around Australia and the world contain downloadable essay writing guides or links to them.

*This phrase is adapted from Jacques Bouveresse, "Why I am so very unFrench", in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 12.

What do I do in a Philosophy essay?

Philosophy essay topics are not designed to provide an intellectual obstacle course that trips you up so as to delight a malicious marker. They are designed to invite you to "grapple with" with some particular philosophical problem or issue. That is to say, they are designed to offer you an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of a particular philosophical problem or issue, and to exhibit your own philosophical skills of analysis, argumentation, etc. These twin goals are usually best achieved by ensuring that your essay performs two basic functions (your understanding and your skills apply to both):

an exposition of the problem or issue in question (often as it is posed in some particular text); and a critical discussion of the problem or text

These two functions can, but need not always, correspond to physically or structurally distinct sections of your essay. See Section 5.1.

The expository ("setting forth") aspect of your essay is where you should make clear what the issue is and why it is an issue. Where you are dealing with an issue as it is presented in some particular text, your aim should be to make clear what it is that the author in question meant in their text, what they see as the issue and why they see it as an issue. This does not involve merely quoting or paraphrasing a text. Of course, occasional quotation and paraphrase may be appropriate - sometimes necessary - but these ought not to constitute the sole or major content of your exposition. Where you do quote or paraphrase, make sure you attribute your sources in footnotes or endnotes. (See Section 7.)

Exposition is, then, primarily a matter of developing in your own words what you think the issue is or what you think the text means. In all expository work you should always try to give a fair and accurate account of a text or problem, even when the exposition becomes more interpretive rather than simply descriptive. You ought to be patient and sympathetic in your exposition, even if you intend later to criticise heavily the philosopher in question. Indeed, the better the exposition in this regard, usually the more effective the critique.

An important part of exposition is your analysis of the text or issue. Here you should try to "break down" the text, issue or problem into its constitutive elements by distinguishing its different parts. (E.g. "There are two basic kinds of freedom in question when we speak of freedom of the will. First, … . Second, …", or "There are three elements in Plato's conception of the soul, namely... He establishes these three elements by means of the following two arguments... ") This also involves showing the relationships between those elements, relationships which make them "parts of the whole".

As well as laying out these elements within a text or issue, you can also (when appropriate or relevant) show how a text or issue "connects up with" other texts, issues, or philosophical and/or historical developments, which can help to shed further light on the matter by giving it a broader context. (eg "Freedom of the will is importantly connected to the justification of punishment", or "Plato's tripartite theory of the soul bears interesting resemblances to Freud's analysis of the psyche", or "Kant's transcendental idealism can be seen as reconciling the preceding rationalist and empiricist accounts of knowledge".)

An exposition of a text need not always simply follow the author's own view of what it means. You should, of course, demonstrate that you understand how the author themself understands their work, but an exposition can sometimes go beyond this, giving another reading of the text. (eg "Heidegger might deny it, but his Being and Time can be read as developing a pragmatist account of human understanding.") A given text or issue may well be susceptible to a number of plausible or reasonable interpretations. An exposition should aim to be sensitive to such variety. When appropriate, you should defend your interpretations against rivals and objections. Your interpretation ought, though, to be aimed at elucidating the meaning or meanings of the text or issue and not serve merely as a "coat-hanger" for presenting your own favoured views on the matter in question, which should be left to your ...

Critical discussion

This is where your thought gets more of the centre stage. Here you should attempt to develop a response to the issues which your exposition has made clear, and/or, in the case of a discussion of some particular text, attempt to give a critical appraisal of the author's treatment of the issue. In developing a response to a philosophical problem, argumentation is, again, of central importance. Avoid making unsupported assertions; back up your claims with reasons, and connect up your ideas so that they progress logically toward your conclusions. Consider some of the various objections to and questions about your views that others might or have put forward, and try to respond to them in defence of your own line of thinking. Your goal here should be to discuss what you have expounded so as to come to some conclusion or judgement about it. ("Critical" is derived from the Ancient Greek for "to decide, to judge".) Critical discussion is thus not necessarily "destructive" or "negative"; it can be quite constructive and positive.

In the case of a critical appraisal of a particular author's text, you can negatively criticise the author's arguments by pointing out questionable assumptions, invalid reasoning, etc. If, on the other hand, you think that the text is good, then your critical discussion can be positive. This can be done by revealing its "hidden virtues" (that is, by showing that there is more to the author's arguments and views than what lies on the surface) and/or by defending an author against possible and/or actual criticisms. (eg "Norman Malcolm argues that Descartes is mistaken in assuming that dreams and waking episodes have the same content.* However, Malcolm fails to appreciate the subtlety of Descartes' argument in the First Meditation, which allows Descartes to claim . . .") Just to expound an author's arguments and then say "I disagree" or "That seems right" is not really enough - you need to "have something to say" about it. Of course, by all means go on, after finding fault with some philosopher, to answer in your own way the questions tackled or raised by the author. (eg "Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of women's oppression in The Second Sex suffers from serious weaknesses, as I have shown in Section 2 above. A better way to approach the issue, I shall now argue, is to . . .".)

Where you are not primarily concerned with evaluating or responding to a particular text, your critical discussion can be more focused on your own constructive response to the issue. (eg "Having used Dworkin's account to clarify the meanings of the concepts of 'the sanctity of life' and 'voluntariness', I shall now argue that voluntary euthanasia is morally permissible because its voluntariness respects what is of value in the notion of the sanctity of life" - where you now leave Dworkin behind as a source and move on to give your own account.)

* See Norman Malcolm, "Dreaming and Skepticism", in Willis Doney, ed., Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 56.

Guide to researching and writing Philosophy essays

5th edition by Steven Tudor , for the Philosophy program, University of Melbourne, 2003.

This fifth edition of How to Write a Philosophy Essay: A Guide for Students (previous editions titled A Guide to Researching and Writing Philosophy Essays ) was prepared in consultation with members of the Philosophy program, the University of Melbourne. For advice and assistance on this and earlier editions, thanks are due to Graham Priest, Barry Taylor, Christopher Cordner, Doug Adeney, Josie Winther, Linda Burns, Marion Tapper, Kimon Lycos, Brendan Long, Jeremy Moss, Tony Coady, Will Barrett, Brian Scarlett, and Megan Laverty. Some use was also made of materials prepared by the Philosophy Departments of La Trobe University, the University of Queensland, and The Australian National University.

Disclaimer: University, Faculty and program rules

Please note: this booklet does not provide authoritative statements of the official policies or rules of the University of Melbourne, the Faculty of Arts, or the Philosophy program with regard to student essays and examinations or any other matters. Students should, therefore, not rely on this booklet for such information, for which they should consult the various appropriate notice boards, handbooks, websites, and/or members of staff.

Essay topics

What do philosophy essay topics look like? There are, very roughly, two basic kinds of philosophy essay topics: "text-focused" topics and "problem-focused" topics. Text-focused topics ask you to consider some particular philosopher's writing on some issue. (eg "Discuss critically David Hume's account of causation in Part III of Book I of his A Treatise of Human Nature " or "Was Wittgenstein right to say that 'the meaning of a word is its use in the language', in his Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 43?"). Problem-focused topics are more directly about a particular philosophical problem or issue, without reference to any particular philosopher's text. (eg "Is voluntary euthanasia morally permissible?" or "What is scientific method?")

There is another sort of topic, one which presents a statement and asks you to discuss it, where that statement is a "made up" or, at least, unattributed quote. (eg. "'Without belief in God, people cannot be moral'. Discuss.") I shall regard these as variations of the problem-focused type of topic. Where you are asked to discuss some such statement "with reference to" some specified text or philosopher, then that topic becomes more text-focused. (eg "'Without belief in God, people cannot be moral'. Discuss with reference to J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. ") Occasionally, a topic presents an unattributed statement, but the statement is, in fact, a quote from a particular philosopher you've been studying, or, at least, a good paraphrase of their thinking. (An example of the latter: "'All the ideas in our minds originate from either sense perception or our reflection upon sensory information.' Discuss.", in a course devoted to John Locke, whose views are summed up in the quoted statement, though those words are not actually his.) Should you take such topics as problem- or text-focused? Rather unhelpfully, I'll say only that it depends on the case. You might ask your lecturer or tutor about it. Whichever way you do take it, be clear in your essay which way you are taking it.

The difference between text-focused and problem-focused essay topics is, however, not very radical. This is because, on the one hand, any particular philosopher's text is about some philosophical problem or question, while, on the other hand, most philosophical problems (certainly virtually all those you will be given as essay topics at university) will have been written about by previous philosophers.

The basic way to approach text-focused topics, then, is to treat the nominated text as an attempt by one philosopher to deal with a particular philosophical problem or issue. The essay topic will, generally speaking, be inviting you to do philosophy with that philosopher, to engage with them in thinking about the issue, whether that engagement proves to be as an ally or an adversary. The chosen text will usually be one which has been (or deserves to be) influential or significant in the history of philosophy, but the task is not to pay homage to past masters. But, even if homage is your thing, the best way to do that here is to engage with the master philosophically.

With regard to problem-focused topics, you will often find your exploration of the problem aided by taking some text or texts which have dealt with it as reference points or prompts. This is not always strictly necessary, but many of you starting out in philosophy will find it helpful to do so - it can help you give focus to your response to the question. (Thus, you might, in an essay on the topic "Is voluntary euthanasia morally permissible?" take it upon yourself to use, for example, Ronald Dworkin's Life's Dominion and Peter Singer's Practical Ethics as reference points. Or, in an essay on the topic "What is scientific method?", you might set up your answer via a comparison of the two different accounts in Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.*) How will you know which texts to adopt as reference points or prompts, if none is mentioned in the essay topic itself? One way is to consider what texts have already been mentioned with regard to the topic in your course reading guide and in lectures and tutorials. Another way is to do some of your own research. On this see Section 4 below.

* In this guide, in giving examples of how to go about answering an essay question, I am not necessarily giving any concrete or reliable advice for any particular topic. The examples are primarily to do with the form or style or strategy you might find helpful.

Researching your essay

To do research for your philosophy essay you need to do only two things: read and think. Actually, for problem-focused essays, thinking is the only truly necessary bit, but it's highly likely that you will find your thinking much assisted if you do some reading as well. Philosophical research at university is a little different to research in most other disciplines (especially the natural sciences), in that it is not really about "collecting data" to support or refute explanatory theories. Rather, the thinking that's involved in philosophical research (as part of one's preparation for philosophical writing) is more a matter of reflecting critically upon the problems in front of one. Researching the writings of other philosophers should, therefore, be primarily directed towards helping you with that reflection rather than aiming at gathering together and reporting on "the relevant findings" on a particular topic. In many other disciplines, a "literature review" is an important research skill, and sometimes philosophy academics do such reviews - but it is rare that philosophy students are asked to do one.

What, then, to read? It should be clear from your lectures and tutorials what some starting points for your reading might be. (All courses provide reading guides; many also have booklets of reading material.) Your tutor and lecturer are also available for consultation on what readings you might begin with for any particular topic in that subject. Independent research can also uncover useful sources, and evidence of this in your essay can be a pleasing sign of intellectual independence. Make sure, though, that what you come up with is relevant to the topic. (See Section 5.2 below on relevance.) Whichever way you proceed, your reading should be purposive and selective.

In the case of essay questions that refer to a particular text, you should familiarise yourself thoroughly with this text. Usually, such a text will be a primary text, i.e. one in which a philosopher writes directly about a philosophical issue. Texts on or about a primary text are called secondary texts. (Many philosophical works will combine these two tasks, and discuss other philosophical texts while also dealing directly with a philosophical issue.) Some secondary texts can be helpful to students. However, don't think you will only ever understand a primary text if you have a nice friendly secondary text to take you by the hand through the primary text. More often than not, you need to have a good grasp of the primary text in order to make sense of the secondary text.

How much to read? The amount of reading you do should be that which maximises the quality of your thinking - that is, you should not swamp yourself with vast slabs of text that you can't digest, but nor should you starve your mind of ideas to chew over. There is, of course, no simple rule for determining this optimal amount. Be wary, though, of falling into the vice of looking for excuses not to read some philosopher or text, as in "Oh, that's boring old religious stuff" or "She's one of those obscure literary feminist types", or "In X Department they laugh at you if you mention those authors in tutes". If someone wants a reason not to think, they'll soon come up with one.

Philosophical writings

Most philosophical writings come in either of two forms: books or articles. Articles appear either in books that are edited anthologies or in academic journals, such as Philosophical Quarterly or Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Some academic journals are also on the internet. Most articles in the journals are written by professional philosophers for professional philosophers; similarly with many books. But by no means let this put you off. Everyone begins philosophy at the deep end - it's really the only kind there is!

There are, however, many books written for student audiences. Some of these are general introductions to philosophy as a whole; others are introductions to particular areas or issues (eg biomedical ethics or philosophy of science). Among the general introductions are various philosophical dictionaries, encyclopedias and "companions". These reference works collect short articles on a wide range of topics and can be very useful starting points for newcomers to a topic. Among the most useful of the general reference works are:

• Edward Craig, ed., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (10 vols.) (London: Routledge, 1998)
• Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 vols.) (New York: Macmillan, 1967)
• Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
• Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Thomas Mautner, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1998)
• J.O. Urmson and Jonathan Ree, eds., The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1993)
• Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an internet-based reference work: plato.stanford.edu/ )

Note taking

Note taking, like your reading, should not be random, but ought to be guided by the topic in question and by your particular lines of response to the issues involved. Note taking for philosophy is very much an individual art, which you develop as you progress. By and large it is not of much use to copy out reams of text as part of your researches. Nor is it generally helpful to read a great number of pages without making any note of what they contain for future reference. But between these two extremes it is up to you to find the mean that best helps you in getting your thoughts together.

Libraries and electronic resources

The University's Baillieu Library (including the Institute of Education Resource Centre), which is open to all members of the University, contains more than 2,500 years' worth of philosophical writings. The best way to become acquainted with them is by using them, including using the catalogues (including the Baillieu's on-line catalogues and subject resources web-pages), following up a work's references (and references in the references), intelligent browsing of the shelves, etc.

In the main Baillieu Library, the philosophical books are located (mostly) between 100–199 in the Dewey decimal system, and philosophical journals are located in the basement. The Reference section on the ground floor also has some relevant works. The Education Resource Centre also has a good philosophy collection.

In addition to hard-copy philosophical writings, there is also a variety of electronic resources in philosophy, mostly internet-based. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was already mentioned above. Links to other useful internet sites (such as the Australasian Association of Philosophy website) can be found through the Baillieu Library's web-page and the Philosophy Department's web-page.

A strong word of warning, however, for the would-be philosophical web-surfer: because anyone can put material on a website, all kinds of stuff, of varying levels of quality, is out there - and new-comers to philosophy are usually not well placed to sort their way through it. Unless you have a very good understanding of what you're looking for - and what you're not looking for - most of you will be much better off simply carefully reading and thinking about a central text for your course, eg Descartes' First Meditation, rather than wandering about the internet clicking on all the hits for "Descartes". Exercise your mind, not your index finger.

Writing your essay

Planning and structuring your essay.

It is very important that you plan your essay, so that you have an idea of what you are going to write before you start to write it. Of course, you will most likely alter things in later drafts, but you should still start off by having a plan. Planning your essay includes laying out a structure. It is very important that your essay has a clearly discernible structure, ie that it is composed of parts and that these parts are logically connected. This helps both you and your reader to be clear about how your discussion develops, stage by stage, as you work through the issues at hand.

Poor essay structure is one of the most common weaknesses in student philosophy essays. Taking the time to work on the structure of your essay is time well spent, especially since skill in structuring your thoughts for presentation to others should be among the more enduring things you learn at university. A common trap that students fall into is to start their essay by writing the first sentence, then writing another one that seems to follow that one, then another one that sort of fits after that one, then another that might or might not have some connection with the previous one, and so on until the requisite 1,500 words are used up. The result is usually a weak, rambling essay.

There are, of course, no hard and fast rules about how to structure a philosophy essay. Again, it is a skill you develop through practice, and much will depend on the particular topic at hand. Nonetheless, it might be helpful to begin by developing an essay structure around the basic distinction between your exposition and your critical discussion (as discussed above). In this it will be important that you make clear who is putting forward which point, that is, make it clear whether you are presenting your own thoughts or are expounding someone else's. (Again, confusion in this regard is a common problem in student essays.) It can often help your structuring if you provide headings for different sections (possibly numbered or lettered). Again, this helps both your reader to follow your discussion and you to develop your thoughts. At each stage, show clearly the logical relations between and the reasons for your points, so that your reader can see clearly why you say what you say and can see clearly the development in your discussion.

Another key to structuring your essay can be found in the old adage "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. Tell 'em. Then tell 'em what you've told 'em", which provides you with a ready-made structure: Introduction, Main Body, and Conclusion.

In your Introduction, first introduce the issues the essay is concerned with. In doing so, try to state briefly just what the problem is and (if there is space) why it is a problem. This also applies, of course, to issues covered in text-focused essay topics. Next, tell the reader what it is that you are going to do about those problems in the Main Body. This is usually done by giving a brief sketch or overview of the main points you will present, a "pre-capitulation", so to speak, of your essay's structure. This is one way of showing your reader that you have a grasp (indeed, it helps you get a grasp) of your essay as a structured and integrated whole, and gives them some idea of what to expect by giving them an idea of how you have decided to answer the question. Of course, for reasons of space, your Introduction might not be very long, but something along these lines is likely to be useful.

In your Main Body, do what you've said you'll do. Here is where you should present your exposition(s) and your critical discussion(s). Thus, it is here that the main philosophical substance of your essay is to be found. Of course, what that substance is and how you will present it will depend on the particular topic before you. But, whatever the topic, make clear at each stage just what it is you are doing. You can be quite explicit about this. (eg "I shall now present Descartes' ontological argument for the existence of God, as it is presented in his Fifth Meditation. There will be three stages to this presentation.") Don't think that such explicitness must be a sign of an unsophisticated thinker.

A distinct Conclusion is perhaps not always necessary, if your Main Body has clearly "played out" your argument. So you don't always have to present a grand summation or definitive judgement at the end. Still, often for your own sake, try to state to yourself what it is your essay has achieved and see if it would be appropriate to say so explicitly. Don't feel that you must come up with earth-shattering conclusions. Of course, utter banality or triviality are not good goals, either. Also, your essay doesn't always have to conclude with a "solution" to a problem. Sometimes, simply clarifying an issue or problem is a worthy achievement and can merit first-class honours. A good conclusion to a philosophy essay, then, will usually combine a realistic assessment of the ambit and cogency of its claims with a plausible proposal that those claims have some philosophical substance.

What you write in your essay should always be relevant to the question posed. This is another common problem in student essays, so continually ask yourself "Am I addressing the question here?" First-class answers to a question can vary greatly, but you must make sure that your essay responds to the question asked, even if you go on to argue that the question as posed is itself problematic. (eg "To ask ‘What is scientific method?' presupposes that science follows one basic method. However, I shall argue that there are, in fact, several different scientific methods and that these are neither unified nor consistent.") Be wary, however, of twisting a topic too far out of shape in order to fit your favoured theme. (You would be ill-advised, for example, to proceed thus: "What is scientific method? This is a question asked by many great minds. But what is a mind? In this essay, I shall discuss the views of Thomas Aquinas on the nature of mind.")

This requirement of relevance is not intended as an authoritarian constraint on your intellectual freedom. It is part of the skill of paying sustained and focused attention to something put before you - which is one of the most important skills you can develop at university. If you do have other philosophical interests that you want to pursue (such as Aquinas on mind), then please do pursue them, in addition to writing your essay on the set topic. At no stage does the requirement of relevance prevent you from pursuing your other interests.

Citing Philosophical "Authorities"

There might be occasions when you want to quote other philosophers and writers apart from when you are quoting them because they are the subject of your essay. There are two basic reasons why you might want to do this. First, you might quote someone because their words constitute a good or exemplary expression or articulation of an idea you are dealing with, whether as its proponent, critic, or simply its chronicler. (eg "As Nietzsche succinctly put the point, 'There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena'.*") You may or may not want to endorse the idea whose good expression you have quoted, but simply want to use the philosopher as a spokesperson for or example of that view. But be clear about what you think the quote means and be careful about what you are doing with the quote. It won't do all the work for you.

The second reason you might want to quote a philosopher is because you think their words constitute an "authoritative statement" of a view. Here you want to use the fact that, eg Bertrand Russell maintained that there are two kinds of knowledge of things (namely, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description) in support of your claim that there are two such kinds of knowledge of things. However, be very careful in doing this, for the nature of philosophical authority is not so simple here. That is to say, what really matters is not that Bertrand Russell the man held that view; what matters are his reasons for holding that view. So, when quoting philosophers for this second reason, be careful that you appreciate in what exactly the authority lies - which means that you should show that you appreciate why Russell maintained that thesis. Of course, you can't provide long arguments for every claim you make or want to make use of; every essay will have its enabling but unargued assumptions. But at least be clear about these. (eg "For the purposes of this essay, I shall adopt Russell's thesis* that ...").

* Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 [first German ed.1886]), Sec. 108.

* See Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 [first pub. 1912]), Ch. 5.

Philosophy is by its nature a relatively abstract and generalising business. (Note that abstractness and generality are not the same thing. Nor do vagueness and obscurity automatically attend them.) Sometimes a longish series of general ideas and abstract reasonings can become difficult for the reader (and often the writer) to follow. It can often help, therefore, to use some concrete or specific examples in your discussion. (Note that there can be different levels of concreteness and specificity in examples.)

Examples can be taken from history, current events, literature, and so on, or can be entirely your own invention. Exactly what examples you employ and just how and why you use them will, of course, depend on the case. Some uses might be: illustration of a position, problem or idea to help make it clearer; evidence for, perhaps even proof of, a proposition; a counter-example; a case-study to be returned to at various points during the essay; or a problem for a theory or viewpoint to be applied to. Again, be clear about what the example is and how and why you use it. Be careful not to get distracted by, or bogged down in, your examples. Brevity is usually best.

English expression

There's another old saying: "If you can't say what you mean, then you can't mean what you say" - and this very much applies to philosophical writing. Thus, in writing philosophically, you must write clearly and precisely. This means that good philosophical writing requires a good grasp of the language in which it is written, including its grammar and vocabulary. (See Section 9.3 for advice for people from non-English speaking backgrounds.) A high standard of writing skills is to be expected of Arts graduates. Indeed, this sort of skill will last longer than your memory of, for example, the three parts of the Platonic soul (though it is also hoped that some of the content of what you study will also stick). So use your time at university (in all your subjects) to develop these skills further.

Having a mastery of a good range of terms, being sensitive to the subtleties of their meaning, and being able to construct grammatically correct and properly punctuated sentences are essential to the clear articulation and development of your thoughts. Think of grammar, not as some old-fashioned set of rules of linguistic etiquette, but rather as the "internal logic" of a sentence, that is, as the relationships between the words within a sentence which enable them to combine to make sense.

Virtually all sentences in philosophical writing are declarative (ie. make statements), as opposed to interrogative, imperative or exclamatory types of sentences. There is some place, though, for interrogative sentences, ie. questions. (Note that, in contrast, this guide, which is not in the essay genre, contains many imperative sentences, ie. commands.) As you craft each (declarative) sentence in your essay, remember the basics of sentence construction. Make clear what the sentence is about (its subject) and what you are saying about it (the predicate). Make clear what the principal verb is in the predicate, since it is what usually does the main work in saying something about the subject. Where a sentence consists of more than one clause (as many do in philosophical writing), make clear what work each clause is doing. Attend closely, then, to each and every sentence you write so that its sense is clear and is the sense you intend it to have. Think carefully about what it is you want each particular sentence to do (in relation to both those sentences immediately surrounding it and the essay as a whole) and structure your sentence so that it does what you want it to do. To help you with your own sentence construction skills, when reading others' philosophical works (or indeed any writing) attend closely to the construction of each sentence so as to be alive to all the subtleties of the text.

Good punctuation is an essential part of sentence construction. Its role is to help to display the grammar of a sentence so that its meaning is clear. As an example of how punctuation can fundamentally change the grammar and, hence, meaning of a sentence, compare (i) "Philosophers, who argue for the identity of mind and brain, often fail to appreciate the radical consequences of that thesis." and (ii) "Philosophers who argue for the identity of mind and brain often fail to appreciate the radical consequences of that thesis." In the first sentence it is asserted (falsely, as it happens) that all philosophers argue for the identity of mind and brain; in the second, only some philosophers are said to argue for the identity of mind and brain. Only the punctuation differs in the two strings of identical words, and yet the meanings of the sentences are very different. Confusions over this sort of thing are common weaknesses in student essays, and leave readers asking themselves "What exactly is this student trying to say?"

It will be assumed that you can spell - which is not a matter of pressing the "spell-check" key on a word-processor. A good dictionary and a good thesaurus should always be within reach as you write your essay.

Also, try to shorten and simplify sentences where you can do so without sacrificing the subtlety and inherent complexity of the discussion. Where a sentence is becoming too long or complex, it is likely that too many ideas are being bundled up together too closely. Stop and separate your ideas out. If an idea is a good or important one, it will usually deserve its own sentence.

Your "intra-sentential logic" should work very closely with the "inter-sentential logic" of your essay, ie. with the logical relations between your sentences. (This "inter-sentential logic" is what "logic" is usually taken to refer to.) For example, to enable sentences P and Q to work together to yield sentence R as a conclusion, you need to make clear that there are elements within P and Q which connect up to yield R. Consider the following example: "Infanticide is the intentional killing of a human being. However, murder is regarded by all cultures as morally abhorrent. Therefore, people who commit infanticide should be punished." This doesn't work as an argument, because the writer has not constructed sentences which provide the connecting concepts in the various subjects and predicates, even though each sentence is grammatically correct (and possibly even true).

If you are concerned to write not only clearly and precisely, but also with some degree of grace and style (and I hope you are), it's still best to get the clarity and precision right first, in a plain, straightforward way, and then to polish things up afterwards to get the style and grace you want. But don't sacrifice clarity and precision for the sake of style and grace - be prepared to sacrifice that beautiful turn of phrase if its presence is going to send your discussion down an awkward path of reasoning. Aim to hit the nail on the head rather than make a loud bang. What you are likely to find, however, is that a philosophy essay which really is clear and precise will have a large measure of grace and style in its very clarity and precision.

Remember that obscurity is not a sign of profundity. (Some profound thought may well be difficult to follow, but that doesn't mean that one can achieve profundity merely through producing obscure, difficult-to-read writing.) Your marker is interested in what's actually in your essay, not what's possibly inside your head (or indeed what's possibly in some book you happen to have referred to in your essay). So avoid hinting at or alluding suggestively to ideas, especially where they are meant to do some important work in your essay. Instead, lay them out explicitly and directly. Of course, you won't have space to spell out every single idea, so work out which ideas do the most important work and make sure that you at least get those ideas clearly articulated. In expounding a text or problem that ultimately just is vague, muddled, or obscure, try to convey such vagueness, muddle or obscurity clearly, rather than simply reproducing it in your own writing. That is, be clear that and how a text or problem has such features, and then perhaps do your best to make matters clearer.

Despite these stern pronouncements, don't be afraid of sometimes saying things which happen to sound a little odd, if you have tried various formulations and think you have now expressed your ideas just as they should be expressed. Philosophy is often an exploratory business, and new ways of seeing and saying things can sometimes be a part of that exploration.

The need for clarity and precision in philosophical writing sometimes means that you need to stipulate your own meaning for a term. When you want to use a particular word in a particular way for the purposes of your essay - as a "technical term" - be clear about it. (eg "In this essay, I shall intend ‘egoism' to mean ...") Also, be consistent in your technical meanings, or else note when you are not. Be wary, though, of inventing too many neologisms or being too idiosyncratic in your stipulations.

With regard to what "authorial pronoun" to adopt in a philosophy essay, it's standard to write plainly in the first person singular ("I", "me", "my", etc.) rather than use the royal "we" (as in "we shall argue that ..."), or the convoluted quasi-legal indirect form ("It is submitted that ..."), or the scientific objectivity of a physics experimental report. Nonetheless, stick closer to "I argue", "I suggest", "my definition", etc., than to "I wish", "I hate", "my feeling", etc. A philosophy essay is still something more intellectual and formal than a personal reminiscence, polemic, or proclamation. In terms of audience, it's probably best to think of your reader as someone who is intelligent, open to discussion and knows a little about the topic you're writing on, but perhaps is not quite clear or decided about the issues, or needs convincing of the view you want to put forward, or is curious about what you think about the issues.

Try also to use non-discriminatory language, ie. language which does not express or imply inequality of worth between people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. As you write, you will be considering carefully your choice of words to express your thoughts. You will almost always find that it is possible to avoid discriminatory language by rephrasing your sentences.

Other things to avoid:

• waffle and padding
• vagueness and ambiguity
• abbreviations (this guide I'm writing isn't an eg. of what's req'd. in a phil. essay)
• colloquialisms (which can really get up your reader's nose)
• writing whose syntax merely reflects the patterns of informal speech
• unnecessary abstractness or indirectness
• unexplained jargon
• flattery and invective
• overly-rhetorical questions (do you really need me to tell you what they are?) and other flourishes

There are many guides to good writing available. Anyone who writes (whether in the humanities or the sciences, whether beginners or experienced professionals) will do well to have some on hand. Most good bookshops and libraries will have some. Among the most consulted works are (check for the latest editions):

• J. M. Williams and G. C. Colomb, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
• W. Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 2000)
• E. Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)
• R. W. Burchfield, ed., The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Pam Peters, The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
• Australian Government Publishing Service, Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers, 5th ed. (Canberra: AGPS, 1995)

Vocabulary of logical argument

Closely related to the above points about English expression is the importance of having a good grasp of what can rather generally be called "the vocabulary of logical argument". These sorts of terms are crucial in articulating clearly and cogently a logical line of argument. Such argumentation will, of course, be of central importance in whatever discipline you are studying, indeed in any sphere of life that requires effective thinking and communication. I have in mind terms such as these (grouped a little loosely):

all, any, every, most, some, none, a, an, the that, this, it, he, she, they if . . . , then. . . ; if and only if . . . , then . . . ; unless either . . . or . . .; neither . . . nor . . . not, is, are therefore, thus, hence, so, because, since, follows, entails, implies, infer, consequence, conditional upon moreover, furthermore which, that, whose and, but, however, despite, notwithstanding, nevertheless, even, though, still possibly, necessarily, can, must, may, might, ought, should true, false, probable, certain sound, unsound, valid, invalid, fallacious, supported, proved, contradicted, rebutted, refuted, negated logical, illogical, reasonable, unreasonable, rational, irrational assumption, premise, belief, claim, proposition argument, reason, reasoning, evidence, proof

Most of these are quite simple terms, but they are crucial in argumentative or discursive writing of all kinds. (Many are themselves the subject of study in logic, a branch of philosophy). The sloppy use of these sorts of terms is another common weakness in students' philosophy essays. Pay close and careful attention to how you employ them. Moreover, pay close and careful attention to how the authors you read use them. For further discussion of some of these terms and others, see:

• Basic Philosophical Vocabulary, prepared by the staff of the Philosophy Department and available from the programs Office
• Wesley C. Salmon, Logic, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973)
• Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking (London: Fontana, 1985)
• Graham Priest, Logic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
• Joel Rudinow and Vincent E. Barry, Invitation to Critical Thinking, 4th ed. (Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1999)

Revising your essay

It is virtually essential that you write a first draft of your essay and then work on that draft to work towards your finished essay. Indeed, several drafts may well be necessary in order to produce your best possible work. It is a rare philosopher indeed who can get things perfectly right on the first attempt, so be prepared to revise and re-develop what you write. Don't be too precious about what you have written, if it appears that it should be sacrificed in the revision process. There is usually a very marked difference between essays which are basically first draft rush-jobs done the night before they are due and those which have been revised and polished. Give yourself time to revise by starting writing early on. For most philosophy students, the greater part of the work in essay writing is in the writing, not in the preliminary researches and planning stages. So be wary of thinking "I've done all the research. I only need to write up my notes, which I can do the night before the essay's due". This is likely to lead to a weak, perhaps non-existent, essay (and very likely a sleepless night).

Stick to the word limit given for your essay. Why are word limits imposed? First, to give the markers a fair basis for comparing student essays. Second, to give you the opportunity to practise the discipline of working creatively under constraints. Skill in this discipline will stand you in very good stead in any sphere where circumstances impose limitations. Again, word limits are not constraints on your intellectual freedom. Outside your essay you are free to write without limit. But even there you'll probably find that your creativity is improved by working under a self-imposed discipline.

As a general rule, most student essays that fall well short of the word limit are weak or lazy attempts at the task, and most essays that go well over the limit are not much stronger or the result of much harder work - the extra length is often due to unstructured waffle or padding which the writer hasn't thought enough about so as to edit judiciously. If you structure your essay clearly, you'll find it easier to revise and edit, whether in order to contract or expand it. ("Hmm, let's see: section 2 is much longer than section 4, but is not as important, so I'll cut it down. And I should expand section 3, because that's a crucial step. And I can shift that third paragraph in the Introduction to the Conclusion.")

Plagiarism and originality

Plagiarism is essentially a form of academic dishonesty or cheating. At university level, such dishonesty is not tolerated and is dealt with severely, usually by awarding zero marks for a plagiarised essay or, in some cases, dismissing a student from the university.

When you submit your essay, you are implicitly stating that the essay is your own original and independent work, that you have not submitted the same work for assessment in another subject, and that where you have made use of other people's work, this is properly acknowledged. If you know that this is not in fact the case, you are being dishonest. (In a number of university departments, students are in fact required to sign declarations of academic honesty.)

Plagiarism is the knowing but unacknowledged use of work by someone else (including work by another student, and indeed oneself - see below) and which is being presented as one's own work. It can take a number of forms, including:

• copying : exactly reproducing another's words
• paraphrasing : expressing the meaning of another's words in different words
• summarising : reproducing the main points of another's argument
• cobbling : copying, paraphrasing or summarising the work of a number of different people and piecing them together to produce one body of text
• submitting one's own work when it has already been submitted for assessment in another subject
• collusion : presenting an essay as your own independent work when in fact it has been produced, in whole or part, in collusion with one or more other people

None of the practices of copying, paraphrasing, summarizing or cobbling is wrong in itself, but when one or more is done without proper acknowledgment it constitutes plagiarism. Therefore, all sources must be adequately and accurately acknowledged in footnotes or endnotes. (See Section 7.) Plagiarism from the internet in particular can be a temptation for a certain kind of student. However, be warned: there is a number of very good internet and software tools for identifying plagiarism.

With regard to collusion, it's undoubtedly often very helpful to discuss one's work with others, be it other students, family members, friends or teachers. Indeed, philosophy thrives on dialogue. However, don't kid yourself that you would simply be extending that process if you were to ask your interlocutor to join with you in the writing of your essay, whether by asking them to tell you what you should write or to write down some of their thoughts for you to reproduce in your essay. At the end of the day, you must be the one to decide what goes into your essay.

Originality

Students sometimes worry about whether they will be able to develop "original ideas", especially in light of the fact that nearly every philosophical idea one comes up with seems to have been thought of before by someone else. There is no denying that truly original work in philosophy is well rewarded, but your first aim should be to develop ideas that you think are good and not merely different. If, after arguing for what you believe is right, and arguing in way that you think is good, you then discover that someone else has had the same idea, don't throw your work away - you should feel vindicated to some extent that your thinking has been congruent with that of another (possibly great) philosopher. (If you have not yet handed your essay in when you make this discovery, make an appropriately placed note to that effect.) Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that plagiarism can be easily passed off as congruent thinking. Of course, if that other philosopher's ideas have helped you to develop your ideas, then this is not a matter of congruent ideas but rather of derivative ideas, and this must be adequately acknowledged. If, after developing your ideas, you discover that they are original, then that is an added bonus. But remember that it is more important to be a good philosopher than an original one.

Quotations, footnotes, endnotes and bibliography

Quotations in your essay should be kept to a minimum. The markers know the central texts pretty well already and so don't need to have pages thereof repeated in front of them. Of course, some quotation will usually be important and useful - sometimes essential - in both exposition and critical discussion.

When you quote the words of someone else directly, you must make the quotation clearly distinct from your own text, using quotation marks . (eg "Descartes said that 'it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.'* He makes this claim …" - where the words quoted from Descartes are in 'single quotation marks'. Note that it is relatively arbitrary whether one uses 'single' or "double" quotation marks for "first order" quotations, but whichever style you adopt, use it consistently in the one essay.) Alternatively, where the quoted passage is greater than three lines, put the quoted words in a separate indented paragraph , so that your essay would look like this:

In his First Meditation , Descartes argues as follows:

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.* In this essay I shall argue that prudence does not in fact require us to distrust our senses and that Descartes's sceptical method is therefore seriously flawed.

In both cases, the quotations must be given proper referencingin a footnote or endnote.

When you are not quoting another person directly, but are still making use of their work - as in indirect quotations (eg "Descartes says that it is wise not to trust something that has deceived us before"*), paraphrases, summaries, and cobblings - you must still acknowledge your debts, using footnotes or endnotes.

* Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy , trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 [first French ed., 1641]), p. 12.

Footnotes and endnotes

Footnotes appear at the foot of the same page on which the cited material appears, clearly separated from the main body of the text, each one clearly numbered. Endnotes appear at the end of the essay, again clearly separated from the main body of text, numbered and headed "Endnotes" or "Notes". Either method is acceptable, but you should choose one and stick with it throughout the one essay.

Below are some examples of how to put the relevant referencing information in footnotes and endnotes. This is not intended as an exercise in pedantry, but as a guide to how to provide the information needed for adequate referencing. The reason we provide this information is to enable our readers to find the sources we use in order to verify them and to allow them to pursue the material further if it interests them. In your own researches you will come to value good referencing in the texts you read as a helpful source of further references on a topic. Again, it is this sort of research skill that an Arts graduate will be expected to have mastered.

There are various conventions for writing up footnotes and endnotes. The Philosophy Department does not require that any particular convention be followed, only that you be consistent in your use of the convention that you do choose. For other conventions see the style guides mentioned above, or simply go to some texts published by reputable publishers and see what formats they employ.

Imagine, then, that the following are endnotes at the end of your essay. I will explain them below.

• James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy , 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 25.
• Philippa Foot, "Moral Relativism", in Michael Krausz and Jack W. Meiland, eds., Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 155.
• Ibid., p. 160.
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964 [first German ed., 1785]), p. 63.
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (London: Dent, 1973 [first pub. 1651]),p. 65.
• Rachels, The Elements, p. 51.
• Peter Winch, "The Universalizability of Moral Judgements", The Monist 49 (1965), p. 212.
• Antony Duff, "Legal Punishment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2001/entries/legal-punishment/ at 15 June 2003, sec. 6.

Notes explained

• This is your first reference to a book called The Elements of Moral Philosophy. The title is given in full and in italics. If you are unable to use italics, then you should underline the title. The book's author is James Rachels. It's the 2nd edition of that book, which was published in New York, by the publishers McGraw-Hill, in 1993. The page you have referred to in your main text is page 25
• This is your first reference to Philippa Foot's article, "Moral Relativism", the title of which is put in "quotation marks". This article appeared in a book (title in italics) which is an anthology of different articles, and which was edited by Krausz and Meiland (names in full). The rest is in the same style as note (1)
• "Ibid." is short for "ibidem", which means "in the same place" in Latin. Use it on its own when you want to refer to exactly the same work and page number as in the immediately preceding note. So here the reference is again to Foot's article at page 155
• Ditto, except this time you refer to a different page in Foot's article, namely page 160
• This is reference to a book by Kant. Same book details as per note (1), except that, because this is a translation, you include the translator's name, and the date of the first edition in the original language
• This is a book reference again, so it's the same as note (1), except that, because it's an old book, you include the date of the original edition. (How old does a book have to be before it merits this treatment? There is no settled view. Note, though, that this convention is not usually followed for ancient authors)
• Here you are referring to Rachels' book again, but, because you are not in the very next note after a reference to it, you can't use "ibid.". Simply give the author's surname and a short title of the book, plus page reference. There is also a common alternative to this, whereby you give the surname, and write "op. cit." (which is short for "opere citato", which is Latin for "in the work already cited") and page reference (eg "Rachels, op. cit., p. 51.") Your reader then has to scan back over the notes to see what that "op." was exactly. The first option (author plus short title) is usually easier on the reader
• This is a reference to an article by Peter Winch in a journal called The Monist. The article's title is in "quotes", the journal title is in italics. The volume of the journal is 49, the year of publication is 1965, the page referred to is p. 212
• This is a reference to an article in the internet-based Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article is titled "Legal Punishment" and was written by Antony Duff. The Encyclopedia was edited by Edward N. Zalta. Note that I have basically followed the mode of citation that the Encyclopedia itself recommends. (This is one sign of the site being a reputable one. Where a site makes such a recommendation, it's best to follow it.) I have, however, also added the date on which the article was retrieved from the site, and put the author's given name first, to be consistent with the other footnotes. I have also added the reference to section 6, in an effort to be more precise as to where in the article the material I used came from. Since web pages aren't numbered in the manner of hard copy works, it will help if you are able to refer to some other feature, such as paragraphs or sections, so as to pin-point your reference. In the absence of a site recommending a mode of citation to its own material, the basic information needed for adequate citation of internet-based material is (where identifiable) the author, the document title, the year the document was created, the website name, the uniform resource locator (URL) in <arrow-brackets>, date of retrieval, and a pin-point reference*

* I am here following the mode of citation of internet materials recommended in Melbourne University Law Review Association Inc, Australian Guide to Legal Citation , 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Law Review Association Inc, 2002), pp. 70-73. I have, though, added the desirability of a pin-point reference.

Bibliography

At the end of your essay (after your endnotes, if used) you should list in a bibliography all of the works referred to in your notes, as well as any other works you consulted in researching and writing your essay. The list should be in alphabetical order, going by authors' surnames. The format should be the same as for your notes, except that you drop the page references and should put surnames first. So the bibliography of our mock-essay above would look like this:

• Duff, Antony, "Legal Punishment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2001/entries/legal-punishment/ at 15 June 2003
• Foot, Philippa, "Moral Relativism", in Michael Krausz and Jack Meiland, eds., Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)
• Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London: Dent, 1973 [first pub.1651])
• Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals , trans. H.J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964 [first German ed. 1785])
• Rachels, James, The Elements of Moral Philosophy , 2nd ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993)
• Winch, Peter, "The Universalizability of Moral Judgements", The Monist 49 (1965)

Presentation of essays and seeking advice

Generally, you should present an essay that is legible (hand-writing is OK, but typed or word-processed essays are preferable), in English, on one side of pieces of paper that are somewhere in the vicinity of A4 size and are fixed together . You should attach a completed Cover Sheet provided by the Philosophy program. Plastic document covers, spiral binding and other forms of presentational paraphernalia are not necessary (nor are they usually even desirable, as they mostly just get in the marker's way).

Late essays

Late essays are penalised . (For details of penalties consult the Philosophy program's notice board.)

Essays not handed in

Essays not handed in at all get zero marks. An essay that is handed in but gets a mark below 50 (and so is technically a "failed" essay) still gets some marks. (At least, it will so long as it's not so extremely late that the deducted marks wipe out all the marks it would have received if handed in on time.) All marks received for your essay (whether pass or fail) go toward your final score in the subject. Therefore, even if you think your essay is bound to fail (but please let your marker be the judge of that), or the due date has already passed, or both, it is still in your interests to hand your essay in .

Tutors and lecturers

Philosophy staff are not there just to be listened to by you; they are also there to listen to you. So don't hesitate to contact your tutor or lecturer to discuss questions or problems you have concerning your work.

If you have a legitimate excuse, you may be granted an extension on the due date for your essay by the lecturer in charge. Similarly, special consideration may also be granted when illness or other circumstances adversely affect your work. Applications for special consideration are made online via the Special Consideration web page.

Student counselling

Some personal or non-philosophical academic difficulties you might have you might want to discuss with someone other than your tutor or lecturer. Student Counselling and Psychological Services are there for you to discuss all sorts of problems you might encounter. Please consult your student diary for details on the counselling service.

English language assistance

As noted above, good philosophical writing requires a good grasp of the language in which it is written. If you are from a non-English speaking background and are having difficulties with your English expression in an academic context, you might like to make use of the services provided by Student Services Academic Skills . Many native English speakers, too, can benefit from short "refresher" courses and workshops run by the Centre. Please consult your student diary for details about this service.

A bit on Philosophy exams

Essays of the sort discussed so far in this guide are not the only form of assessment in the Philosophy program - examinations are also set. What is to be said about them?

First, not much that is different from what's been said above about philosophy essays. This is because what you write in a philosophy exam is none other than a philosophy essay . Have a look at past philosophy exam papers, in the Gibson and Baillieu libraries, to get a feel for them. The only basic difference between essays and exams is the matter of what constraints you're working under. Essays have word limits; exams have time limits . Again, stick to them. (Actually, you'll be made to stick to them by the exam invigilators.)

It's best, then, to think about how long to spend writing on an exam essay topic, rather than about how many words to write on it. Simple arithmetic will tell you how much time to spend on each exam question. (eg if you have a 2-hour exam and have to answer 3 questions, each worth one-third of the exam mark, then spend 40 minutes on each question.) Avoid the trap of "borrowing time" from a later question in order to perfect your answer to an earlier question, and then working faster on the later questions to catch up on lost time - this is likely to get you in a tangle. There are no word limits in philosophy exam essays, but don't think that the more you scrawl across the page, the more marks you'll get. Nonetheless, use the time you've got so as to maximise your display of your philosophical understanding and skills in answering the question.

Planning and structuring remain very important in exam essays. With regard to the niceties of footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies, etc., these are not necessary, so don't waste time on these. However, if you quote or refer to a specific passage from a text, do indicate clearly that it is a quotation or reference. (The principle of being clear as to who is saying what remains central.) If you have the reference handy, just put it briefly in the text of your exam essay. (eg "As Descartes says in Meditation I (p. 12), . . ." or "'[I]t is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once' (Descartes, Meditation I, p. 12)".) Generally speaking, you will show your familiarity with any relevant texts by how you handle them in your discussion. This is also true for your non-exam essays.

Your preparation for the exam should have been done well before entering the exam hall. Note that various subjects have restrictions on what texts and other items can be brought into the exam hall. (Consult the Philosophy program's notice board for details.) Many subjects will have "closed book" exams. Even if an exam is "open book", if you are properly prepared, you should not need to spend much time at all consulting texts or notes during the exam itself.

You won't have time for redrafting and revising your exam essay (which makes planning and structuring your answers before you start writing all the more important). If you do want to delete something, just cross it out clearly. Don't waste time with liquid paper or erasers. Write legibly . Don't wr. "point form" sav. time. Diff. kn. mean. use incomp. sent.

Finally, read the instructions at the beginning of the exam paper. They are important. (eg it's not a good strategy to answer two questions from Part A, when the Instructions tell you to answer two questions, one from Part A and one from Part B.) Note the (somewhat quaint) University practice of starting Reading Time some time before the stated time for the exam. Philosophy exams usually have 15 minutes of reading time. (Check for each of your exams.) So, if your exam timetable says the exam is at 2.15 pm, with reading time of 15 minutes, then the reading time starts at 2.00 pm and the writing time starts at 2.15pm - so get to the exam hall well before 2.00 pm. Reading time is very important. Use it to decide which questions you'll answer and to start planning your answers.

Checklist of questions

• Do I understand the essay question ? Do I know when the essay is due ?
• Do I know which texts to consult? Do I know where to find them?
• Have I made useful notes from my reading of the relevant texts?
• Have I made a plan of how I'll approach the question in my essay?
• Have I given myself enough time to draft and redraft my essay?
• Have I written a clearly structured essay? Is it clear what each stageis doing? Do I do what I say I'll do in my Introduction?
• Have I clearly distinguished exposition and critical discussion ? Have I given a fair and accurate account of the author(s) in question?
• Is my response to the topic relevant ? Do I answer the question? Have I kept my essay within the general bounds of the topic?
• Have I displayed a good grasp of the vocabulary of logical argument ? Are my arguments logically valid and sound? Are my claims supported by reasons ? Am I consistent within my essay?
• Is my English expression clear and precise ? Are my grammar, punctuation and spelling correct? Have I said what I meant to say? Is my writing legible?
• Have I fully acknowledged all my sources in footnotes or endnotes? Are my quotations accurate? Have I included a bibliography ?
• Do I need to revise any part of my essay again?
• Have I made a copy or photocopy of my essay for myself?
• Have I kept the receipt for my handed-in essay?

2.6 Writing Philosophy Papers

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify and characterize the format of a philosophy paper.
• Create thesis statements that are manageable and sufficiently specific.
• Collect evidence and formulate arguments.
• Organize ideas into a coherent written presentation.

This section will provide some practical advice on how to write philosophy papers. The format presented here focuses on the use of an argumentative structure in writing. Different philosophy professors may have different approaches to writing. The sections below are only intended to give some general guidelines that apply to most philosophy classes.

Identify Claims

The key element in any argumentative paper is the claim you wish to make or the position you want to defend. Therefore, take your time identifying claims , which is also called the thesis statement. What do you want to say about the topic? What do you want the reader to understand or know after reading your piece? Remember that narrow, modest claims work best. Grand claims are difficult to defend, even for philosophy professors. A good thesis statement should go beyond the mere description of another person’s argument. It should say something about the topic, connect the topic to other issues, or develop an application of some theory or position advocated by someone else. Here are some ideas for creating claims that are perfectly acceptable and easy to develop:

• Compare two philosophical positions. What makes them similar? How are they different? What general lessons can you draw from these positions?
• Identify a piece of evidence or argument that you think is weak or may be subject to criticism. Why is it weak? How is your criticism a problem for the philosopher’s perspective?
• Apply a philosophical perspective to a contemporary case or issue. What makes this philosophical position applicable? How would it help us understand the case?
• Identify another argument or piece of evidence that might strengthen a philosophical position put forward by a philosopher. Why is this a good argument or piece of evidence? How does it fit with the philosopher’s other claims and arguments?
• Consider an implication (either positive or negative) that follows from a philosopher’s argument. How does this implication follow? Is it necessary or contingent? What lessons can you draw from this implication (if positive, it may provide additional reasons for the argument; if negative, it may provide reasons against the argument)?

Think Like a Philosopher

The following multiple-choice exercises will help you identify and write modest, clear philosophical thesis statements. A thesis statement is a declarative statement that puts forward a position or makes a claim about some topic.

• How does Aristotle think virtue is necessary for happiness?
• Is happiness the ultimate goal of human action?
• Whether or not virtue is necessary for happiness.
• Aristotle argues that happiness is the ultimate good of human action and virtue is necessary for happiness.
• René Descartes argues that the soul or mind is the essence of the human person.
• Descartes shows that all beliefs and memories about the external world could be false.
• Some people think that Descartes is a skeptic, but I will show that he goes beyond skepticism.
• In the meditations, Descartes claims that the mind and body are two different substances.
• Descartes says that the mind is a substance that is distinct from the body, but I disagree.
• Contemporary psychology has shown that Descartes is incorrect to think that human beings have free will and that the mind is something different from the brain.
• Thomas Hobbes’s view of the soul is materialistic, whereas Descartes’s view of the soul is nonphysical. In this paper, I will examine the differences between these two views.
• John Stuart Mill reasons that utilitarian judgments can be based on qualitative differences as well as the quantity of pleasure, but ultimately any qualitative difference must result in a difference in the quantity of pleasure.
• Mill’s approach to utilitarianism differs from Bentham’s by introducing qualitative distinctions among pleasures, where Bentham only considers the quantitative aspects of pleasure.
• J. S. Mill’s approach to utilitarianism aligns moral theory with the history of ethics because he allows qualitative differences in moral judgments.
• Rawls’s liberty principle ensures that all people have a basic set of freedoms that are important for living a full life.
• The US Bill of Rights is an example of Rawls’s liberty principle because it lists a set of basic freedoms that are guaranteed for all people.
• While many people may agree that Rawls’s liberty principle applies to all citizens of a particular country, it is much more controversial to extend those same basic freedoms to immigrants, including those classified by the government as permanent residents, legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and refugees.

[ANS: 1.d 2.c 3.c 4.a 5.c]

Write Like a Philosopher

Use the following templates to write your own thesis statement by inserting a philosopher, claim, or contemporary issue:

• [Name of philosopher] holds that [claim], but [name of another philosopher] holds that [another claim]. In this paper, I will identify reasons for thinking [name of philosopher]’s position is more likely to be true.
• [Name of philosopher] argues that [claim]. In this paper, I will show how this claim provides a helpful addition to [contemporary issue].
• When [name of philosopher] argues in favor of [claim], they rely on [another claim] that is undercut by contemporary science. I will show that if we modify this claim in light of contemporary science, we will strengthen or weaken [name of philosopher]’s argument.

Collect Evidence and Build Your Case

Once you have identified your thesis statement or primary claim, collect evidence (by returning to your readings) to compose the best possible argument. As you assemble the evidence, you can think like a detective or prosecutor building a case. However, you want a case that is true, not just one that supports your position. So you should stay open to modifying your claim if it does not fit the evidence . If you need to do additional research, follow the guidelines presented earlier to locate authoritative information.

If you cannot find evidence to support your claim but still feel strongly about it, you can try to do your own philosophical thinking using any of the methods discussed in this chapter or in Chapter 1. Imagine counterexamples and thought experiments that support your claim. Use your intuitions and common sense, but remember that these can sometimes lead you astray. In general, common sense, intuitions, thought experiments, and counterexamples should support one another and support the sources you have identified from other philosophers. Think of your case as a structure: you do not want too much of the weight to rest on a single intuition or thought experiment.

Consider Counterarguments

Philosophy papers differ from typical argumentative papers in that philosophy students must spend more time and effort anticipating and responding to counterarguments when constructing their own arguments. This has two important effects: first, by developing counterarguments, you demonstrate that you have sufficiently thought through your position to identify possible weaknesses; second, you make your case stronger by taking away a potential line of attack that an opponent might use. By including counterarguments in your paper, you engage in the kind of dialectical process that philosophers use to arrive at the truth.

Accurately Represent Source Material

It is important to represent primary and secondary source material as accurately as possible. This means that you should consider the context and read the arguments using the principle of charity. Make sure that you are not strawmanning an argument you disagree with or misrepresenting a quote or paraphrase just because you need some evidence to support your argument. As always, your goal should be to find the most rationally compelling argument, which is the one most likely to be true.

Organize Your Paper

Academic philosophy papers use the same simple structure as any other paper and one you likely learned in high school or your first-year composition class.

Introduce Your Thesis

The purpose of your introduction is to provide context for your thesis. Simply tell the reader what to expect in the paper. Describe your topic, why it is important, and how it arises within the works you have been reading. You may have to provide some historical context, but avoid both broad generalizations and long-winded historical retellings. Your context or background information should not be overly long and simply needs to provide the reader with the context and motivation for your thesis. Your thesis should appear at the end of the introduction, and the reader should clearly see how the thesis follows from the introductory material you have provided. If you are writing a long paper, you may need several sentences to express your thesis, in which you delineate in broad terms the parts of your argument.

Make a Logical and Compelling Case Using the Evidence

The paragraphs that follow the introduction lay out your argument. One strategy you can use to successfully build paragraphs is to think in terms of good argument structure. You should provide adequate evidence to support the claims you want to make. Your paragraphs will consist of quotations and paraphrases from primary and secondary sources, context and interpretation, novel thoughts and ideas, examples and analogies, counterarguments, and replies to the counterarguments. The evidence should both support the thesis and build toward the conclusion. It may help to think architecturally: lay down the foundation, insert the beams of your strongest support, and then put up the walls to complete the structure. Or you might think in terms of a narrative: tell a story in which the evidence leads to an inevitable conclusion.

Connections

See the chapter on logic and reasoning for a developed account of different types of philosophical arguments.

Summarize Your Argument in the Conclusion

Conclude your paper with a short summary that recapitulates the argument. Remind the reader of your thesis and revisit the evidence that supports your argument. You may feel that the argument as written should stand on its own. But it is helpful to the reader to reinforce the argument in your conclusion with a short summary. Do not introduce any new information in the conclusion; simply summarize what you have already said.

The purpose of this chapter has been to provide you with basic tools to become a successful philosophy student. We started by developing a sophisticated picture of how the brain works, using contemporary neuroscience. The brain represents and projects a picture of the world, full of emotional significance, but this image may contain distortions that amount to a kind of illusion. Cognitive illusions produce errors in reasoning, called cognitive biases. To guard against error, we need to engage in effortful, reflective thinking, where we become aware of our biases and use logical strategies to overcome them. You will do well in your philosophy class if you apply the good habits of mind discussed in this chapter and apply the practical advice that has been provided about how to read and write about philosophy.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

How to Write a Philosophical Essay

Authors: The Editors of 1000-Word Philosophy [1] Category: Student Resources Word Count: 998

If you want to convince someone of a philosophical thesis, such as that God exists , that abortion is morally acceptable , or that we have free will , you can write a philosophy essay. [2]

Philosophy essays are different from essays in many other fields, but with planning and practice, anyone can write a good one. This essay provides some basic instructions. [3]

1. Planning

Typically, your purpose in writing an essay will be to argue for a certain thesis, i.e., to support a conclusion about a philosophical claim, argument, or theory. [4] You may also be asked to carefully explain someone else’s essay or argument. [5]

To begin, select a topic. Most instructors will be happy to discuss your topic with you before you start writing. Sometimes instructors give specific prompts with topics to choose from.

It’s generally best to select a topic that you’re interested in; you’ll put more energy into writing it. Your topic will determine what kind of research or preparation you need to do before writing, although in undergraduate philosophy courses, you usually don’t need to do outside research. [6]

Essays that defend or attack entire theories tend to be longer, and are more difficult to write convincingly, than essays that defend or attack particular arguments or objections: narrower is usually better than broader.

After selecting a topic, complete these steps:

• Ensure that you understand the relevant issues and arguments. Usually, it’s enough to carefully read and take notes on the assigned readings on your essay’s topic.
• Choose an initial thesis. Generally, you should choose a thesis that’s interesting, but not extremely controversial. [7] You don’t have to choose a thesis that you agree with, but it can help. (As you plan and write, you may decide to revise your thesis. This may require revising the rest of your essay, but sometimes that’s necessary, if you realize you want to defend a different thesis than the one you initially chose.)
• Ensure that your thesis is a philosophical thesis. Natural-scientific or social-scientific claims, such as that global warming is occurring or that people like to hang out with their friends , are not philosophical theses. [8] Philosophical theses are typically defended using careful reasoning, and not primarily by citing scientific observations.

Instructors will usually not ask you to come up with some argument that no philosopher has discovered before. But if your essay ignores what the assigned readings say, that suggests that you haven’t learned from those readings.

2. Structure

Develop an outline, rather than immediately launching into writing the whole essay; this helps with organizing the sections of your essay.

Your structure will probably look something like the following, but follow your assignment’s directions carefully. [9]

2.1. Introduction and Thesis

Write a short introductory paragraph that includes your thesis statement (e.g., “I will argue that eating meat is morally wrong”). The thesis statement is not a preview nor a plan; it’s not “I will consider whether eating meat is morally wrong.”

If your thesis statement is difficult to condense into one sentence, then it’s likely that you’re trying to argue for more than one thesis. [10]

2.2. Arguments

Include at least one paragraph that presents and explains an argument. It should be totally clear what reasons or evidence you’re offering to support your thesis.

In most essays for philosophy courses, you only need one central argument for your thesis. It’s better to present one argument and defend it well than present many arguments in superficial and incomplete ways.

2.3. Objection

Unless the essay must be extremely short, raise an objection to your argument. [11] Be clear exactly which part of the other argument (a premise, or the form) is being questioned or denied and why. [12]

It’s usually best to choose either one of the most common or one of the best objections. Imagine what a smart person who disagreed with you would say in response to your arguments, and respond to them.

Offer your own reply to any objections you considered. If you don’t have a convincing reply to the objection, you might want to go back and change your thesis to something more defensible.

2.5. Additional Objections and Replies

If you have space, you might consider and respond to the second-best or second-most-common objection to your argument, and so on.

2.6. Conclusion

To conclude, offer a paragraph summarizing what you did. Don’t include any new or controversial claims here, and don’t claim that you did more than you actually accomplished. There should be no surprises at the end of a philosophy essay.

Make your writing extremely clear and straightforward. Use simple sentences and don’t worry if they seem boring: this improves readability. [13] Every sentence should contribute in an obvious way towards supporting your thesis. If a claim might be confusing, state it in more than one way and then choose the best version.

To check for readability, you might read the essay aloud to an audience. Don’t try to make your writing entertaining: in philosophy, clear arguments are fun in themselves.

Concerning objections, treat those who disagree with you charitably. Make it seem as if you think they’re smart, careful, and nice, which is why you are responding to them.

Your readers, if they’re typical philosophers, will be looking for any possible way to object to what you say. Try to make your arguments “airtight.”

4. Citations

If your instructor tells you to use a certain citation style, use it. No citation style is universally accepted in philosophy. [14]

You usually don’t need to directly quote anyone. [15] You can paraphrase other authors; where you do, cite them.

Don’t plagiarize . [16] Most institutions impose severe penalties for academic dishonesty.

5. Conclusion

A well-written philosophy essay can help people gain a new perspective on some important issue; it might even change their minds. [17] And engaging in the process of writing a philosophical essay is one of the best ways to develop, understand, test, and sometimes change, your own philosophical views. They are well worth the time and effort.

[1] Primary author: Thomas Metcalf. Contributing authors: Chelsea Haramia, Dan Lowe, Nathan Nobis, Kristin Seemuth Whaley.

[2] You can also do some kind of oral presentation, either “live” in person or recorded on video. An effective presentation, however, requires the type of planning and preparation that’s needed to develop an effective philosophy paper: indeed, you may have to first write a paper and then use it as something like a script for your presentation. Some parts of the paper, e.g., section headings, statements of arguments, key quotes, and so on, you may want to use as visual aids in your presentation to help your audience better follow along and understand.

[3] Many of these recommendations are, however, based on the material in Horban (1993), Huemer (n.d.), Pryor (n.d.), and Rippon (2008). There is very little published research to cite about the claims in this essay, because these claims are typically justified by instructors’ experience, not, say, controlled experiments on different approaches to teaching philosophical writing. Therefore, the guidance offered here has been vetted by many professional philosophers with a collective hundreds of hours of undergraduate teaching experience and further collective hundreds of hours of taking philosophy courses. The editors of 1000-Word Philosophy also collectively have thousands of hours of experience in writing philosophy essays.

[4] For more about the areas of philosophy, see What is Philosophy? by Thomas Metcalf.

[5] For an explanation of what is meant by an “argument” in philosophy, see Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf.

[6] Outside research is sometimes discouraged, and even prohibited, for philosophy papers in introductory courses because a common goal of a philosophy paper is not to report on a number of views on a philosophical issue—so philosophy papers usually are not “research reports”—but to rather engage a specific argument or claim or theory, in a more narrow and focused way, and show that you understand the issue and have engaged in critically. If a paper engages in too much reporting of outside research, that can get in the way of this critical evaluation task.

[7] There are two reasons to avoid extremely controversial theses. First, such theses are usually more difficult to defend adequately. Second, you might offend your instructor, who might (fairly or not) give you a worse grade. So, for example, you might argue that abortion is usually permissible, or usually wrong, but you probably shouldn’t argue that anyone who has ever said the word ‘abortion’ should be tortured to death, and you probably shouldn’t argue that anyone who’s ever pregnant should immediately be forced to abort the pregnancy, because both of these claims are extremely implausible and so it’s very unlikely that good arguments could be developed for them. But theses that are controversial without being implausible can be interesting for both you and the instructor, depending on how you develop and defend your argument or arguments for that thesis.

[8] Whether a thesis is philosophical mostly depends on whether it is a lot like theses that have been defended in important works of philosophy. That means it would be a thesis about metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, logic, history of philosophy, or something therein. For more information, see Philosophy and Its Contrast with Science and What is Philosophy? both by Thomas Metcalf.

[9] Also, read the grading rubric, if it’s available. If your course uses an online learning environment, such as Canvas, Moodle, or Schoology, then the rubric will often be visible as attached to the assignment itself. The rubric is a breakdown of the different requirements of the essay and how each is weighted and evaluated by the instructor. So, for example, if some requirement has a relatively high weight, you should put more effort into doing a good job. Similarly, some requirement might explicitly mention some step for the assignment that you need to complete in order to get full credit.

[10] In some academic fields, a “thesis” or “thesis statement” is considered both your conclusion and a statement of the basic support you will give for that conclusion. In philosophy, your thesis is usually just that conclusion: e..g, “Eating meat is wrong,” “God exists,” “Nobody has free will,” and so on: the support given for that conclusion is the support for your thesis.

[11] To be especially clear, this should be an objection to the argument given for your thesis or conclusion, not an objection to your thesis or conclusion itself. This is because you don’t want to give an argument and then have an objection that does not engage that argument, but instead engages something else, since that won’t help your reader or audience better understand and evaluate that argument.

[12] For more information about premises, forms, and objections, see Arguments: Why do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf.

[13] For a philosophical argument in favor of clear philosophical writing, and guidance on producing such writing, see Fischer and Nobis (2019).

[14] The most common styles in philosophy are APA (Purdue Online Writing Lab, n.d.a) and Chicago (Purdue Online Writing Lab, n.d.b.).

[15] You might choose to directly quote someone when it’s very important that the reader know that the quoted author actually said what you claim they said. For example, if you’re discussing some author who made some startling claim, you can directly quote them to show that they really said that. You might also directly quote someone when they presented some information or argument in a very concise, well-stated way, such that paraphrasing it would take up more space than simply quoting them would.

[16] Plagiarism, in general, occurs when someone submits written or spoken work that is largely copied, in style, substance, or both, from some other author’s work, and does not attribute it to that author. However, your institution or instructor may define “plagiarism” somewhat differently, so you should check with their definitions. When in doubt, check with your instructor first.

[17] These are instructions for relatively short, introductory-level philosophy essays. For more guidance, there are many useful philosophy-writing guides online to consult, e.g.: Horban (1993); Huemer (n.d.); Pryor (n.d.); Rippon (2008); Weinberg (2019).

Fischer, Bob and Nobis, Nathan. (2019, June 4). Why writing better will make you a better person. The Chronicle of Higher Education . 

Horban, Peter. (1993). Writing a philosophy paper. Simon Fraser University Department of Philosophy . 

Huemer, Michael. (N.d.). A guide to writing. Owl232.net .

Pryor, Jim. (N.d.). Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper. Jimpryor.net .

Purdue Online Writing Lab. (N.d.a.). General format. Purdue Online Writing Lab . 

Purdue Online Writing Lab. (N.d.b.). General format. Purdue Online Writing Lab .

Rippon, Simon. (2008). A brief guide to writing the philosophy paper. Harvard College Writing Center .

Weinberg, Justin. (2019, January 15). How to write a philosophy paper: Online guides. Daily Nous .

Related Essays

Arguments: Why do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf

Philosophy and its Contrast with Science by Thomas Metcalf

What is Philosophy? By Thomas Metcalf

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Supplement to Analysis

Conceptions of analysis in analytic philosophy.

• 1. Introduction

5. Wittgenstein

• 6. The Cambridge School of Analysis
• 7. Carnap and Logical Positivism
• 8. Oxford Linguistic Philosophy
• 9. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

1. Introduction to Supplement

This supplement provides an account of the development of conceptions of analysis in analytic philosophy. The emergence of logical analysis as the distinctive form of analysis in early analytic philosophy is outlined in §6 of the main document.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.1

Although Frege’s work shows the enormous potential of logical analysis, it is not incompatible with other forms of analysis. Indeed, its whole point would seem to be to prepare the way for these other forms, as philosophers in the second phase of analytic philosophy came to argue (see The Cambridge School of Analysis ). One such form is traditional decompositional analysis—understood, more specifically, as resolving a whole into its parts (e.g., a ‘thought’ or ‘proposition’ into its ‘constituents’). Decompositional analysis does indeed play a role in Frege’s philosophy, but what is of greater significance is Frege’s use of function-argument analysis, which operates in some tension to whole-part analysis.

In developing his logic in his first book, the Begriffsschrift , Frege’s key move was to represent simple statements such as ‘Socrates is mortal’ not in subject-predicate form (‘ S is P ’, i.e., analyzing it into subject and predicate joined by the copula) but in function-argument form (‘ Fa ’)—taking ‘Socrates’ as the argument and ‘ x is mortal’ as the function, which yields as value what Frege calls the ‘judgeable content’ of the statement when the argument indicated by the variable ‘ x ’ is filled by the name ‘Socrates’. (I gloss over here the controversial issue as to how Frege understands functions, arguments and judgeable contents at this particular time. In his later work, he regards the result of ‘saturating’ a concept by an object as a truth-value.) It was this that allowed him to develop quantificational theory, enabling him to analyze complex mathematical statements.

To appreciate some of the philosophical implications of function-argument analysis, consider the example that Frege gives in the Begriffsschrift (§9):

(HLC) Hydrogen is lighter than carbon dioxide.

According to Frege, this can be analyzed in either of two ways, depending on whether we take hydrogen as the argument and is lighter than carbon dioxide as the function, or carbon dioxide as the argument and is heavier than hydrogen as the function. If we respected subject-predicate position, we might wish to express the latter thus:

(CHH) Carbon dioxide is heavier than hydrogen.

But on Frege’s view, (HLC) and (CHH) have the same ‘content’ (‘Inhalt’), each merely representing alternative ways of ‘analyzing’ that content. There does seem to be something that (HLC) and (CHH) have in common, and function-argument analysis seems to permit alternative analyses of one and the same thing, since two different functions with different arguments can yield the same value.

However, in response to this, it might be suggested that both these analyses presuppose a more ultimate one, which identifies two arguments , hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and a relation (a function with two arguments). Michael Dummett (1981b, ch. 17), for example, has suggested that we distinguish between analysis and decomposition : there can be alternative decompositions, into ‘component’ concepts, but only one analysis, into unique ‘constituents’. (By ‘analysis’ Dummett means what has here been called ‘decomposition’, which— pace Dummett—seems to imply a unique end-product far more than ‘analysis’, and by ‘decomposition’ Dummett means function-argument analysis.) But which relation do we then choose, is lighter than or is heavier than ? Clearly they are not the same, since one is the converse of the other. So if we accept that (HLC) and (CHH) have the same ‘content’—and there is undoubtedly something that they have in common—then it seems that there can be alternative analyses even at the supposedly ultimate level.

The issue, however, is controversial, and leads us quickly into the deepest problems in Frege’s philosophy, concerning the criteria for sameness of ‘content’ (and of ‘ Sinn ’ and ‘ Bedeutung ’, into which ‘content’ later bifurcated), the fruitfulness of definitions, and the relationship between Frege’s context principle and compositionality. For discussion, see Baker and Hacker 1984, ch. 6; Beaney 1996, ch. 8; 2007d; Bell 1987, 1996; Bermúdez 2001; Currie 1985; Dummett 1981b, ch. 15; 1989; 1991a, chs. 9-16; Garavaso 1991; Hale 1997; Levine 2002, 2007; Picardi 1993; Tappenden 1995b; Weiner 1990, ch. 3.

For more on Frege’s philosophy, see the entry on Frege in this Encyclopedia.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.2

In My Philosophical Development , Russell wrote: “Ever since I abandoned the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, I have sought solutions of philosophical problems by means of analysis; and I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible” ( MPD , 11). Similar remarks are made elsewhere (cf. e.g. POM , 3; IMP , 1-2; PLA , 189 [ Quotations ]). Unfortunately, however, Russell never spells out just what he means by ‘analysis’—or rather, if we piece together his scattered remarks on analysis, they by no means reflect his actual practice. In a paper entitled ‘The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics’, dating from 1907, for example, Russell talks of ‘analysis’ in the regressive sense, i.e., as the process of working back to ‘ultimate logical premises’, and this as an inductive rather than deductive process. In the chapter on analysis and synthesis in his abandoned 1913 manuscript, Theory of Knowledge , on the other hand, he defines ‘analysis’ as “the discovery of the constituents and the manner of combination of a given complex” ( TK , 119 [ Quotation ]). This best captures Russell’s ‘official’ view, and decompositional analysis undoubtedly played a major role in Russell’s thought (cf. Hylton 1996; Beaney 2007a). Yet as suggested in §6 of the main document, what characterizes the founding by Frege and Russell of (at least one central strand in) the analytic movement was the use made of logical analysis, in which a crucial element was the formalization of ordinary language statements into a logical language.

It was logical analysis that was involved in Russell’s celebrated theory of descriptions, first presented in ‘On Denoting’ in 1905, which Ramsey called a ‘paradigm of philosophy’ and which played a major role in the establishment of analytic philosophy. In this theory, (Ka) is rephrased as (Kb), which can then be readily formalized in the new logic as (Kc):

(Ka) The present King of France is bald. (Kb) There is one and only one King of France, and whatever is King of France is bald. (Kc) ∃ x [ Kx & ∀ y ( Ky → y = x ) & Bx ].

The problems generated by attempting to analyze (Ka) decompositionally disappear in this analysis. Russell’s problem was this: if there is no King of France, then the subject term in (Ka)—the definite description ‘the present King of France’—would seem to lack a meaning, in which case how could the whole have a meaning? Russell solved this problem by ‘analyzing away’ the definite description. The definite description has no meaning in itself, but (Ka) as a whole does have a meaning, a meaning that is given by (Kb), to which (Ka) is seen as equivalent. The meaning of (Kb) has still to be explained, but this can be done by drawing on the resources of the logical theory, in which the logical constants and quantificational structure revealed in (Kc) are clarified.

Just as Frege provided a diagnosis of what is wrong with the ontological argument, at least in its traditional form (see §6 of the main entry), so Russell showed how to avoid unnecessary reification of the purported objects of our discourse. If we can find an equivalent to a statement involving some problematic expression, then the problems drop away in the very process of ‘translating’ it into a logical language. Although Frege himself seems not to have fully appreciated the eliminativist possibilities opened up by this strategy of logical analysis, Russell clearly did, and in the process initiated a reductionist programme that has been influential ever since. Although, as Russell and Whitehead acknowledge in their preface to Principia Mathematica , “In all questions of logical analysis, our chief debt is to Frege” ( PM , viii), Russell’s own advance lay in extending logical analysis and in suggesting the possibilities of eliminativism.

For detailed discussion of Russell’s theory of descriptions and its development, see Griffin 1996; Hylton 1990, ch. 6; 2003; 2007; Linsky and Imaguire 2005; Neale 2005; Noonan 1996.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.3

Moore is generally regarded as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, yet his own early conception of analysis is surprisingly traditional. In ‘The Nature of Judgement’, published in 1899, he sees analysis simply as the decomposition of complex concepts (which is what propositions were for Moore at the time) into their constituents: “A thing becomes intelligible first when it is analysed into its constituent concepts” ( NJ , 8 [ Quotation ]). This conception underlies the main theses of Moore’s first major work, Principia Ethica (1903), including his famous ‘open question’ argument.

In the first chapter, entitled ‘The Subject-Matter of Ethics’, Moore considers how ‘good’ is to be defined. By ‘definition’ here Moore means ‘real’ rather than ‘nominal’ definition, concerned not with the meaning of a word but with the nature of the object denoted (cf. PE , 6). He comes to the conclusion that ‘good’ is indefinable, since good has no parts into which it can be decomposed:

My point is that ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion; that, just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to any one who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is. Definitions of the kind that I was asking for, definitions which describe the real nature of the object or notion denoted by a word, and which do not merely tell us what the word is used to mean, are only possible when the object or notion in question is something complex. You can give a definition of a horse, because a horse has many different properties and qualities, all of which you can enumerate. But when you have enumerated them all, when you have reduced a horse to his simplest terms, then you no longer define those terms. They are simply something which you think of or perceive, and to any one who cannot think of or perceive them, you can never, by any definition, make their nature known. ( PE , 7.)

Insofar as something is complex, according to Moore, it can be ‘defined’ in terms of its component parts, and, unless we are to go on ad infinitum , we must eventually reach simple parts, which cannot themselves be defined ( PE , 7-8). Since ‘good’, like ‘yellow’, is not a complex notion, it is indefinable.

Moore’s ‘open question’ argument is then offered to support his claim that ‘good’ is indefinable. Consider a proposed definition of the form:

(G) The Good is X .

(Suggested candidates for ‘ X ’ might be ‘that which causes pleasure’ or ‘that which we desire to desire’; cf. PE , 15-16.) Then either ‘the Good’ means the same as ‘ X ’, or it does not. If it does, then the definition is trivial, since ‘analytic’; but if it does not, then the definition is incorrect. But for any substitution for ‘ X ’—other than ‘the Good’ itself, which would obviously make (G) analytic—we can always raise the question (i.e., it is always an ‘open question’) as to whether (G) is true; so ‘ X ’ cannot mean the same as ‘the Good’ and hence cannot be offered as a definition of ‘good’. In particular, any attempt at providing a naturalistic definition of ‘good’ is bound to fail, the contrary view being dubbed by Moore the ‘naturalistic fallacy’.

This argument has been influential—and controversial—in metaethical discussions ever since. But in its general form what we have here is the paradox of analysis . (Although the problem itself goes back to the paradox of inquiry formulated in Plato’s Meno , and can be found articulated in Frege’s writings, too [ Quotation ], the term ‘paradox of analysis’ was indeed first used in relation to Moore’s work, by Langford in 1942.) Consider an analysis of the form ‘ A is C ’, where A is the analysandum (what is analysed) and C the analysans (what is offered as the analysis). Then either ‘ A ’ and ‘ C ’ have the same meaning, in which case the analysis expresses a trivial identity; or else they do not, in which case the analysis is incorrect. So it would seem that no analysis can be both correct and informative.

There is a great deal that might be said about the paradox of analysis. At the very least, it seems to cry out for a distinction between two kinds of ‘meaning’, such as the distinction between ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ that Frege drew, arguably precisely in response to this problem (see Beaney 2005). An analysis might then be deemed correct if ‘ A ’ and ‘ C ’ have the same reference , and informative if ‘ C ’ has a different, or more richly articulated, sense than ‘ A ’. In his own response, when the paradox was put to him in 1942, Moore talks of the analysandum and the analysans being the same concept in a correct analysis, but having different expressions . But he admitted that he had no clear solution to the problem ( RC , 666). And if this is so, then it is equally unclear that no definition of ‘good’—whether naturalistic or not—is possible.

However, if Moore provided no general solution to the paradox of analysis, his work does offer clarifications of individual concepts, and his later writings are characterized by the painstaking attention to the nuances of language that was to influence Oxford linguistic philosophy, in particular.

For fuller discussion of Moore’s conception of philosophical analysis, see Baldwin 1990, ch. 7; Bell 1999.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.4

In the preface to his first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , Wittgenstein records his debt to both Frege and Russell. From Frege he inherited the assumptions that the logic that Frege had developed was the logic of our language and that propositions are essentially of function-argument form. “Like Frege and Russell I construe a proposition as a function of the expressions contained in it.” ( TLP , 3.318; cf. 5.47.) From Russell he learnt the significance of the theory of descriptions. “It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.” ( TLP , 4.0031.) Unlike Frege and Russell, however, he thought that ordinary language was in perfect logical order as it was ( TLP , 5.5563). The aim was just to show how this was so through the construction of an ideal notation rather than an ideal language , revealing the underlying semantic structure of ordinary propositions no longer obscured by their surface syntactic form.

Arguably unlike Frege, too, Wittgenstein was convinced at the time of the Tractatus that “A proposition has one and only one complete analysis” ( TLP , 3.25). The characteristic theses of the Tractatus result from thinking through the consequences of this, in the context of Fregean logic. Propositions are seen as truth-functions of elementary propositions (4.221, 5, 5.3), and elementary propositions as functions of names (4.22, 4.24). The meaning of each name is the simple object that it stands for (3.203, 3.22), and these simple objects necessarily exist as the condition of the meaningfulness of language (2.02ff.). For Wittgenstein, the existence of simple objects was guaranteed by the requirement that sense be determinate (3.23; cf. NB , 63). It was in this way that Wittgenstein reached metaphysical conclusions by rigorously pursuing the implications of his logical views. As he noted in his Notebooks in 1916, “My work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world” ( NB , 79).

According to Wittgenstein, then, analysis—in principle—takes us to the ultimate constituents of propositions, and indeed, to the nature of the world itself. That Wittgenstein was unable to give any examples of simple objects was not seen as an objection to the logical conception itself. Equally definite conclusions were drawn as far as our thought was concerned. “If we know on purely logical grounds that there must be elementary propositions, then everyone who understands propositions in their unanalysed form must know it.” ( TLP , 5.5562.) The claim might seem obviously false, but it was precisely the task of analysis to bring out what we only tacitly know.

This whole logical and metaphysical picture was dismantled in Wittgenstein’s later work (see especially PI , §§1-242). The assumption that Fregean logic provides the logic of language and the world was rejected, and the many different uses of language were stressed. The idea that names mean their bearers, the various theses of functionality and compositionality, and the associated appeal to tacit processes of generating meaning were criticized. On Wittgenstein’s later view, “nothing is hidden” ( PI , §435; cf. Malcolm 1986, 116); philosophy is simply a matter of getting clear about what is already in the public domain—the grammar of our language ( PI , §§ 122, 126).

Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.—Some of them can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called an “analysis” of our forms of expression, for the process is sometimes like one of taking a thing apart. ( PI , §90 [ Full Quotation ])

Wittgenstein’s earlier conception of analysis, as combining logical analysis with decompositional analysis, has given way to what has been called ‘connective’ analysis (Strawson 1992, ch. 2; Hacker 1996, ch. 5). Given how deeply embedded that earlier conception was in the whole metaphysics of the Tractatus , the critique of the Tractatus has been seen by some to imply the rejection of analysis altogether and to herald the age of ‘post-analytic’ philosophy. But even Wittgenstein himself does not repudiate analysis altogether, although (as the passage just quoted suggests) he does tend to think of ‘analysis’ primarily in its crude decompositional sense. Not only may logical analysis, in the sense of ‘translating’ into a logical language, still have value in freeing us from misleading views of language, but ‘connective’ analysis is still worthy of being called ‘analysis’ (as we shall see in the next three sections).

For further discussion, see Baker and Hacker 1980, chs. 2-3; Carruthers 1990, ch. 7; Glock 1996, 203-8; Hacker 1996, chs. 2, 5; Malcolm 1986, chs. 6-7.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.5

6. The Cambridge School of Analysis: Logical and Metaphysical Analysis

The Cambridge School of Analysis, as it was known at the time, was primarily active in the 1930s. Based in Cambridge, it drew its inspiration from the logical atomism of Russell and Wittgenstein and the earlier work of Moore. As well as Moore himself, its central figures included John Wisdom, Susan Stebbing, Max Black and Austin Duncan-Jones. Together with C.A. Mace and Gilbert Ryle, Stebbing and Duncan-Jones (who was its first editor) founded the journal Analysis , which first appeared in November 1933 and which remains a key journal of analytic philosophy today.

The paradigm of analysis at this time was Russell’s theory of descriptions, which (as we have seen in relation to Russell and Wittgenstein above) opened up the whole project of rephrasing propositions into their ‘correct’ logical form, not only to avoid the problems generated by misleading surface grammatical form, but also to reveal their ‘deep structure’. Embedded in the metaphysics of logical atomism, this gave rise to the idea of analysis as the process of uncovering the ultimate constituents of our propositions (or the primitive elements of the ‘facts’ that our propositions represent).

This characterization suggests a distinction that has already been implicitly drawn, and which was first explicitly drawn in the 1930s by Susan Stebbing (1932, 1933b, 1934) and John Wisdom (1934), in particular, between what was called ‘logical’ or ‘same-level’ analysis and ‘philosophical’ or ‘metaphysical’ or ‘reductive’ or ‘directional’ or ‘new-level’ analysis. The first translates the proposition to be analyzed into better logical form, whilst the second aims to exhibit its metaphysical presuppositions. In Russell’s case, having ‘analyzed away’ the definite description, what is then shown is just what commitments remain—to logical constants and concepts, which may in turn require further analysis to ‘reduce’ them to things of our supposed immediate acquaintance.

The value of drawing this distinction is that it allows us to accept the first type of analysis but reject the second, which is just what Max Black (1933) did in responding to Stebbing (1933b). Attacking the idea of metaphysical analysis as uncovering facts, he considers the following example:

(E) Every economist is fallible.

Black suggests that a metaphysical analysis, on Stebbing's conception, at least at an intermediate level, would yield the following set of facts:

(E#) Maynard Keynes is fallible, Josiah Stamp is fallible, etc.

Yet (E) does not mean the same as (E#), Black objects, unless ‘means’ is being used loosely in the sense of ‘entails’. But analysis cannot exhibit the propositions entailed, since this would require knowing, in this example, the name of every economist. The correct analysis, Black suggests, is simply:

(E*) ( x ) ( x is an economist) entails ( x is fallible).

This is a logical analysis of structure rather than a metaphysical uncovering of facts. (1933, 257.)

Similar arguments might be offered in the case of other general propositions, which together with negative propositions proved particularly resistant to ‘reductive’ analysis, and the rejection of the latter in favour of logical analysis, and later, linguistic analysis, came to characterize the next phase of analytic philosophy.

For further discussion, see Beaney 2002b; Hacker 1996, ch. 4; Passmore 1966, ch. 15; Urmson 1956.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.6

7. Carnap and Logical Positivism: Quasi-analysis and Explication

The rejection of metaphysical analysis is characteristic of logical positivism, which developed in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. The central figure was Rudolf Carnap, who was influenced not only by Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein but also by neo-Kantianism (see Friedman 2000, Richardson 1998). His work can be seen as marking the transition to logical and linguistic forms of analysis unencumbered, at least officially, by metaphysical baggage.

Carnap’s key methodological conception in his first major work, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) is that of quasi-analysis . Carnap held that the fundamental ‘units’ of experience were not the qualities (the colours, shapes, etc.) involved in individual experiences, but those experiences themselves, taken as indivisible wholes. But this meant that analysis— understood in the decompositional sense —could not yield these qualities, precisely because they were not seen as constituents of the elementary experiences (1928, §68). Instead, they were to be ‘constructed’ by quasi-analysis , a method that mimics analysis in yielding ‘quasi-constituents’, but which proceeds ‘synthetically’ rather than ‘analytically’ (1928, §§ 69, 74).

In essence, Carnap’s method of quasi-analysis is just that method of logical abstraction that Frege had used in §62 of the Grundlagen (albeit without seeing it as ‘abstraction’). An equivalence relation holding between things of one kind (concepts in Frege’s case) is used to define or ‘construct’ things of another kind (numbers in Frege’s case). Just as numbers are not constituents of the concepts to which they are ascribed, but can be constructed from appropriate equivalence relations, so too can other ‘quasi-constituents’ be constructed. (For detailed discussion of quasi-analysis, and the complications and difficulties that it gives rise to, see Goodman 1977, ch. 5; Richardson 1998, ch. 2.)

Carnap’s use of the term ‘quasi-analysis’ is revealing, for the ‘quasi’ suggests that he is still in thrall to the decompositional conception of analysis, despite his recognition that there are other forms of analysis, e.g., which use abstraction instead. By the early 1930s, however, Carnap is happy to use the term ‘analysis’—or more specifically, ‘logical analysis’—for methods of abstraction and construction. In a paper called ‘The Method of Logical Analysis’, given at a conference in 1934, for example, he wrote: “The logical analysis of a particular expression consists in the setting-up of a linguistic system and the placing of that expression in this system.” (1936, 143.) By this time, Carnap’s ‘linguistic turn’ had occurred (see Carnap 1932, 1934); but the conception underlying the Aufbau remained: analysis involves exhibiting the structural relations of something by locating it in an abstract theoretical system.

In his later work Carnap talks of analysis as ‘explication’, though this also goes back to the Aufbau , where Carnap talked of ‘rational reconstruction’. (The connection between the two ideas is made clear in Carnap’s preface to the 2nd edition of the Aufbau ). In Meaning and Necessity (1947), Carnap characterizes explication as follows:

The task of making more exact a vague or not quite exact concept used in everyday life or in an earlier stage of scientific or logical development, or rather of replacing it by a newly constructed, more exact concept, belongs among the most important tasks of logical analysis and logical construction. We call this the task of explicating, or of giving an explication for, the earlier concept … (1947, 7-8)

Carnap gives as examples Frege’s and Russell’s logicist explication of number terms such as ‘two’—“the term ‘two’ in the not quite exact meaning in which it is used in everyday life and in applied mathematics”—and their different explications of definite descriptions (1947, 8).

A fuller discussion of explication is provided in the first chapter of Logical Foundations of Probability (1950 [ Quotation ]), where Carnap offers criteria of adequacy for explication, and gives as his main example the concept of temperature as explicating the vaguer concept of warmth. The idea of a scientifically defined concept replacing an everyday concept may be problematic, but the idea that analysis involves ‘translating’ something into a richer theoretical system is not only characteristic of a central strand in analytic philosophy but has also been fruitful throughout the history of philosophy. In effect, it originates in ancient Greek geometry, though it can be seen more prominently in analytic geometry (see the supplementary section on Descartes and Analytic Geometry ). It is not therefore new, but it was certainly foregrounded in philosophy and given a modern lease of life in the context of the new logical systems developed by Frege, Russell and Carnap.

For further discussion of Carnap’s methodology, see Beaney 2004; Beth 1963; Coffa 1991, Part II; Proust 1989, Part IV; Strawson 1963; Uebel 1992.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.7

8. Oxford Linguistic Philosophy: Linguistic and Connective Analysis

Michael Dummett (1991a, 111) has suggested that the precise moment at which the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy was taken is §62 of Frege’s Grundlagen , where in answer to the question as to how numbers are given to us, Frege proposes to define the sense of a proposition in which a number term occurs. Dummett has also stated that ‘the fundamental axiom of analytical philosophy’ is that “the only route to the analysis of thought goes through the analysis of language” (1993, 128). Yet both Frege and Russell were hostile to ordinary language, and the ‘linguistic turn’ was only properly taken in Wittgenstein's Tractatus , before being consolidated in the work of Carnap in the early 1930s. But Dummett’s axiom has been held by many analytic philosophers and it was certainly characteristic of Oxford philosophy in the two decades or so after the Second World War.

Gilbert Ryle can be taken as representative here. In one of his earliest works, dating from before the war, he had argued that language is ‘systematically misleading’ (1932), although as he himself later remarked (in Rorty 1967, 305 [ Quotation ]), he was still under the influence of the idea that was always a ‘correct’ logical form to be uncovered (see §6 of the main document). But with the breakdown of logical atomism (see §6 above), the emphasis shifted to the careful description of what Ryle called the ‘logical geography’ of our concepts. Ryle’s most important work was The Concept of Mind , published in 1949, in which he argued that the Cartesian dogma of the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ was the result of a ‘category-mistake’, confusing mental descriptions with the language of physical events. Again, Ryle was later critical of the implication that the single notion of a category-mistake could function as a ‘skeleton-key’ for all problems (1954, 9); but the detailed accounts of individual concepts that he provided in his work as a whole demonstrated the power and value of linguistic analysis, and offered a model for other philosophers. In chapter 2, for example, he draws an important distinction between knowing how and knowing that . There are many things that I know how to do—such as ride a bicycle—without being able to explain what I am doing, i.e., without knowing that I am following such-and-such a rule. The temptation to assimilate knowing how to knowing that must thus be resisted.

J. L. Austin was another influential figure in Oxford at the time. Like Ryle, he emphasized the need to pay careful attention to our ordinary use of language, although he has been criticized for valuing subtle linguistic distinctions for their own sake. He was influential in the creation of speech-act theory, with such distinctions as that between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts (Austin 1962a). Although Austin shared Ryle’s belief that reflection on language could resolve traditional philosophical problems, linguistic analysis has since come to be employed more and more as a tool in the construction of theories of language. But one good illustration of the importance of such reflection for philosophy occurs in section IV of Austin’s book Sense and Sensibilia (1962b), where Austin considers the various uses of the verbs ‘appear’, ‘look’ and ‘seem’. Compare, for example, the following (1962b, 36):

(1) He looks guilty. (2) He appears guilty. (3) He seems guilty.

There are clearly differences here, and thinking through such differences enables one to appreciate just how crude some of the arguments are for theories of perception that appeal to ‘sense-data’.

Ryle, in particular, dominated the philosophical scene at Oxford (and perhaps in Britain more generally) in the 1950s and 1960s. He was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy from 1945 to 1968 and Editor of Mind from 1947 to 1971. His successor in the chair was P.F. Strawson, whose critique of Russell’s theory of descriptions in his own seminal paper of 1950, ‘On Referring’, and his Introduction to Logical Theory of 1952 had also helped establish ordinary language philosophy as a counterweight to the tradition of Frege, Russell and Carnap. The appearance of Individuals in 1959 and The Bounds of Sense in 1966 signalled a return to metaphysics, but it was a metaphysics that Strawson called ‘descriptive’ (as opposed to ‘revisionary’) metaphysics, aimed at clarifying our fundamental conceptual frameworks. It is here that we can see how ‘connective’ analysis has replaced ‘reductive’ analysis; and this shift was explicitly discussed in the work Strawson published shortly after he retired, Analysis and Metaphysics (1992). Strawson notes that analysis has often been thought of as “a kind of breaking down or decomposing of something” (1992, 2), but points out that it also has a more comprehensive sense (1992, 19), which he draws on in offering a ‘connective model’ of analysis to contrast with the ‘reductive or atomistic model’ (1992, 21). Our most basic concepts, on this view, are ‘irreducible’, but not ‘simple’:

A concept may be complex, in the sense that its philosophical elucidation requires the establishing of its connections with other concepts, and yet at the same time irreducible, in the sense that it cannot be defined away, without circularity, in terms of those other concepts to which it is necessarily related. (1992, 22-3)

Such a view is not new. The point had also been made by A.C. Ewing, for example, in a book on ethics published in 1953. Responding directly to Moore’s arguments in Principia Ethica (see §4 above), Ewing remarks that “To maintain that good is indefinable is not to maintain that we cannot know what it is like or that we cannot say anything about it but only that it is not reducible to anything else” (1953, 89). Whatever one’s view of reductionist programmes, an essential part of philosophy has always been the clarification of our fundamental concepts. Reflected in the idea of connective analysis, it is perhaps this, above all, that has allowed talk of ‘analytic’ philosophy to continue despite the demise of logical atomism and logical positivism.

For further discussion, see Baldwin 2001; Beaney 2007b; Hacker 1996, ch. 6; Lyons 1980; Passmore 1966, ch. 18; Rorty 1967; Stroll 2000, ch. 6; Warnock 1989.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.8

9. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy: The Varieties of Analysis

As mentioned at the beginning of this entry, analytic philosophy should really be seen as a set of interlocking subtraditions held together by a shared repertoire of conceptions of analysis upon which individual philosophers draw in different ways. There are conflicts between these various subtraditions. In his inaugural lecture of 1969, ‘Meaning and Truth’, Strawson spoke of a ‘Homeric struggle’ between theorists of formal semantics, as represented in their different ways by Frege, the early Wittgenstein and Chomsky, and theorists of communication-intention, as represented by Austin, Paul Grice and the later Wittgenstein (1969, 171-2). The ideas of the former were to be developed, most notably, by Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett, and the ideas of the latter by Strawson himself and John Searle; and the debate has continued to this day, ramifying into many areas of philosophy. Nor is there agreement on what Dummett called the ‘fundamental axiom’ of analytic philosophy, that the analysis of language is prior to the analysis of thought (1993, 128). As Dummett himself noted (ibid., 4), Gareth Evans’s work, The Varieties of Reference (1982), would seem to put him outside the analytic tradition, so characterized. To suggest that he only remains inside in virtue of “adopting a certain philosophical style and … appealing to certain writers rather than to certain others” (Dummett 1993, 5) is already to admit the inadequacy of the characterization.

Since the 1960s, the centre of gravity of analytic philosophy has shifted towards North America, counterbalanced slightly by the blossoming in recent years of analytic philosophy in continental Europe and South America and its continued growth in Australasia. Although many of the logical positivists—most notably, Carnap—emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, it took a while for their ideas to take root and develop. Quine is the towering figure here, and his famous critique of Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction (Quine 1951) was instrumental in inaugurating a view of philosophy as continuous with the natural sciences, with the corresponding rejection of the view that there was anything distinctive about conceptual analysis. His critique was questioned at the time by Grice and Strawson (1956), but it is only in the last few years that the issue has been revisited with a more charitable view of Carnap (Ebbs 1997, Part II; Friedman 1999, ch. 9; Richardson 1998, ch. 9).

One recent defence of conceptual analysis, with a qualified rejection of Quine’s critique of analyticity, has been offered by Frank Jackson in his book, From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998). On Jackson’s view, the role of conceptual analysis is to make explicit our ‘folk theory’ about a given matter, elucidating our concepts by considering how individuals classify possibilities (1998, 31-3). To the extent that it involves ‘making best sense’ of our responses ( ibid ., 36), it is closer to what Quine called ‘paraphrasing’ (1960, §§ 33, 53) than the simple recording of our ordinary intuitions (Jackson 1998, 45). Jackson argues for a ‘modest’ role for conceptual analysis, but in so far as he admits that a certain “massaging of folk intuitions” may be required ( ibid ., 47), it is not clear that his conception is as neutral as he suggests. Consider, for example, his central argument in chapter 4, offered in defence of the view that colours are primary qualities of objects ( ibid ., 93):

(Pr. 1) Yellowness is the property of objects putatively presented to subjects when those objects look yellow. (Pr. 2) The property of objects putatively presented to subjects when the objects look yellow is at least a normal cause of their looking yellow. (Pr. 3) The only causes (normal or otherwise) of objects' looking yellow are complexes of physical qualities. (Conc.) Yellowness is a complex of the physical qualities of objects.

(Pr. 1) exemplifies what Jackson calls our “prime intuition about colour”, (Pr. 2) is a “conceptual truth about presentation”, and (Pr. 3) is the empirical truth that is required to reach the metaphysical conclusion (Conc.) that ‘locates’ yellowness in our ontology. (Pr. 1) is intended to encapsulate our ordinary ‘folk view’. But as it stands it is ambiguous. Does (Pr. 1) say that there is a property, but one about which we are unsure whether it is really presented to us or not, or that the property itself is only putative? The latter reading is closest to the ‘triviality’ Jackson says he wants as his “secure starting-place”, which might be better expressed as “yellowness is the property objects look to have when they look yellow” (cf. 1998, 89); but it is the former that is doing the work in the argument. If the property itself is only putative (i.e., if colours are not properties of objects at all, as some people have held), then (Pr. 2) is false; at the very least, it is not a conceptual truth that putative properties can be normal causes. This is not to say that Jackson is wrong about the primary quality view of colour. But it does illustrate just what assumptions may already be involved in articulating ‘folk intuitions’, even on a supposedly ‘modest’ understanding of conceptual analysis. In the end, as the history of conceptions of analysis shows, no conception can be dissociated from the logical and metaphysical context in which it operates.

Analytic philosophy, then, is a broad and still ramifying movement in which various conceptions of analysis compete and pull in different directions. Reductive and connective, revisionary and descriptive, linguistic and psychological, formal and empirical elements all coexist in creative tension; and it is this creative tension that is the great strength of the analytic tradition.

For further discussion, see Beaney 2001 (on Jackson); Dummett 1993; Hacker 1996, chs. 7-8; Hookway 1988 (on Quine); Stroll 2000, chs. 7-9.

Annotated Bibliography, §6.9

Copyright © 2014 by Michael Beaney < michael . beaney @ hu-berlin . de >

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14 Philosophical and Conceptual Analysis

Jeffrey C. King, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers Universitypg xii

• Published: 03 August 2016
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This article examines the main lines of contemporary thinking about analysis in philosophy. It first considers G. E. Moore’s statement of the paradox of analysis. It then reviews a number of accounts of analysis that address the paradox of analysis, including the account offered by Ernest Sosa 1983 and others by Felicia Ackerman (1981, 1986, 1991); the latter gives an account of analysis on which properties are the objects of analysis. It also discusses Jeffrey C. King’s (1998, 2007) accounts of philosophical analysis, before turning to views of analysis that are not aimed at addressing the paradox of analysis, including those associated with David Lewis, Frank Jackson, and David Chalmers. In particular, it comments on Lewis’s argument that conceptual analysis is simply a means for picking out the physical state that occupies a certain role, where formulating what that role is constitutes a conceptual analysis of the relevant notion.

1. Introduction

Philosophers spend a lot of time attempting to give analyses of philosophically interesting notions. Analyses have been proposed for knowledge, moral rightness, species-hood, object-hood, persistence, change, reference, and much more. It is therefore surprising that there isn’t more consensus among philosophers regarding what they are attempting to do in providing purported analyses. Philosophers don’t agree about the things that are being analyzed, nor what it is to analyze something. In what follows, we’ll see a sampling of views on what philosophical analysis is. The present work isn’t meant to be exhaustive and there is much work that will not be discussed. However, it does purport to illustrate the main lines of thinking about analysis in recent philosophy. The present work also makes no attempt to discuss the views about analysis of historical figures like Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell. There is a rich literature on this topic and interested readers should consult it. Here, we focus on more contemporary views.

2. Views of Philosophical Analysis that Address the Paradox of Analysis

In this section we discuss views of philosophical analysis that aim to address the so-called paradox of analysis . Though the paradox is often said to have been formulated by Plato, contemporary interest in it is due to the formulations of the paradox by C. H. Langford and G. E. Moore. Hence, we do well to start here. What follows is Moore’s influential statement of the paradox:

But, now, if we say, as I propose to, that to make any of the above three statements 1 is to give an analysis of the concept ‘brother’, we are obviously faced with a puzzle which Mr. Langford calls ‘the paradox of analysis’. Suppose we use still another way, a fourth way, of expressing the very same statement which is expressed in those three ways I gave, and say: ‘To be a brother is the same thing as to be a male sibling.’ The paradox arises from the fact that, if this statement is true, then it seems that you would be making exactly the same statement if you said: ‘To be a brother is the same thing as to be a brother.’ But it is obvious that these two statements are not the same; and obvious also that nobody would say that by asserting ‘To be a brother is to be a brother.’ you were giving an analysis of the concept ‘brother’. 2

Moore claims that if the following is a correct analysis:

1. To be a brother is to be a male sibling

then if you say either of the two following sentences, you would be making the same statement and, in both cases, giving an analysis of the concept ‘brother’:

2a. To be a brother is to be a brother 2b. To be a brother is to be a male sibling

But, Moore says, both of these things are obviously false: saying 2a and 2b does not amount to making the same statement; and saying 2a does not amount to giving an analysis.

In effect, Moore is claiming that if 1 expresses an analysis, then the sentences 2a and 2b stand in some relation (saying 2a is making the same statement as saying 2b; in saying 2a or 2b, one is giving an analysis). But there is strong reason to think 2a and 2b do not stand in this relation. Hence, in its most general form, the paradox can be viewed as follows. We begin by supposing we have a correct analysis:

Next, it is alleged that if 1 is a correct analysis, then the following sentences stand in some relation:

What relation they are claimed to stand in varies with the version of the paradox: it may be claimed that they express the same proposition; that they mean the same thing; that they are both analyses and so on. Reasons are then given for the claim that they cannot stand in this relation. Thus the paradox: assuming that 1 is an analysis, 2a and 2b both must and must not stand in some relation.

Of course, any view of philosophical or conceptual analysis that addresses the paradox of analysis must somehow resolve it. But presumably theories addressing the paradox should do more than this. For example, the analysis given in 1 is importantly different from both of the following two claims, which appear to be (purported) analyses in some sense as well:

(JTB) To be in instance of knowledge is to be an instance of justified true belief(H 2 O) To be water is to be H 2 O

In particular, 1 is uninteresting and trivial in a way that JTB and H 2 O are not. Further, JTB and 1 can be the result of armchair theorizing. Not so for H 2 O. An account of analysis that addresses the paradox of analysis should explain these things. Let’s now turn to such accounts.

We begin with the view of Sosa 1983 . Sosa is very much concerned with the paradox of analysis, and states it as follows:

(A) To be a cube is (=) to be a closed solid with sides all square. (C1) No one can think consciously of being a cube without thinking consciously of being a closed solid with all sides square. (C1) follows from A given: RCT: Thinking (in various modes) is a relation between a thinker and a Thought (in an extension of Frege’s sense which covers not only propositions but also properties, such as being a cube). 3

Sosa supposes A to follow from the fact that the analysis of what it is to be a cube is that it is to be a closed solid with all sides square. RCT looks quite plausible. But C1 looks false. According to Sosa 1983 , it is complex properties, built up out of other properties and relations, that are the objects of analysis. 4 An analysis specifies the constituents of the property being analyzed and how they are combined to yield the property being analyzed. Sosa refers to the latter as a ‘logical mode of constitution’, and explicitly mentions negation and conjunction. 5 Sosa also considers identity to be a limiting case of a mode of constitution, so that every property is constituted out of itself by the mode of constitution of identity. Hence, in general, an analysis is expressed by a sentence of the form ‘P is constituted by mode of constitution M out of constituents C 1 , … ,C n in that order.’ An example Sosa uses is this: the property of being a cube is constituted by the mode of constitution conjunction out of constituents being a closed solid and having all sides square .

But how does all this solve the paradox of analysis that Sosa originally stated? Well, it doesn’t really. Sosa thinks the property of being a cube and the property of being a closed solid with all sides square just are the same property. And given his commitments, this seems right: after all, if the property of being a cube is composed by conjunction out of the properties of being a closed solid and having all sides square, it is hard to see how the property of being a cube could fail to be the same property as the property of being a closed solid with all sides square. Sosa also thinks that the English expressions ‘cube’ and ‘closed solid with all sides square’ express the same property. Hence, C1 above is true and does follow from A and RCT. Our reluctance to accept C1, Sosa claims, stems from confusing it with the following false claim:

C1’ No one can consciously think of being a cube as bearing the relation of identity to being a cube (or being a cube being constituted out of being a cube by identity ) without thinking of being a cube as the bearer of conjunction to the properties of being a closed solid and having all sides square.

Sosa’s account has many merits. The idea that analyses state how the analyzed thing is composed out of other things and what the mode of composition is is powerful and has intuitive appeal. Further, that Sosa’s account entails that being a cube and being a closed solid with all sides square just are the same property, and more generally that on his view in giving analyses one is trying to say what the thing being analyzed is are virtues of the view. One difficulty with Sosa’s view is that he doesn’t explain why it is that we confuse the true C1 with the false C1’. Further, being forced to an error theory on which we are always wrong about the truth-value of sentences like C1 is a significant cost. Finally, Sosa doesn’t say what distinguishes philosophical analyses from other things that appear to be analyses in his sense. A1 after all is not a philosophical analysis. Further, recall the example of H 2 O we have discussed. It is plausible that this tells us the constituents of the property of being water and how they are combined in the complex property of being water. So this appears to be an analysis in Sosa’s sense. But it clearly is not a philosophical analysis. One would want an account of what makes an analysis philosophical. Similar remarks apply to ‘To be a brother is to be a male sibling’, which again appears to be an analysis in some sense, but not a philosophical analysis.

Ackerman (1981 , 1986 ) gives an account of analysis on which properties are the objects of analysis. 6   Ackerman’s (1986) version of the paradox of analysis is that if the following is a correct analysis:

(3) To be an instance of knowledge is to be an instance of justified true belief

then the property of being knowledge must just be the property of being a justified true belief. But then 3 expresses the same proposition as

(3a) To be knowledge is to be knowledge

But of course there is reason to think 3 and 3a do not express the same proposition (3a is trivial; 3 can be informative, etc.). Ackerman blocks the paradox by formulating an account of analysis according to which when a property P provides the analysis of a property Q, P and Q are nonetheless distinct properties. 7 Hence, 3 and 3a do not express the same proposition on Ackerman’s view. Of course, the pressing question for such a view is: what relation does property P bear to the distinct property Q when P analyzes Q? The first two conditions are: (i) P and Q are necessarily coextensive; (ii) it is knowable a priori that P and Q are coextensive. However, as Ackerman acknowledges, these two conditions are not sufficient for something being a philosophical analysis since they don’t rule out the property of being the fourth root of 1296 as providing an analysis of the property of being 6. The final condition for P to provide a philosophical analysis of Q is that the claim that necessarily to be Q is to be P can be justified by the ‘philosophical example/counterexample method’: we formulate hypothetical test cases and ask our subject K: ‘Is this a case of Q?’. We then contrast the descriptions of cases in which K answers affirmatively with those in which she does not. Generalizing from these descriptions we arrive at the properties and their mode of combination that constitute the analysis of (K’s notion of) Q.

One difficulty with this account is raised by Ackerman (1986) herself. Ackerman’s third condition on analyses is designed to get beyond something that is merely a priori knowable to be coextensive with Q and necessarily coextensive with Q (on pain of things like triangularity being an analysis of trilaterality ). However, suppose upon hearing K’s answers as to which cases are Q and which aren’t I generalize to P being the analysis of Q. Now take any property R≠P that is a priori knowable to be coextensive with Q and that is necessarily coextensive with Q. Given K’s responses I could just as easily have generalized to R being the analysis of Q. After all, nothing has been said about how to generalize to P from K’s answers as to which hypothetical cases are Q except that P must capture those answers. But if P does, then R will, since P, Q and R are necessarily coextensive (and a priori knowable to be coextensive). Hence, for all that has been said, Ackerman’s third condition that was supposed to get beyond P being merely necessarily coextensive with Q and a priori knowable to be coextensive with Q fails to do so since it fails to distinguish between P (which, we can suppose, does analyze Q) and an arbitrary property R that is merely necessarily coextensive with Q and knowable a priori to be so.

A second difficulty is that the third condition essentially says that the claim that necessarily something is Q iff it is P can be justified by a certain kind of philosophical inquiry. Suppose the claim that necessarily something is Q iff it is P can be so justified (and satisfies Ackerman’s other two conditions). Then the fact that it can be so justified is either a brute fact or supervenes on some other relation between P and Q. The former seems implausible: how could it be a brute fact that the claim that necessarily something is Q iff it is P be the possible outcome of a certain sort of philosophical inquiry? Hence it must be that there is some as yet undiscovered relation R that obtains between P and Q and that explains why the claim that necessarily something is Q iff it is P can be justified in the way described. In that case, arguably that P and Q stand in R ought to be Ackerman’s third condition on philosophical analyses. But then Ackerman hasn’t really given us an account of analysis. Instead she has told us that P analyzes Q iff (i) P is necessarily coextensive with Q; (ii) it is knowable a priori that P is coextensive with Q; and (iii) there is some relation R between P and Q that explains why the claim that necessarily something is Q iff it is P can be justified by the philosophical method described. Until we are told what R is, we really don’t have an account of philosophical analysis. One way to see this is that Ackerman’s third condition was designed to distinguish philosophical analyses from things like

(4) For all x, x is 6 iff x is x is the fourth root of 1296

that satisfy Ackerman’s other two conditions on philosophical analyses. It is very unsatisfying to be told that 3 is a philosophical analysis and 4 isn’t because though they both satisfy conditions 1 and 2 on philosophical analyses, only 3 can be the outcome of a certain type of philosophical inquiry. Of course, what is needed here is an explanation of why this is so.

Related to this, as with Sosa’s account, nothing in Ackerman’s account tells us how philosophical analyses differ from things like ‘To be a brother is to be a male sibling’ and ‘Water is H 2 O’, which, as indicated, also appear to be analyses in some sense.

A final difficulty with Ackerman’s view is shared by all views on which when P analyzes Q, P and Q are distinct properties. This just seems not to capture what we take ourselves to be doing in attempting to analyze some property. In so doing, we take ourselves to be trying to say what the property is , as I mentioned in discussing Sosa 1983 . We do not take ourselves to be trying to come up with a property intimately related to the property we are trying to analyze. Perhaps if there were no plausible account of analysis on which in some sense the analyzing property and analyzed property are the same, we would be forced to an account on which these properties are different. But it doesn’t appear to be a view we should embrace otherwise.

Jeffrey C. King’s [1998 , 2007] account of analyses begins by assuming that analyses will be stated by means of universally quantified biconditionals:

∀x (x is knowledge iff x is a justified true belief).

For simplicity, King assumes that the term of the left of the biconditional is syntactically simple and the term on the right is syntactically complex. King’s framework for resolving the paradox of analysis comprises three elements, which King claims can be independently motivated. That this is so, King claims, makes his resolution of the paradox attractive.

The first element is the claim, endorsed by Sosa as we have seen as well, that some properties and relations are complex and are “made up” of other properties and relations. To take a very simple example, the property of being a brother is complex and is made up out of the properties of being male and being a sibling. These properties are combined conjunctively in the bachelor property. 8 Call the properties and relations that combine to make up a complex property or relation the latter’s components .

The second element of King’s framework is some version of a view about propositions defended in King [2007 , 2009] . What needs to be assumed here is that the structure of a proposition is very close to the syntactic structure of the sentence expressing it at the level of syntax where quantifier scope is explicitly represented. In effect, this means that a proposition is a structured entity whose structure is very much like the structure of the sentence expressing it, where the semantic values of the words in the sentence are structured in the proposition more or less the way the words with those semantic values are structured in the sentence.

The final element of King’s framework is the claim that there are at least three categories of words, where what distinguishes the words in each category from words in the others are the standards of competence governing the words. In category one are words that express complex properties and relations, where to be competent with the words requires one to know the component properties and relations and how they are combined to yield the complex property or relation expressed by the word. ‘Bachelor’ is a paradigm of a category one word: to be competent with it one must know that ‘bachelor’ expresses a complex property that results from conjunctively combining being male and being unmarried . 9 Category two words are words that express complex properties or relations where competence with the word requires one to be able to say whether the property is instantiated or not in a (possibly hypothetical) situation, given sufficient information about the situation and given that the situation is one in which the property is paradigmatically instantiated or not. 10 Paradigms of category two words are things like ‘knowledge’, ‘reference’, ‘chair’ etc. Finally, competence with words in category three neither requires speakers to be able to articulate the component properties and relations of the complex property or relation expressed by the word, nor properly apply the word in clear (possibly hypothetical) cases. It is hard to say exactly what competence does require here. Category three words include words that many have called natural kind words such as ‘aluminum’, ‘elm’, and so on.

Now on King’s view of analysis, it is complex properties and relations that are the objects of analysis. In stating an analysis, one is saying what the component properties and relations are that make up the complex property being analyzed and how they are combined to form this complex property. Given King’s assumption about the syntactic structure of sentences stating analyses, and his assumptions about the structures of propositions expressed by sentences, a sentence expressing a purported analysis and the proposition it expresses will look as follows:

Sa [[Every x][[R(x)] iff [C(x)]]] Pa [[Every* x[[R*(x)] iff [C(x)]]]

where Every* is the semantic value of ‘Every’, R* is the semantic value of ‘R’ (and is the property being analyzed) and C(x) is what the complex predicate ‘C(x)’ contributes to the proposition expressed by S a . Now according to King, in the case of entities like C(x) that are contributed to propositions by syntactically complex predicates, in the definition of truth for propositions such entities will be mapped to properties. Take a simple case like the following proposition:

[[Mary*[hit* [Bill*]]]

where [[hit*[Bill*]] is the C(x)-like complex entity contributed to this proposition by the complex predicate ‘hit Bill’ in the sentence ‘Mary hit Bill’. In the definition of truth for propositions, this entity must be mapped to the property of hitting Bill and then the above proposition is true iff Mary possesses this property. In such a case, King says that [[hit*[Bill*]] represents the property of hitting Bill. Further, let’s call hit* and Bill* the constituents of the complex, subpropositional C(x)-like entity [[hit*[Bill*]]. Finally, note that it is plausible that hit* and Bill* are components of the presumably complex (and relational) property of hitting Bill . Exactly similar remarks apply to C(x) in P a : it will be mapped to a property by the definition of truth for propositions and it will have constituents. We can now state King’s account of analysis: a proposition of the form P a is an (correct) analysis iff (i) the property R* is identical to the property represented by C(x); and (ii) the constituents of C(x) are components of the property R*.

This does not yet distinguish philosophical analyses from (what are arguably on King’s account) analyses like the uninformative analysis 1 and the ‘scientific analysis’ H 2 O above. King claims that philosophical analyses are distinguished from the former in terms of the sort of epistemic relations typical members of a linguistic community bear to the property being analyzed. In turn, King thinks that the epistemic relations typical members of a linguistic community bear to a property are reflected in the standards of competence associated with the word expressing the property in the community. Hence, a proposition P is a philosophical analysis for a linguistic community C iff (i) P is an analysis; and (ii) there is a sentence of the language of C that expresses P, and the word that contributes the analyzed property to P belongs to category two. 11 King’s idea is that if the word expressing the analyzed property belongs to category one or three, the result will be an uninformative analysis or a scientific analysis, respectively. Further, King thinks that if one is a member of a linguistic community C where the word w expressing a given property in the language of C belongs to category two, speakers’ competence with w in C allows speakers to consider hypothetical situations and determine whether the property expressed by w is instantiated in those situations or not. This puts speakers in a position to formulate hypotheses about the analysis of the property expressed by w.

As to problems with King’s view, one might think that true statements such as ‘To be good is to be pleasurable.’ 12 are philosophical analysis. But on King’s view, they won’t be since the predicate doesn’t have constituents whose semantic values are components of the property being analyzed. Hence, there is no sense in which the property of being good is analyzed here on King’s view of analysis. A second worry concerns how we could ever know an analysis is correct on King’s account. Given a purported analysis of the form of S a above, suppose we could come to known that it is necessarily true. Still, how could we ever determine that the further conditions required for a successful analysis are met? Really, this amounts to asking how we could know that we have successfully identified the components (and how they are combined) of a complex property or relation. This epistemological worry applies to any account on which analyses purport to tell us the components of a complex property or relation and how they are combined in it.

3. Views of Analysis That Are Not Aimed at Addressing the Paradox of Analysis

The views we have looked at so far have been views of philosophical analysis that try to explain the paradox of analysis and the felt difference between 3 and 3a as set out earlier. However, there are views of analysis that are aimed at addressing quite different issues.

One such view is that of David Lewis (1966 , 1970 , 1994 ). Lewis (1994) holds that it is an a priori truth that there are fundamental (perfectly natural) properties and relations, and that every contingent truth must be made true by the pattern of instantiation of these fundamental properties and relations. As he puts it, ‘The whole truth about the world, including the mental part, supervenes on this pattern.’ 13 Lewis further takes the fundamental properties and relations to be physical. This claim Lewis calls materialism . Of course there is no a priori guarantee that materialism is correct. But putting together the a priori claim that everything supervenes on the pattern of instantiation of the fundamental properties and relations, with the a posteriori claim that the fundamental properties and relations are all physical, we get the a posteriori claim that everything supervenes on the pattern of instantiation of physical properties and relations. In particular, the mental items so supervene.

But this raises a puzzle for Lewis. Some features of the world that supervene on the physical properties and relations will be given by extremely complex physical conditions that are too complex for beings like us to entertain or track. But mental features aren’t like that. We seem to do a surprisingly good job of tracking the beliefs, desires, and so forth of others. This must mean, Lewis thinks, that there is a certain kind of simplicity about mental phenomena when looked at in the right way. It is the job of conceptual analysis to reveal that simplicity.

Here Lewis appeals to a largely tacit theory we all grasp of how we work mentally. Lewis call this theory folk psychology . Lewis thinks folk psychology is largely correct and that it is a powerful instrument for predicting and explaining human behavior. For any given mental state M, folk psychology will have principles telling us the causal relations between M, perceptual input, behavioral output and other mental states (e.g. it might tell us very roughly that pain is caused by certain perceptual inputs, causes certain behavioral outputs, and leads to being in other mental states like anger, etc). Imagine that we conjoin all the principles of folk psychology and let M 1 , … M n be names of all the mental states the theory mentions. 14 Let this sentence be ‘T[M 1 , … ,M n ]’. This, in effect, gives us our simultaneous conceptual analysis of the mental states in our folk psychology by assigning to the n-tuples of these states a joint causal role, including causal relations between the mental states (as well as causal relations to perceptual input and behavioral output). We can think of ‘T[M 1 , … ,M n ]’ as saying ‘the states that typically occupy the M 1 … ,M n roles are typically causally related to each other, perceptual input and behavioral output as follows: …’. Now it is an open question and an empirical question what states do in fact occupy these roles. But if Lewis is right and every feature of the world supervenes on physical properties, the occupier of the roles are ultimately physical states. And this, Lewis thinks, gives us a simple argument for the view that mental states are ultimately identical to physical states. For simplicity, let’s suppress the idea that the mental states M 1 , … ,M n are interdefined and focus on a single mental state M. The argument that M is a physical state runs as follows:

Mental state M = the occupier of the M role (conceptual analysis) The occupier of the M role = physical state P (empirical claim) Therefore, mental state M = physical state P

It should be noted that the second premise here is contingent, according to Lewis. Hence, the conclusion is contingent as well. Some different physical state could have occupied the M role (or even some nonphysical state). 15 It is important to see that for Lewis, P is the state M. So had things been different, some other state would have been M.

In summary, for Lewis conceptual analysis is simply a means for picking out the physical state that occupies a certain role, where formulating what that role is constitutes a conceptual analysis of the relevant notion. This is done in the service of reconciling physicalism with mental features of the world. As a result, Lewis’s view of conceptual analysis has no obvious application to the paradox of analysis.

Whatever the merits of Lewis’ view here regarding mental states, the question arises whether Lewis’ conception of conceptual analysis is broadly applicable to other philosophically interesting concepts. Most of the concerns center around what the theory is that is the analogue of folk psychology for the other philosophically interesting concepts one might hope to analyze. In the case of ethical concepts, for example, it is not clear that there is a consistent folk theory of morality, since there is wide-ranging moral disagreement. Further, in the case of virtually any philosophically interesting concept, one must be given some idea of how to determine what claims involving the concept, and related concepts, count as part of the relevant folk theory, as opposed to merely being claims involving the concept and related concepts.

A related view of conceptual analysis appears in the work of Frank Jackson (1994 , 1998 ) and David Chalmers (1996) . We’ll put things in Chalmers’ terms here, though Jackson’s views in crucial respects are similar. It will be useful to put things in terms of the two-dimensional semantic framework Jackson 1998 and Chalmers 1996 employ. 16

In this framework, expressions are associated with two functions from possible worlds to extensions. Such functions are generally called intensions . A word like ‘water’ has what is often called a primary intension , which maps a possible world to the stuff that is water in that world. 17 The idea here is that when the function is applied to a world, it gives as its output what the extension of ‘water’ would be if that world turns out to be actual. So consider a world where the oceans and lakes are filled with a chemical XYZ (which is not H 2 O). XYZ also falls from the skies there during storms, comes out of faucets, and so on. The intuition here is that if the world turns out to be like that, water is XYZ. So the primary intension of ‘water’ maps the XYZ world to XYZ. Of course, it also maps the actual world to H 2 O. To repeat, it maps any world to what would be water in that world if the actual world turns out that way.

But ‘water’ also has a secondary intension. This intension maps a possible world, now considered as counterfactual, to what is water at that world given that water is H 2 O. When we consider the XYZ world as counterfactual, and ask what is water there, the answer is that water is H 2 O there and that there is no water in the XYZ world. Given that water in the actual world is H 2 O, water is H 2 O in every possible world. Hence, the secondary intension of ‘water’ maps every possible world to H 2 O. As we’ve just seen, the primary and secondary intentions are different for an expression like ‘water’. This is because what we will say is water at a given world w depends on whether we are thinking of w as the way the actual world turned out (primary intension) or as a counterfactual world, holding the actual world, in which water is H 2 O, fixed (secondary intension). However, for some expressions the primary and secondary intensions collapse. Consider ‘square’. Whether we consider a world w as how the actual world turned out or as a counterfactual world (holding the actual world fixed) makes no difference to what we would say are squares at the world in question. So primary and secondary intentions collapse for such a word.

Now specifying the primary intension for a term Chalmers calls conceptual analysis. The primary intension encodes the way the secondary intension gets fixed given the way the actual world turns out to be. Hence, the primary intension encapsulates the application conditions for a term given a world considered as actual. In the case of ‘water’, very roughly speaking it applies to the local watery stuff in any world considered as actual. That is why it yields XYZ at the XYZ world and H 2 O in the actual world. We discover what the primary intension of a term is by considering various ways the world might be and asking: ‘If the world turns out that way, what would water be?’ So according to Chalmers, doing this sort of conceptual analysis is an a priori enterprise.

The main point for doing conceptual analysis for Chalmers is to give reductive explanations of various phenomena. A reductive explanation of a phenomenon for Chalmers is an explanation of the phenomenon in terms of microphysics. Specifically, let P be the conjunction of microphysical truths about the world. 18 Then consider the material conditional:

(5) P → there is water

If this conditional is knowable a priori, then there being water has a reductive explanation according to Chalmers. For in that case, ‘we show that there is a sort of transparent epistemic connection between the microphysical and macrophysical phenomena.’ 19 Now in judging whether 5 is known a priori we must be appealing to the primary intension of ‘water’ in considering the consequent. We are asking whether, if the world turns out the way P says, there is water. So for Chalmers, the interest in the primary intension of terms, and hence conceptual analysis, is in considering whether a reductive explanation can be given of what the term applies to by way of considering whether a conditional like 5 is knowable a priori.

As to worries with Chalmers’ view, first it is questionable whether terms like ‘water’ really have primary intensions that are knowable a priori. Since the primary intensions encode how a term comes to pick out what it does in a given world considered as actual, the claim that such intensions are knowable a priori amounts to the claim that we can know a priori how our terms came to pick out what they do. See Laurence and Margolis 2003 for discussion. Further, the claim that 5 must be knowable a priori for water to have a reductive explanation is controversial. See Block and Stalnaker 1999 and Chalmers and Jackson 2001 for discussion. For pro and con discussion of other issues regarding the Chalmers–Jackson approach to conceptual analysis, as well as Lewis’ discussed above, see Braddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009 .

Finally, though Chalmers doesn’t think otherwise, it is worth noting that conceptual analysis as Chalmers understand it is does nothing to address the paradox of analysis. For consider the following sentences:

(6) For all x, x is an instance of knowledge iff x is a justified true belief. (6a) For all x, x is an instance of knowledge iff x is an instance of knowledge.

On Chalmers’ view, the primary and secondary intensions collapse for these sentences; and both sentences have the same intension. Thus, they are not assigned any different semantic value on a view like Chalmers’ by means of which we could avoid the paradox of analysis. To repeat, that this is not surprising since Chalmers’ notion of conceptual analysis was crafted for another purpose.

Ackerman, D. F. ( 1981 ), ‘ The Informativeness of Philosophical Analysis ’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI, 313–320.

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Bradden-Mitchell , and R. Nola , 2009 , Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism , Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

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Chalmers, David J.   1996 , The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory , New York, Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, David J. , and Frank Jackson , 2001 , ‘ Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation ’, Philosophical Review , 110, 315–361.

Chisholm, R. M. and Potter, R. C. ( 1981 ): ‘ The Paradox of Analysis: A Solution ’, Metaphilosophy 12(1), 1–6.

Jackson, Frank , 1994 , ‘Armchair Metaphysics.’ In Philosophy in Mind , ed. J. O’Leary-Hawthorne and M. Michael . Dordrecht, Kluwer, 23–42.

Jackson, Frank , 1998 , From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis , Oxford, Oxford University Press.

King, Jeffrey C. , 1998 , ‘ What is a Philosophical Analysis? ’ Philosophical Studies 90, 155–179

King, Jeffrey C. , 2007 , The Nature and Structure of Content , Oxford, Oxford University Press.

King, Jeffrey C. , 2009 , ‘ Questions of Unity’,   Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. CIX, Part 3 , 257–277.

Laurence, Stephen and Eric Margolis , 2003 , ‘ Concepts and Conceptual Analysis ’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67, no. 2, 253–282.

Lewis, David , 1966 , ‘ An Argument for the Identity Theory ’, Journal of Philosophy 63, 17–25. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers Volume 1 , 1983, 99–107, New York, Oxford University Press. I use the pagination of the latter.

Lewis, David , 1970 , ‘ How to Define Theoretical Terms ’, Journal of Philosophy 67, 427–446. Reprinted in Philosophical Papers Volume 1 , 1983, 78–96, New York, Oxford University Press. I use the pagination of the latter.

Lewis, David , 1994, ‘Reduction of Mind.’ In Companion to Philosophy of Mind , ed. Sam Guttenplan , 412–31, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers. Reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology , 1999 , 291–324, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. I use the pagination of the latter.

Schilpp, Paul A. , 1942 , The Philosophy of G.E. Moore , Open Court Publishing Company.

Soames, Scott , 2004 , Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism , Princeton University Press.

Sosa, Ernest , 1983 , ‘ Classical Analysis ’, Journal of Philosophy 80, no. 11, 695–710.

The statements in question are: ‘The concept “being a brother” is identical to the concept “being a male sibling” ’; ‘The propositional function “x is a brother” is identical to the propositional function “x is a male sibling”.’; and ‘To say that a person is a brother is the same thing as to say that that person is a male sibling.’ See Schilpp 1942 p. 665.

Schilpp 1942 p. 665.

Sosa 1983 pp. 695–696. Sosa also formulates a version of the paradox that begins with an identity claim about propositions instead of the identity claim about properties (A) above. I’ll stick to A and C1 since Sosa spends more time on this version. Thinking back to my general schema for the paradox of analysis, we can say that on Sosa’s version, assuming that being a closed solid with all sides square provides an analysis of the property of being a cube , then the property identity A is true (the properties must stand in some relation—identity; of course on my version above, it was propositions or sentences that must stand in some relation assuming some analysis is correct). But then that the apparently false C1 follows from A (given RCT) gives us reason to think that the properties in question are not identical contra A.

Actually, what are analyzed on Sosa’s view are Thoughts, which include properties and propositions. But as I indicated I’ll concentrate on properties here.

See p. 705.

Ackerman 1981 talks of concepts being the objects of analysis. Ackerman 1986 talks instead of properties and makes clear that she uses ‘concept’ and ‘property’ interchangeably (p. 306).

Chisholm and Potter 1981 is another account on which when P analyzes Q, P and Q are distinct (Chisholm and Potter take properties to be the objects of analysis). Chisholm and Potter define a number of quasi-logical notions and use them to define how P and Q have to be related for P to analyze Q. However, in giving their definitions of the notions that are used to define what an analysis is, Chisholm and Potter rely on a number of undefined notions (specifically, conceiving, and attributing) whose application I simply don’t understand. Thus I am unable to determine whether pairs of properties stand in the relation defined using these notions or not.

These latter properties may themselves be complex.

Of course ordinary competent speakers wouldn’t put things this way, but that is how we as theorists would describe them, given our commitment to the first element of King’s framework.

The requirement that the situation be one in which the property in question is paradigmatically instantiated or not reflects the idea that competence with the word in question requires the speakers to “get it right” in cases in which the word clearly applies or clearly doesn’t. Also, since category one words likely satisfy the condition stated for category two, we should add that no category one words are in category two.

For simplicity King assumes here that there are not two words or more words of the language of C belonging to different categories that express the analyzed property.

Suppose, counterfactually, that this is a true statement.

See p. 292. Lewis’ gloss on the supervenience of everything on the instantiation of perfectly natural properties and relations is on that same page: ‘If two possible worlds were exactly isomorphic in their patterns of coinstantiation of fundamental properties and relations, they would thereby be exactly alike simpliciter .’

For an explanation of why we can use names of mental states and why if the conjunction is infinitely long there is no problem, see Lewis 1970 p. 80.

I suppress here Lewis’ related idea that it may even be that for nonhuman animals or aliens (or even subpopulations of humans), something other than P does occupy the M role for them. In that case we would have to relativize to kinds of things K, and instead of the second premise above, we would have: M in kind K = P. See Lewis 1994 pp. 305–307.

For criticism of the two-dimensional approach, see Soames 2004 .

Chalmers actually uses the set of centered possible worlds as the domain of primary intensions. For simplicity I’ll ignore that here.

For the purposes at hand, Chalmers actually wants to conjoin P with a ‘that’s all’ clause that says that the world contains exactly what is implied by P , and some indexical information. See Chalmers and Jackson 2001 pp. 317–318. I ignore this for simplicity here.

Chalmers and Jackson 2001 p. 351.

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How to Write a Philosophy Paper: Bridging Minds

Table of contents

• 1 What is a Philosophy Paper?
• 2.1 Philosophy Research Paper Introduction
• 2.2 Body Sections
• 2.3 Writing a Philosophy Paper Conclusion
• 3 Template for a Philosophy Essay Structure
• 4 How to Format a Philosophy Research Paper
• 5.1 Choose a Topic
• 5.2 Read the Material and Take Notes
• 5.3 Think about Your Thesis
• 5.4 Make an Outline
• 5.5 Make a First Draft
• 5.6 Work on the Sections
• 5.7 Engage with Counterarguments
• 5.8 Don’t Niglet Citations
• 5.9 Check Formatting Guidelines.
• 5.10 Revise and Proofread
• 6 How to Select the Best Philosophy Essay Topic?
• 7.1 Argumentative Philosophy Essay Topics
• 7.2 Plato Essay Topics
• 7.3 Worldview Essay Topics
• 7.4 Transcendentalism Essay Topics
• 7.5 Practical Philosophy Essay Topics
• 7.6 Enlightenment Essay Topics
• 8 Let Your Philosophy Paper Shine

As a college student who has decided to take a philosophy course, you may be new to this science. A philosophy assignment may seem hard, and this subject is indeed pretty difficult. You read some text, but what you read is just one level of the text, as you need to think critically and analyze what the author is trying to get across. It also involves a lot of analytical and deep thinking. Thus, it is difficult to do an assignment unless you fully understand the text. Don’t freak out if you have little experience with this subject, as we have prepared a comprehensive guide on how to write a philosophy paper, from which you will know:

• The essence of philosophy paper, its structure and format
• Why it is important not to omit the outline stage
• Practical tips on writing a philosophy research paper.

What is a Philosophy Paper?

A philosophy research paper is an academic work that presents a comprehensive exploration of a specific philosophical question , topic, or thinker. It typically involves the analysis of arguments, the articulation of one’s own positions or perspectives, and the evaluation of philosophical texts and ideas. The primary objective of such a paper is to contribute to the understanding of philosophical issues by critically examining existing views, offering new interpretations, or developing novel arguments. The paper is characterized by rigorous logical reasoning, clear articulation of ideas, and grounding in relevant philosophical literature.

Drafting a philosophy essay begins with appreciating precisely what a philosophy research paper entails. It involves taking a definite position on a philosophical topic and defending that viewpoint with a logical, irrefutable claim. A good research essay generally uses rational arguments to lead readers down a path to a conclusive, hard-to-contradict resolution.

Philosophy Paper Outline Structure

Writing a quality philosophy paper means beginning with a first-rate outline. The best philosophy paper outline is straightforward in its intent, takes up a position, and is uncomplicated in its language. A proper outline makes drafting easier and less time-consuming. Moreover, philosophical writing with a clear-cut outline will lend assurance that your end result is condensed yet enlightening.

After determining a format, you are ready to begin writing out your philosophy paper outline. The first step in this process is to determine how to choose a topic for a paper. Great papers are those that the writer is most interested in. Once your topic has been chosen, your outline can be written with specific details and facts. Said specifics will take your introduction, body, and conclusion through an easy-to-follow guide.

Philosophy Research Paper Introduction

Your research essay should begin with a striking and  attention-grabbing hook . It should identify your topic of focus in some way and ensure that readers have the desire to continue on. The hook is intended to smoothly transition to your thesis statement, which is the claim your thesis is venturing to prove. Your thesis statement should lead readers to  the question of research – the distinct question that will be wholly explained in the body of writing. Finally, your  introduction for the research paper will close with your stance on the question.

Body Sections

The body aspect of a philosophy thesis is considered the meat of any paper. It is hard unless you find someone to  write my philosophy paper for me . This element is where most of the logic behind your stance is contained. Typically, bodies are made up of 3 sections, each explaining the explicit reasoning behind your position. For instance, the first chunk of the body will directly and logically answer the question posed.

In your second body section, use statements that argue why your position is correct. These statements should be informed, prudent, and concise in their reasoning, yet still presented without overly fancy lingo. The explanation of your argument should not be easily opposed. It should also be succinct and without fluff, insulating the explanatory material.

The third portion of the body section should defend your thesis against those that may have counterarguments. This will be the backbone of the essay – the portion that is too hard to refute. By ensuring that criticisms are properly and utterly denounced and the thesis is ratified, philosophical writing will begin to reach its end – the conclusion.

Writing a Philosophy Paper Conclusion

The conclusion is ultimately meant to tie the entire work together in a nice, coherent fashion. It should start with a brief rehash of the body section of your essay. Then, it will move into explaining the importance of the thesis and argument as a whole.  Quality conclusions are ones that will offer a sense of closure.

Template for a Philosophy Essay Structure

A suggested template to help guide you when writing out a philosophy outline is as follows:

The use of the above outline template is sure to help with the overall drafting procedure of philosophical writing. Understanding the proper use of the outline is ideal for the best end product.

Putting an outline to use makes the process of writing a philosophy paper much more simple. By using an outline to navigate your thoughts as you write, your essay nearly composes itself. The addition of detail to an outline as it is written provides pronounced facts and a full outline. Take the outline chock full of thoughts and ideas, add words and transitions, and you have a complete paper.

How to Format a Philosophy Research Paper

Formatting a philosophy paper starts with choosing a citation style . The choice between APA, MLA, and Chicago styles simply lay out citations in contrasting manners for your philosophical writing. Each of these styles requires a differing method of citing sources and varying types of organization. Most commonly, philosophy research paper citations are done in MLA or Chicago. While both are accepted, it may be best to choose which your supervisor requires.

Luckily, you can  APA research papers for sale and forget about this stress.

10 Steps to Write a Great Philosophy Paper Like a Pro

Learning how to write a philosophy research paper outline is a skill that can be carried over to numerous other subjects. While philosophical writing is a bit different than most other topics of discussion, the outline can be applied to others fairly easily. Proper utilization of outlines makes for a well-thought-out and structured thesis work that a writer can be proud of.

Choose a Topic

One of the primary steps is choosing a topic, and that is the first thing college students get stuck on. If you can not choose a topic you are interested in, talk to your university professor. You can also take a look at different lists of ideas on the Internet.

Read the Material and Take Notes

Read all materials carefully and take notes of important ideas. It is a good idea to read the material a couple of times as there will always be something you don’t notice at first. It is important to have a clear understanding of what you read to nail your assignment. If you feel like you don’t understand anything, then Google ‘ write my philosophy paper for me ’ and get help from real professionals.

Think about Your Thesis

Before you start writing, realize what you are going to show. Your work should have a strong thesis that states your position. The central component of the work is a clear thesis statement followed by supporting claims.

Make an Outline

An outline should include your ideas for the introduction, your thesis, main points, and conclusion. Having a philosophy paper outline before working on the assignment can help you stay focused and ensure you include all major points.

Make a First Draft

Don’t worry about perfection at this stage. Instead, focus on getting your ideas on paper. Following your outline, start building your arguments. Make sure to provide evidence or reasons for your claims.

Work on the Sections

Introduction: An introduction for a research paper is an essential part of any assignment because it gives your readers an overview of your work. It is your opportunity to grab their attention, so take this step seriously. Remember the thesis statement? You should present it here.

Main body: In this part, you need to present arguments and support your thesis. Start with providing a clear explanation of the philosopher’s ideas and move to the evaluation. Support your thesis by using examples.

Conclusion: A conclusion for any research paper is where you restate your central thesis. It should look like a mirror image of the introduction. Here you need to summarize the major points of your work.

Engage with Counterarguments

A good philosophy paper acknowledges opposing views. Make sure to address these counterarguments and provide reasons for why you believe your stance is more compelling.

Don’t Niglet Citations

Citations serve as a bridge. They link your ideas to the broader world of philosophical discourse, allowing readers to trace back your sources and delve deeper if they wish. Always remember, that citations are more than a mere formality. They correspond to specific ideas, arguments, or facts you present in your paper. This means every claim, idea, or quote you borrow from a philosopher needs to be clearly linked to its source. In this way, you will be sure that your work will be free of plagiarism .

Check Formatting Guidelines.

It’s also crucial to maintain consistency in your citation style. Whether you use APA, MLA, or Chicago, stick to one style throughout your paper.

Revise and Proofread

Once you finish your masterpiece, it is time to  edit and proofread the research paper . We recommend you put your work aside for a few days to have a fresh perspective when start editing it.

How to Select the Best Philosophy Essay Topic?

First of all, we recommend deciding on a direction that interests you more. It can be a theoretical aspect, applicative use of philosophy or even the integration of this science with others – for example, ontology or metaphysics. After all, it is essential to reflect your thoughts correctly in writing for any direction. You will need to use writing tools for students to show your judgments accurately in the essay. Sometimes this can be a difficult task when the authors of the papers get into a so-called flow state.

Secondly, choosing a good topic that can be compared with the opinions of already-known thinkers is necessary for a deeper justification of your point of view. To do this, use the appropriate essay quotation format to make your paper easy to read. After all, while we are not recognized philosophers, proving our claims will be helpful to get the highest score.

If you still need to get philosophy essay ideas, continue reading this article. Here you will find 70 interesting topics that you can use as a topic for your essay or get inspired to create your own.

Easy Philosophy Paper Topics

Often we want to avoid reinventing the wheel. We are interested in writing an exciting but easy essay. So, if you were looking for simple philosophical essay topics, here is the list of the top 10 topics in philosophy for your paper:

• Human Responsibilities in Different World Religions: Why are They Distinct?
• Good and Evil: Do They Have Anything in Common? Will They Be Able to Insulate One without the Other?
• Advantages and Disadvantages of a Hedonistic Approach to Life
• Life after Death: Should We Endure the Circumstances of the X-axis for a Better Future on the Y-axis?
• Why Ancient People Asked Themselves the Same Questions as We Do: Isn’t Humanity Progressing?
• Do We Fulfill Our Moral Obligation to Parents by Helping Children?
• Three Features: Each from an Animal and an Angel. What is the Nature of Man?
• Is Genetic Engineering Ethical with Respect to the Laws of Nature?
• How Society Can Influence the Personal Choice of the Sense of Life for Each of Us
• Self-Determination of a Person & the Formation of our Microuniverse

Argumentative Philosophy Essay Topics

If you think more analytically, use it to your advantage. The argumentative type of philosophy essay is an unusual and exciting option for such papers since it requires strong thesis statement points. If you want to write exactly this sort of essay, these essay topics ideas will come in handy to decide on the topic of your work:

• Peaceful Protests/Desperate Battle: a Critical Analysis of the Philosophy of Resistance
• The Borderland Situation and Absurdity: Analytical Review.
• Explanation of the Path of any Subject to the Point of No Return. A Critical Analysis of “The Myth of Sisyphus” 1942.
• The Paradox of Absurdity and How to Find a Way Out of It: Follow the Rules or Set Yours
• Comparative Analysis of Forms of Globalization from the Point of View of Philosophy
• E. Leroy, P. Teilhard de Shader and Volodymyr Vernandskyi: Together About the Noosphere, Separately About its Functioning.
• Analysis of the Origins of the First Thinkers from the Point of View of Metaphysics.
• The Legal Aspect of Organ Cloning and Entire Human Cloning. Does it Make a Difference?
• Are People Obliged to Always Tell the Truth and Nothing But the Truth?
• Is Experience Acquired through Lived Years or Situations? Explanation of Each of the Parties.

Plato Essay Topics

Plato and Aristotle were the founders of philosophy in their classical sense. That is why writing an essay that will outline or refute Plato’s reasoning is a surefire option to impress your teacher and stand out from the rest of the group. If you still don’t know what to write about, below are the topics in the philosophy type of paper:

• Understanding a Being as a Multiplicity of Organic Elements According to Plato’s Postulates.
• Reflection of the Philosophy of Truth As an Idea: Plato’s Teaching
• Plato’s way of Familiarizing themself with the Truth through Memories
• Is It Possible to Trace the Influence of Socrates on Plato’s Philosophy: a Detailed Analysis
• Truth Exists, but It does not Exist until Being Developed – the Main Contradiction of Plato’s System of Philosophy Understanding
• “Phaedo”: Philosophy is the Science of Death.
• Plato’s Dialectic: Philosophy is the Cornice that Crowns All Our Knowledge
• Platonic Vision of Four Types of Dialectics as Four Modes of the Soul Activity
• A Move Against Democracy from the Platonic Postulates of Understanding the State and Society According to Personal Philosophy
• Plato and the “Ladder of Love” in the “Banquet”: Beautiful Bodies, Souls, Tempers and Sciences.

Worldview Essay Topics

Worldview and philosophy are similar concepts; they are rooted in the history of the human race. That is why this type of essay is interesting for both writing and reading. Choose your worldview essay topic from the options below to create your perfect piece of writing:

• Three-Aspect Structure of Worldview: Elements, Levels, Main Subsystems
• Mythological and Religious Types of Worldview: What do They Have in Common?
• Worldview as an Individual Prism of Multilevel Interaction Between Man and the World
• The Influence of Previous Generations on Modern Prejudices of our Outlook
• Ideological Form of Globalization. How does Social Media Affect It?
• The Noosphere as a Part of Countering Global Warming
• Modern Beauty Standards and the Bodily Phenomenon of Existence: What is the Connection between Them?
• Human Rights. Philosophy and Ethics
• Religious Beliefs as a Form of Philosophy Existence
• A Complex and Fragmented Approach to Studying the Worldview of Different Nations

Transcendentalism Essay Topics

Transcendentalism, as a new stage in the formation of philosophy, played a key role in its modern appearance. If you are more inclined towards more modernist lines of philosophy, these topics will suit you perfectly:

• Classical German Philosophy. Rational and Intelligent Thinking
• Subjectively Realistic Description of the Environment According to Categories of Philosophy
• The Influence of Transcendentalism on the Ongoing Development of Philosophy Accordingly to the Categories of Multiplicity and Necessity
• 10 Categories Denoting Deep Connections in being Relative to Transcendentalism: What Unites and Distinguishes Them
• Scientific Contemplation as a Mental Category through the Prism of the 20s Years of the 20th Century
• Life at the Intersection of the Past and the Future: Influence on Currents of American Transcendentalism Philosophy
• Modes of Perception of Time & Time as Duration: New ideas of Transcendentalists or Paraphrasing of Hegel’s Postulates?
• Ontological Doctrines and their Essential Characteristics: Henry David Thoreau
• Concepts of Understanding Space and their Qualitative Changes Relative to New Views on Philosophy
• Nature for Self-Sufficiency as the Main Myth of Philosophy Currents at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Practical Philosophy Essay Topics

The theory is great. However, any science’s practical and applied meaning is interesting for each of us. If you are interested in delving into the use of philosophy in modern society, these topics will not leave you indifferent:

• Everyday/Life Level of Philosophy
• Philosophy of Principles. What does It Mean to be Guided by a Certain Life Principle?
• Approach of Philosophy to the Life of Tibetan Monks – does It Correlate with Reality?
• Prejudice against Residents of Third World Countries: Reasons for Contempt for Their Mentality and Lifestyle
• Unpreparedness of College Teachers for Changes in the Education System: What are They Afraid of?
• Truth as the Last Instance of Communication with People. Is It Always Necessary?
• The Philosophy of Excessive Consumption in the USA. What Basis does it Have?
• Does the Concept of One’s Opinion Exist in the Era of Oversaturation of Information?
• The use of Ancient Greek Postulates in Philosophy Today – is the Appeal to Classical Canons Still Relevant?
• The Concept of Ethical and Moral Principles in the Era of Excessive Permissiveness.

Enlightenment Essay Topics

Enlightenment played a huge role in all sciences and spheres of human life. It’s a mind-blowing theme to write about. So, if you were looking for some ideas for your Enlightenment essay topic, we’ve prepared the best ones for you:

• Does the Urge to Study and Develop the Beautiful in Man Still Influence Modern Philosophy?
• Empiricism and Rationalism: Julien Aufre de Lametre’s Attempt to Unite Them
• The Concept of Atheistic Speech of Enlightenment: Religious Dogmatics Debunktion by Voltaire
• Voltaire: Ignorance, Fanaticism, Delusion and Lies Are Cultivated by Christianity
• The State as a Level of Inequality between the Rich and the Poor, According to Rousseau’s Views.
• The Immense Book of Nature as an Object of Knowledge According to Denis Diderot
• The Structure of Existence through Its Concepts: Elements, Substratum, Substance, Objective Reality beyond Human Consciousness and the Condition of Multiplicity.
• Concepts of Understanding Space and Time in Enlightenment Philosophy
• “Molecular Motion” by Paul Holbach: What is It?
• Social Life Based on the Principles of Reason and Justice – “About Reason” Andrian Helvetius

Let Your Philosophy Paper Shine

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Philosophical Analysis: The Concept Grounding View

Philosophical analysis was the central preoccupation of 20th-century analytic philosophy. In the contemporary methodological debate, however, it faces a number of pressing external and internal challenges. While external challenges, like those from experimental philosophy or semantic externalism, have been extensively discussed, internal challenges to philosophical analysis have received much less attention. One especially vexing internal challenge is that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are deeply unclear. According to the standard textbook view, a philosophical analysis aims at a strict biconditional that captures the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the relevant category. The textbook view arguably identifies a necessary condition on successful philosophical analyses, but understood as a sufficient condition it is untenable, as I will argue in this paper. To this end, I first uncover eight conditions of adequacy on successful philosophical analyses, some of which have rarely been spelled out in detail. As we shall see, even sophisticated alternatives to the textbook view fail to accommodate some of these conditions. I then propose the concept grounding view as a more promising account of philosophical analysis. According to this view, successful philosophical analyses require necessary biconditionals that are constrained by grounding relations among the concepts involved. Apart from providing a satisfactory account of philosophical analysis in its own right, the concept grounding view is also able to meet the challenge that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are problematically unclear.

Related Papers

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Jeffrey King

This article examines the main lines of contemporary thinking about analysis in philosophy. It first considers G. E. Moore’s statement of the paradox of analysis. It then reviews a number of accounts of analysis that address the paradox of analysis, including the account offered by Ernest Sosa 1983 and others by Felicia Ackerman (1981, 1986, 1991); the latter gives an account of analysis on which properties are the objects of analysis. It also discusses Jeffrey C. King’s (1998, 2007) accounts of philosophical analysis, before turning to views of analysis that are not aimed at addressing the paradox of analysis, including those associated with David Lewis, Frank Jackson, and David Chalmers. In particular, it comments on Lewis’s argument that conceptual analysis is simply a means for picking out the physical state that occupies a certain role, where formulating what that role is constitutes a conceptual analysis of the relevant notion.

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Michael T Stuart

Philosophical conceptual analysis is an experimental method. Focusing on this helps to justify it from the skepticism of experimental philosophers who follow Weinberg, Nichols & Stich (2001). To explore the experimental aspect of philosophical conceptual analysis, I consider a simpler instance of the same activity: everyday linguistic interpretation. I argue that this, too, is experimental in nature. And in both conceptual analysis and linguistic interpretation, the intuitions considered problematic by experimental philosophers are necessary but epistemically irrelevant. They are like variables introduced into mathematical proofs which drop out before the solution. Or better, they are like the hypotheses that drive science, which do not themselves need to be true. In other words, it does not matter whether or not intuitions are accurate as descriptions of the natural kinds that undergird philosophical concepts; the aims of conceptual analysis can still be met.

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In this article the standard philosophical method involving intuition-driven conceptual analysis is challenged in a new way. This orthodox approach to philosophy takes analysanda to be the specifications of the content of concepts in the form of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Here it is argued that there is no adequate account of what necessary and sufficient conditions are. So, the targets of applications of the standard philosophical method so understood are not sufficiently well understood for this method to be dependable.

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• Essays in Philosophical Analysis

In this Book

• Nicholas Rescher
• Published by: University of Pittsburgh Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright, Epigraph
• pp. vii-viii
• Historical Essays
• I. Cosmic Evolution in Anaximander
• II. Aristotle's Theory of Modal Syllogisms and Its Interpretation
• III. Three Post-Aristotelian Concepts of Syllogistic Logic
• IV. The Concpt of Nonexistent Possibles
• V. Choice Without Preference: A Study of the History and of the Logic of Problem of "Buridan's Ass"
• pp. 111-158
• VI. Logical Difficulties in Leibniz' Metaphysics
• pp. 159-170
• VII. A Argument of Hume's
• pp. 171-180
• VIII. The Revolt Against Process in Recent Philosphy
• pp. 181-190
• Systematic Essays
• IX. The Problem of Uniqueness in History
• pp. 193-210
• X. Evidence in History and in the Law
• pp. 211-228
• XI. The Dimensions of Metaphysics
• pp. 229-254
• XII. A New Look at the Problem of Innate Ideas
• pp. 255-270
• XIII. Truth and Necessity in Temporal Perspective
• pp. 271-302
• XIV. Pragmatic Justification: A Cautionary Tale
• pp. 303-308
• XV. The Illegitimacy of Cartesian Doubt
• pp. 309-320
• XVI. Translation as a tool of Philosophical Analysis
• pp. 321-326
• XVII. The Concept of Control
• pp. 327-354
• XVIII. A Philosopher Looks at Welfare Economics
• pp. 355-374
• XIX. A Problem in the Theory of Estimation
• pp. 375-380
• XX. Discrete State Systems, Markov Chains, and Problems in the Theory of Scientific Explanation and Prediction
• pp. 381-420
• Index of Names
• pp. 421-426
• Subject Index
• pp. 427-430

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• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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François Voltaire

• Literature Notes
• Alexander Pope's Essay on Man
• Book Summary
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Chapters II-III
• Chapters IV-VI
• Chapters VII-X
• Chapters XI-XII
• Chapters XIII-XVI
• Chapters XVII-XVIII
• Chapter IXX
• Chapters XX-XXIII
• Chapters XXIV-XXVI
• Chapters XXVII-XXX
• Francois Voltaire Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Philosophy of Leibnitz
• Poème Sur Le Désastre De Lisoonne
• Other Sources of Influence
• Structure and Style
• Satire and Irony
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

The work that more than any other popularized the optimistic philosophy, not only in England but throughout Europe, was Alexander Pope's  Essay on Man  (1733-34), a rationalistic effort to justify the ways of God to man philosophically. As has been stated in the introduction, Voltaire had become well acquainted with the English poet during his stay of more than two years in England, and the two had corresponded with each other with a fair degree of regularity when Voltaire returned to the Continent.

Voltaire could have been called a fervent admirer of Pope. He hailed the Essay of Criticism as superior to Horace, and he described the Rape of the Lock as better than Lutrin. When the Essay on Man was published, Voltaire sent a copy to the Norman abbot Du Resnol and may possibly have helped the abbot prepare the first French translation, which was so well received. The very title of his Discours en vers sur l'homme (1738) indicates the extent Voltaire was influenced by Pope. It has been pointed out that at times, he does little more than echo the same thoughts expressed by the English poet. Even as late as 1756, the year in which he published his poem on the destruction of Lisbon, he lauded the author of Essay on Man. In the edition of Lettres philosophiques published in that year, he wrote: "The Essay on Man appears to me to be the most beautiful didactic poem, the most useful, the most sublime that has ever been composed in any language." Perhaps this is no more than another illustration of how Voltaire could vacillate in his attitude as he struggled with the problems posed by the optimistic philosophy in its relation to actual experience. For in the Lisbon poem and in Candide , he picked up Pope's recurring phrase "Whatever is, is right" and made mockery of it: "Tout est bien" in a world filled with misery!

Pope denied that he was indebted to Leibnitz for the ideas that inform his poem, and his word may be accepted. Those ideas were first set forth in England by Anthony Ashley Cowper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1731). They pervade all his works but especially the Moralist. Indeed, several lines in the Essay on Man, particularly in the first Epistle, are simply statements from the Moralist done in verse. Although the question is unsettled and probably will remain so, it is generally believed that Pope was indoctrinated by having read the letters that were prepared for him by Bolingbroke and that provided an exegesis of Shaftesbury's philosophy. The main tenet of this system of natural theology was that one God, all-wise and all-merciful, governed the world providentially for the best. Most important for Shaftesbury was the principle of Harmony and Balance, which he based not on reason but on the general ground of good taste. Believing that God's most characteristic attribute was benevolence, Shaftesbury provided an emphatic endorsement of providentialism.

Following are the major ideas in Essay on Man: (1) a God of infinite wisdom exists; (2) He created a world that is the best of all possible ones; (3) the plenum, or all-embracing whole of the universe, is real and hierarchical; (4) authentic good is that of the whole, not of isolated parts; (5) self-love and social love both motivate humans' conduct; (6) virtue is attainable; (7) "One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." Partial evil, according to Pope, contributes to the universal good. "God sends not ill, if rightly understood." According to this principle, vices, themselves to be deplored, may lead to virtues. For example, motivated by envy, a person may develop courage and wish to emulate the accomplishments of another; and the avaricious person may attain the virtue of prudence. One can easily understand why, from the beginning, many felt that Pope had depended on Leibnitz.

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