Writing for Philosophy
The purpose of writing for 100 and 200-level philosophy classes is to demonstrate how you are engaging with the ideas and questions presented in the readings. We ask big questions in philosophy, so your job is to first do the readings and then to determine your response to the ideas presented there. Aim to find an original take on the material, even something small like disagreeing with one step the philosopher took to get to their conclusion. Or perhaps you fully agree with the philosopher and can offer a stronger way they might have arrived at their conclusion. Remember that there is not one prescriptive way to mount an original argument, but what matters is that the argument is yours.
The two main mandates for a philosophy essay can be understood as a) reconstructing the main point of the text and b) presenting an argument that is vigorously and tenaciously defended. Some professors in this field want you to spend equal time on each; others value your own argument over a reconstruction of the text. When in doubt, ask for your professor’s preference. Tip: Writing is thinking on the page. It’s okay to spend the whole paper trying to interpret the reading—you don’t need to know what it all means, although you do need to make an honest and serious attempt to interpret the text.
Length doesn’t matter, and longer isn’t usually better—often just long winded and repetitive. If you can say something simply, do. In philosophy, you can’t avoid using the same word multiple times. You can’t call a person a soul or a spirit. In other words, in philosophy, there are no synonyms. Seek clarity and specificity in your ideas, and the writing will follow. Tip: Ask yourself what am I doing in this paper? Not the topic, but what you’re doing with the topic. What is the literature to which I’m responding? What have I found in the text, how do I understand what the author is trying to do?
The first person is welcome in writing in this discipline. You’re saying something in your own voice, and this is part of the tradition and culture of writing in philosophy. Tip: If you disagree with the text, offer objections as you would in a conversation: “The author says X, but I respond by saying Y.” Remember to stress not THAT you agree or disagree with the text, but WHY.
It’s useful to begin writing in philosophy by thinking of your paper as a 5-paragraph essay. This is less because that’s what your faculty want to see and more because it is useful to start out with an understanding that your paper needs a structure. Ask yourself, what am I going to say and how will I arrange where things go? Tip: You’re not writing an opinion piece. Your job is to do justice to a disagreement by fairly representing both sides, and then taking a stance and defending it. One way to arrange things is to announce your claim in the beginning—rather than introducing the paper with broad generalizations about the history of philosophy or the nature of inquiry. To lay out your argument very explicitly, you could open by saying, "first I will explore X, then I will demonstrate how this leads us to Y conclusion. Next I will..." etc. Another way to arrange things in a philosophy paper is to raise questions about an idea or problem in order to show the reader why it’s important, and then make your claim. In other words, the claim does not have to come in the first paragraph, though it should be introduced fairly early in the paper. The body paragraphs should then defend your argument, guiding the reader through your logic from the beginning to the end of the paper. Whichever approach you take, remember to think about the movement of your paper. When you arrive at the conclusion, remember that it cannot simply repeat the introduction. If you raised a question in the beginning or started with a problem, the conclusion then needs to say something about the question or problem that you haven’t already said.
As long as you use one style consistently, you can choose the style you prefer.