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Philosophy 342 |
Prof. Warren Schmaus |
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Philosophy of Mind |
Office: 228 Siegel Hall |
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Room: 109 Perstein Hall |
Mailbox: 218 Siegel Hall |
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TR 3:00 – 5:40 |
Email: schmaus@iit.edu. |
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Office Hrs: TR 1:00 – 3:00, 228 Siegel Hall |
Phone: 7-3473 |
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GUIDE TO ESSAY WRITING
Let me begin with some general comments that apply to all kinds of essays. Organization is very important. The introductory paragraph of a paper should say exactly what the paper is about. For the short essays, one should not have to read past the first paragraph in order to figure out which question the student is answering. Clarity is also very important. One should pay special attention to sentence structure to make sure the meaning will be understood. The paper should then end with a concluding paragraph that unequivocally states your position. After you write your conclusion, it's a good idea to go back and check your introduction to make sure it agrees. Also, some of the things I say below about philosophy papers in particular also apply to essays in general.
Students are encouraged to come to office hours to discuss their papers. I will be happy to comment on outlines or rough drafts of papers before the due date. It’s not the greatest idea to try to throw something together the night before the assignment is due. Most of the things that lower your grade on a paper are the sorts of things that you can find wrong yourself, and no doubt would find if it weren’t for the fact that it was so blamed late at night and you had run out of energy drink hours ago. So, proofread! Writing that may be "good enough" for a tweet may not be good enough for a formal written assignment in college. So, check to make sure you have not done things like confuse “it’s” with “its” or “there” with “their” or “they’re.” Don’t rely on the spell checker in your word processing program, since a word can be spelled correctly and still be the wrong thing to say.
Although a title page is a nice touch, cardboard or plastic covers just add weight and should be avoided. A simple staple in the upper-left corner is sufficient.
PHILOSOPHY ESSAYS
Although nearly all of you may have written essays in high school English or History classes, few have written philosophy essays. How does one write a philosophy paper? Philosophy professors are interested above all in good arguments. One should take a clear stand, defend it with good reasons, and then draw a conclusion. Ideally, the essay should include both explanations of the relevant views of the philosopher or philosophers under consideration and criticisms of these views.
How does one criticize a thinker? There are many ways. To mention but a few:
(1) One may point out that an author's argument relies on questionable assumptions for which the author does not argue.
(2) One may point out that an argument begs the question, with the conclusion implicitly assumed in the premises.
(3) One may point out an ambiguity in the author's terms, such that he or she sometimes uses a word one way and sometimes another. The author fails to make a crucial distinction with regard to a key concept, so that as a result his or her argument proves less than he or she thinks it does.
(4) One may point out a tension in the author's argument, where he or she appears to say two very different things. However, one should use the term "contradiction" very carefully, for cases in which the author has really said both P and Not-P.
(5) One may raise problems that the thinker has not considered, perhaps through counter-examples or examples where it would prove difficult to apply the author's ideas.
(6) One may draw logical consequences of the author's views that the author has not considered but that you may find unacceptable for one reason or another.
(7) One may argue that the author is misinformed and point out the relevant facts he or she has overlooked.
(8) One may argue that the author in fact misrepresents the views of another writer that you have read.
(9) One may cite criticisms raised by other authors or raised in class discussion.
When you make a claim that an author has contradicted himself or used a term ambiguously or committed some other fallacy, it's a good idea to back up your claim with a quotation from the text as evidence. See below for an explanation as to how to use quotations.
GRADING
Grades lower than a "B" are given to papers that are inadequate for any number of the following reasons:
(1) The paper does not answer the question.
(2) The paper is lacking an introduction or conclusion.
(3) The paper as a whole is poorly organized. It either repeats itself or goes off on tangents not relevant to the question at issue.
(4) The student says things that are not clear, either through an ambiguous use of words, through self-contradiction, or through weak sentence structure. Try to keep your sentences short. Forty or fifty words should be a maximum. Also, try not to embed one sentence in another with parentheses or dashes.
(5) The student merely summarizes the author's conclusions, without trying to give an account of the author's reasons for holding these views.
(6) The student misrepresents the views of the author under study or a character in the author’s work.
(7) The student merely strings a lot of long quotations together and does not try to discuss the issues in his/her own words.
(8) The student merely paraphrases the text, making only slight alterations here and there, and does not try to express him or herself in his/her own words.
(9) The student uses quotations without acknowledging their source.
ACKNOWLEDGING SOURCES
Library research is not expected for the short essays. That is only for the final project. Hence, a bibliography is probably unnecessary for the short essays. However, all quotations from the assigned texts – or from other materials – must be properly acknowledged. Failure to do so is considered plagiarism, and can seriously impact your grade.
Any expression that is not the student's own is a quotation and should be acknowledged as such:
· Short quotations of three lines or less should be included in the body of the paragraph and put within quotation marks. If you embed a quotation within one of your own sentences, the sentence must flow together grammatically.
· Longer quotations should be separated from the main body of the paragraph, indented, and single-spaced. Quotation marks are then unnecessary.
When quoting from one of the texts for the course, in most cases it will be sufficient to provide the author or editor of the text and the page number in parentheses after the quotation. For example: Descartes said, "We often err in cases in which nature does impel us." (PM 47). In the term paper, when you are using sources in addition to the assigned class material, you should provide this kind of in-text citation for quotations and ideas taken from your sources, providing the author's name and the page number. If there is more than one article or book by the same author, include a date as well as the author’s last name. Then provide full bibliographic information, alphabetically by author’s last name, in the list of references at the end on a separate page.
Many of the things that you can find on the web these days existed first in print. For instance, the full text of many classic works in philosophy can be found on line. In such cases, one should provide the original publication data for the edition used, and not the URL. Similarly, if one finds an article through a database such as JSTOR, one should provide the original publication data and not the JSTOR URL. For things that appeared originally in print, one should give the print source, as described below:
For books, one should provide the author, date, title, city of publication, and publisher. E.g.:
Losee, John. 2001. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For a chapter in an anthology, one should provide author, date, title of chapter, editor of book, title of anthology, city of publication, and publisher. E.g.:
Garber, Daniel. 1992. A Discussion of Descartes’ Methodology. In P. Achinstein, ed., Science Rules: A Historical Introduction to Scientific Methods. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
For journal articles, you should give the author, date, title of article, title of publication, and volume and page number of the article cited. E.g.:
Schmaus, Warren. 2007. Renouvier and the Method of Hypothesis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, vol. 38, no. 1: 132-148.
For documents that exist only on the web, one should give the author’s name, the title of the web site or article found there, the universal resource locator (URL or web address), and the date visited.