Aaron M. Griffith

Tips for Writing a Philosophy Paper

A philosophy paper is a unique beast. You’ll find that it requires a different way of thinking and writing than you might have used in papers for your other classes. The aim of every philosophy paper is to defend a specific claim by giving reasons for that claim. Philosophical writing at its best is clear, to the point, engaging, and full of interesting, well-supported ideas. The following are some tips for starting, writing, and editing your philosophy paper. There are lots of great resources for writing philosophy papers online. Here are just a few others:

A Good Philosophy Paper Is...

This is what it's like when you try to sound smart by using big words...except you're not as funny.

Clear: Ideas are stated as simply and succinctly as possible. You shouldn’t try to sound sophisticated; don’t try to dress up a simple idea in fancy language to sound smart or deep. Jargon should be avoided and all philosophical terms need to be defined.

Here's Bertrand Russell on clarity and exact thinking.

Well-Structured: Your essay must have a decipherable structure, i.e., it should be easy for the reader to figure out the purpose of each section/paragraph/sentence. “Guideposts” (periodic explicit statements of what you have done or what you will do) are helpful throughout your paper. Words/phrases indicating logical connections between ideas are essential to giving structure to your paper, e.g., ‘hence’ and ‘therefore’ indicate that a conclusion is coming; ‘moreover’ and ‘furthermore’ indicate that a further implication of an idea will be discussed. I like the idea of an essay being “streamlined”, i.e., there is one easily identifiable line of thought running through the entire essay. Every paragraph of the essay contributes to your thesis; every sentence of every paragraph contributes to your thesis; every word of every sentence of every paragraph contributes to your thesis.

Accurate and Charitable: The philosophical positions and views are correctly stated. You can’t effectively argue for or against a view if you don't accurately state the view. You also want to be as charitable to your opponents as possible. That means you will try to consider/critique/respond to the best, strongest, and clearest version of opposing views and objections that you possibly can.

Reasonable in Scope and Philosophically Interesting: In all likelihood you’ll be writing a short paper, i.e., 2 to 10 pages. You can’t hope to fully defend a controversial philosophical thesis (e.g., that abortion is morally wrong, that God exists, or that Kant's moral theory is fatally flawed) in such little space. You’ll need to limit your scope to a manageable, modest project. E.g., Defend a particular view against a particular objection; give two reasons for endorsing a certain view; provide a counterexample to some philosopher’s theory of X. While your scope should be manageable, you need to do some original philosophical work in your paper. You might not do groundbreaking work on your topic, but you can’t just summarize what others have said (see http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html).

Responsive to the Reader: The reader will be looking for reasons to believe your thesis, so given them reasons! Also the reader doesn’t want to do a lot of work to identify those reasons, so you need to present them in an obvious and timely manner (i.e., not buried at the end of the paper or in a footnote). Moreover, a good reader will always be coming up with objections to your claims. Therefore, you’ll need to anticipate and respond to possible objections at the relevant points of your paper.

Getting Started

In order to write a clear and cogent paper, you’ll need to spend some time thinking about your topic before you put pen to paper, so to speak. If you’re responding to a prompt, you’ll need to make sure to completely understand what it is asking you to do and all the various questions you’ll need to answer. If you’re coming up with your own paper, you’ll need to make sure you completely understand the ideas and/or papers you will be interacting with. Start by:

Taking notes on the papers/articles/books related to your topic.
Discuss the ideas with your professor or peers.
Put the ideas in your own words.

Once you have a firm grasp on the ideas, you can turn your attention to developing a guiding idea for your paper: the idea that will eventually be your thesis statement. You might end up changing this idea as you go along, but you’ll want some foothold from which to begin. Next, outline your paper. This involves identifying the various sections of the paper and the claims and evidence you’ll need to establish in order to substantiate your guiding idea/thesis. See below for an example.

Writing a Draft

Once you have a sense of what you’ll be arguing and how you’ll be arguing it, then you can move on to precisely formulating your thesis statement in your first draft. Since you’ve outlined your paper, you have a pretty good idea of the structure of the paper, i.e., of the order of your claims and reasons. Now you can start putting some flesh on the skeleton of your outline. Every paper has the following three sections:

Introduction/Thesis

The goal of an introduction is to introduce the reader to your topic and the claim you’ll be defending. You shouldn’t assume that your reader knows anything about your topic, so you’ll need to explain your topic and its significance in your introduction. That said, you don’t want to begin too broadly. NEVER start your paper with “Since the dawn of time, humans have searched far and wide for an account of…” or “By their nature, humans are philosophical creatures, prone to explore questions like…” These introductions are too general, unhelpful, and are rather silly. Instead, go straight to the point and explain what you’ll be doing in the paper; it’s even okay to be blunt and simply say, “In this paper, I’ll be discussing…and arguing that…”

Your thesis is the specific claim you want to defend. Douglas W. Portmore ( http://www.public.asu.edu/~dportmor/tips.pdf) says this about a thesis statement: "a thesis statement should:

Be specific.
Be narrow enough as to be practicably defended within the length
Parameters of the assignment.
Make an interesting claim, one over which reasonable people might disagree.
Provide some hint as to what the main line of argument will be."

Keep in mind that a philosophy paper is NOT A MYSTERY NOVEL: your thesis should not be hidden from the reader; you don't want a twist or a surprise ending to a philosophy paper; everything should be laid out clearly in the beginning of the paper.

Body

The goal of the body of your paper is to present and defend the reasons supporting your thesis. Typically, this will involve (1) exposition of the views, concepts, and arguments that you'll be considering, (2) your arguments for the premises that support your conclusion, and (3) consideration of possible objections and counterarguments to your argument and your responses to them (from Portmore, http://www.public.asu.edu/~dportmor/tips.pdf). Here are some general tips for writing the body of your paper.

Identify what claims you need to establish in order to support your thesis. Let those claims help structure the body of your paper. Perhaps your argument goes like this:

99% of the meat Americans eat comes from factory farms.
If meat comes from factory farms, then it is wrong to eat.
Therefore, 99% of the meat Americans eat is wrong to eat.

The body of your paper would be devoted to arguing for (1) and (2). For (1), you'd need to devote a section to providing some empirical facts about how much factory farm meat Americans eat. The next section of your paper will be devoted to defending the more philosophical premise (2). You'll need to give reasons for thinking that meat coming from factory farms is wrong to eat.

The reader should easily be able to determine what each paragraph/section is about and how it contributes to establishing the thesis. This requires a topic sentence explaining the purpose of the paragraph/section. Transition sentences to subsequent paragraphs/sections are also crucial for clearly structuring your paper. Jim Pryor gives some good advice about this. He says, a "way you can help make the structure of your paper obvious is by telling the reader what you've done so far and what you're going to do next. You can say things like:
- I will begin by...
- Before I say what is wrong with this argument, I want to...
- These passages suggest that...
- I will now defend this claim...
- Further support for this claim comes from...
- For example..."

(From section 2 of http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html)

You'll likely need to summarize and analyze the work of other philosophers in the body of your paper. In doing this, you'll need to present these views as simply, clearly, and as charitably as possible. That is, don't present more of an author's view than is needed for your purposes; try to distill the argument down to its basic elements so that you can critique/analyze/supplement/support/etc. it; present the view in the best, most plausible light possible.
Addressing possible objections shows the reader that you are aware of potential weakness and/or controversial aspects of your argument. Be sure to consider these objections in their strongest form to ward off suspicions that you're covering up a weakness. Signal that you'll consider some possible objections to your view by saying something like, "Now that I have presented an argument for X, I foresee the following objections A, B, and C that I will respond to in turn."

Conclusion

The goal of the conclusion is mainly to summarize your thesis and argument and possibly to points towards further issues, questions, and avenues of thought that your paper opens up. Convince your reader that you have in fact provided good reasons to believe your thesis. You don't want to include new claims and arguments in the conclusion, too late for that at this point! (See section 4 of http://www.public.asu.edu/~dportmor/tips.pdf on writing your conclusion)

What Not To Do

Don't do any of the following things and your paper won't end up as the philosophical equivalent of this guy >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

DO NOT...

Define philosophical terms using the dictionary. Philosophical terms are used in a variety of ways and have very specific definitions that are typically not included in the dictionary.
Consult or quote from Wikipedia in your philosophy paper. There is no guarantee that Wikipedia entries are accurate or that they are written by professionals in the field. If you want to consult an encyclopedia on a philosophical topic, I recommend these two:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Start your paper the night before it is due. Start early so that you can get a good grasp on the ideas and your own view.
Use the phrase "Since the dawn of time..." or any variant thereof to start your paper. It's too general and likely an overstatement.
Say "Both authors make valid points" when you compare the work of two philosophers. Beyond misusing the term "valid", such a statement is about as informative as Rasheed Wallace's response in the video on the right. That is, not informative at all. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Turn in your first draft. Writing philosophy requires lots of writing and re-writing. Reading your paper out loud is a good way to identify places in your paper that need more clarity or explanation.
Vary your vocabulary throughout the paper. Since philosophical terms are meant to have precise meanings, you can't simply substitute any word that is ordinarily a synonym for the term in question. For instance, you can't replace 'happiness' with 'contentment' or 'satisfaction' since these terms have different meanings for different philosophers.
Fail to cite any source that you have used in writing your paper. Whenever you summarize, paraphrase, analyze, quote, or are inspired by another author's work, you must cite that work. It's always best to be safe and cite a source rather than risk being caught for plagiarism.
Ignore the instructor's grading rubric. The rubric gives you the criteria for grading, so pay attention to the various ways in which you'll be evaluated as you write and edit your paper. Below is a sample grading rubric:

﻿Tips for Writing a Philosophy Paper﻿