How to Write a Philosophy Paper Part 0

how to write a philosophy paper hello i'm dr michael johnson and i'm here to give you an overview of my opinions on how to write a philosophy

paper this video is intended for students who need an introduction on how to write a philosophy paper i know frequently you may have even taken philosophy classes

but received no training so you may be a little bit confused about what your teacher wants and what counts as a philosophy paper so in this video i'm going to try to

explain that the video is going to come in several parts this is part 0 due to technical reasons that i don't want to go into and then after this continue with part one and

then go on to the other parts all right so let's start with one aspect of the philosophy paper whenever you write something you're writing something for a particular

audience but writing as a student it actually involves some measure of pretense

so in reality there's only one person who will read your paper at least probably and that's me i encourage you to give your paper to your peers to other your friends and people that you know so that they can give you

feedback but i understand that that can be difficult sharing your ideas and also finding people who are willing to spend the time to help you with your assignment so likely i'm the only person who will

ever read your paper however writing papers in class is supposed to be a training for you to write papers for a general audience

therefore you should write your paper as if people who don't know you right a general audience so what is a general audience it's

um yeah people in general not people so people who don't know you people who haven't taken this class right people who've taken this class or a very

specific audience you're writing for a general audience people who don't know who i am and so you're going to write for an audience of such people and you're going to write

as if those are the people who are going to read it right a general audience right somebody who hasn't been to this class and doesn't know what we learned in this class they're the people you have to explain your ideas to

so don't in particular cite the professor and by that i mean as dr johnson said in class quote blah blah blah right i've gotten papers that do that um that's not appropriate for a general

audience because the general audience is going to be like who's dr johnson and what do you mean by class right so you're writing for people who have never been to this class don't know about this class don't know about me and so on and

so forth again similarly don't cite the powerpoints so there's info don't say as it says on slide 17 of week three is

powerpoint quote blah blah blah blah blah right again a general audience doesn't know about week three or powerpoints or anything like that because they're not members of this

class right they're your sort of imaginary general audience right and don't mention examples from the class as if the reader knows about them

so don't just mention in an example and say oh this is like that example of a man on a train that we had from class right any example that you introduce needs to be explained in a way that a general reader would be able to

understand it so don't make specific reference to things that happen in class now that doesn't mean so every time i tell i give students advice like this

don't do this then they say oh no does that mean that i can't talk about the stuff that we learned about in class in the papers no of course right you can use the information from class you can

use the information from the powerpoints you can use the information from the reading but present it to your reader in a way that does not assume that your reader was in class and knows who i am

and so on and so forth right you need to contextualize that information and explain it to people right so if you're taking material from the readings

then you can cite the readings as the source so don't cite the powerpoints don't cite the professor just cite the readings because that's an independent source that your general audience can

then go consult if they would like um secondly if it's something that i said if like i gave you my opinion or my interpretation of something well i'm your teacher so i'm a special person in

your life uh in the following way if you come to believe the things that i've taught you so i teach you sort of general information and if you come to

believe those things then those are now your beliefs and you don't need to cite me for them right they are now your opinions you own them

don't bother citing michael as michael said in class blah blah blah right um if you believe something that i said in class if you liked my interpretation of something and now it's your

interpretation then just run with it it belongs to you now all right so yeah cite things from the reading no need to cite me or the powerpoints right um

but obviously don't take verbatim things from the powerpoints and put it in your paper make sure to use quotes appropriately right so i think the best reader for you to

assume is to assume that the reader is one of your peers so somebody who has a similar amount of knowledge to you and philosophy so like a second year philosophy major

or third year philosophy major somebody has taken some philosophy classes who knows what philosophy is about but who hasn't taken a the specific class that we have so sorry this slide

was for i originally wrote it for a philosophy of logic class um but assume that they haven't taken the class that you're writing the paper for right um

so what so number one who are you writing for you're writing for the general audience okay number two

what is the purpose of a philosophy paper well the point of a philosophy paper is to convince the reader that a thesis is true so what is a thesis the thesis is the

main claim in the paper it's why you wrote the paper it's in order to get people to believe the thesis right so the entire point of a philosophy paper is that it results revolves around a

thesis so and we'll talk more about in part one of this video this is part zero um about feces so structure of a philosophy of paper

here's a general idea of what we're going to be talking about and what i will go through in these videos that i'm making so these are general guidelines and not always true so you can't if you're

reading the original literature and philosophy journal articles and books and stuff you won't expect it to have this sort of structure but if you're a beginning student writing a beginning

paper for a philosophy class that you're taking right you're not a professional or anything i think this is a good general outline for you to structure your paper around and this is how i'm going to structure

these videos is assuming that you're shooting for this sort of general structure so you start your paper with an introduction and in your introduction it contains a thesis it contains some road

map of how you are going to continue with the rest of the paper right you tell people here's my thesis and then here's how i'm going to argue for it in the rest of the paper

then you're going to have some exposition of key concepts that appear in your thesis and that will appear in your arguments so there'll be some ideas in your thesis that maybe

you'll need to explain to a general audience right so as a philosopher as somebody who's taken this class for instance you already know what an idea

in the idea theory is what the idea theorists meant by that but an ordinary person will only have their ordinary conception of idea and so for a general audience you might have to explain to them the technical

philosophical notion right so you have an exposition of key concepts and ideas and then you'll then the main body of the um

philosophy paper will be consist in arguments that are in support of the thesis so you'll give your arguments for your thesis why you think that it's true

finally you will consider objections to the arguments that you've made you will consider charitably and we'll talk about the virtue of charity later objections to your arguments or your

thesis right you're supposed to imagine how somebody might respond to the arguments that you made what objections that they might make and then you respond to those potential

objections and then finally you'll have a conclusion where you summarize what you've accomplished in this paper in this paper i have shown that blah blah blah

okay so let's talk about uh thesis the thesis statement or a thesis so what is a thesis well philosophy exam

papers are an example of persuasive writing your goal is to persuade somebody so that something is true philosophy papers aren't an example of the type of persuasive writing that tries to persuade through emotion but

rather through reason and argument you're trying to convince your reader of something a thesis a particular claim right your thesis is the main claim that

you're trying to convince your reader of you should have in a paper only one thesis right and the rest of your paper is going to be devoted to establishing that your thesis is true arguing for it

defending it against objections that sort of thing right so you have a thesis you lay your thesis on the table out at the beginning you say this is what i'm going to argue for and the rest of your paper is an extended argument for that

thing and against objections to that thing that of course does not mean just because you only have one thesis doesn't mean that you're only be making one

claim or you only be making arguments for the thesis right you make lots of claims and maybe spend lots of time arguing for those other claims

but all your other claims and arguments should be made in service of arguing for your thesis so what you want to do is argue for claims that support your thesis right so

ultimately everything in the paper is in service of supporting your thesis uh no to bene that means note well the fact that a philosophy paper

consists of arguments for a thesis means that a summary of what someone else thinks is not a philosophy paper right so a lot of students fall into the following trap

they begin the paper by summarizing what some other philosopher like david chalmers thinks and then they end the paper by summarizing what some other philosopher thinks and at no point did they

say something interesting or add to the discussion right this of course just because a philosophy paper isn't a summary of what somebody else thinks in its entirety doesn't mean that you won't be

summarizing what other people think that's often very important to a philosophy paper where you say here's what somebody else thinks and here's why i think it's wrong or here's what somebody else thinks here's an objection

that somebody else has given to that but here's why i don't think that objection works or something like that right so summarizing isn't prohibited of course

but it can't be all that you do you have to add to this discussion you have to do something original so here we're going to talk about the

thesis but what i'm going to do is continue in part one which i've already made so please continue to that