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Course description |
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Philosophy 2202G (002) – Early Modern
Philosophy |
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Term Paper Due: April 8 |
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Suggested
Length: 2,000-3,000 words Your job
for your term paper will be to review the 2-3 sources you have selected, give
a good exposition of the views of the authors, and add your own
reflections. Your paper should do two
main things. First, and most
importantly, it should summarize the argument of the sources you have
consulted. When doing so, you should
imagine yourself trying to explain the argument to another student in the
class — so, to someone who knows what you have learned about early modern
philosophy from this course, but who knows none of the things you have
learned about from your special research. The major portion of your grade
will be determined by how well you do at making your authors’ positions
intelligible to someone else with that level of background knowledge. An excellent job at that task alone could
earn an A. Lower grades would
typically result from being unclear about what the authors are trying to
prove or how they go about proving it.
The difference between an A and an A+ comes with the quality of
whatever original contribution you can make to the topic addressed by your
authors or to our critical understanding of what the authors are up to. Making an original contribution does not
have to involve formulating and defending a thesis of your own. Sometimes, in the process of attempting to
explain the authors’ positions, you uncover ambiguities in their expositions
or features of their arguments that are confusing or that don’t seem to
follow. You might even find that
aspects of their arguments do not fit with your understanding of Descartes or
Locke or Berkeley or Hume or other authors we have studied. If, while still being charitable and
interpreting the authors in the best possible way, you can show that there
are real weaknesses in their position, you will have made an original
contribution. Or you might find
features of their views that you think are just wrong and that you can show
to be wrong. Alternatively, if the authors you are studying are taking
different positions and criticizing one another’s work, you may be in a
position to adjudicate the dispute.
Keep in mind that your main job is not to do original work on the
problem addressed by your authors. It
is to write about what the authors say about that problem and, so far as
possible, offer an original analysis and critique of their positions. It is important
to resist the temptation to simply paraphrase what your authors are
saying. Do not look at what they have
written as you write! Read what your
authors have to say, understand it, and then write a first draft of your
paper from your understanding and without looking at what the authors have
written. Keep in mind that, as this is
work in philosophy, argumentation will figure in a central way. There will be some main point or thesis the
author is attempting to establish and there will be some argument for that
thesis. The author will have taken
considerably more pages to present this argument than you will have
available. Your job is not to repeat
everything but to identify the most important points and the line of argument
and convey the most important points in a far more succinct fashion while
preserving all the cogency of the line of argument and making it clear how it
justifies the conclusion. You must
understand the paper well enough that you are able to write this up without
having to consult the paper as you write.
Then, after you have written your first draft, go back and check that
you have gotten the authors right and not left out anything important. If you find you can’t do this, then you
haven’t understood the authors yet. If
you don’t understand the authors, chances are that no one else will
understand what you are trying to write about them. Simply paraphrasing or cutting and pasting
their words will not help — paraphrases or cut and paste jobs done without
understanding tend to be unintelligible or contradictory. Try to understand what the authors are
trying to say well enough so that you don’t have to look at the specifics of
how they have written it down in order to be able to report it. The most
common shortcoming of student term papers is not that they say the wrong
thing but that what they say does not make sense. It ends up being ambiguous, confusing, or
inconsistent, or it presumes too much background knowledge, or it degenerates
into a blow-by-blow account of what the author said next that fails to
capture the line of argument. Adopt
the attitude that you are trying to teach what you have learned to someone
else in the class so that they will know it well enough that they will be
able to pass an exam in the material. Write
accordingly. Password
is: emod |
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