Administration Guide

12. How to Write Philosophy

There is absolutely no magic to the business. Just a bit of patience and a bit of common-sense.
Here are three obvious priorities to begin with.

Rules for Assignment Writing

Get the assignment in on time.
Do the best job that you can - but not at the cost of violating Rule 1.
If you have extra time, make it perfect - but not at the cost of violating Rules 2. or 1.

Now some more detailed advice.

First, before you begin any writing in philosophy, ask yourself what problem is at issue. Be careful to speak to the specific question asked and not to some other question. Most of us got terrible advice in high school: "Well, if you don’t know the answer, at least write down something to show that you are still breathing." At the university level, and especially in philosophy, this is Very Bad Advice. I say "especially in philosophy" because philosophers rarely operate in a vacuum. They don’t sit down one morning and say, "Well I think I’ll explicate the universe today" or "I think I’ll tell everyone what minds really are now" or "My goodness, I’m a free and responsible agent". Philosophers start writing, usually, because something puzzles them. Aristotle wrote: "Philosophy begins in wonder" (Metaphysics 982b12-24). Plato wrote: "Philosophy begins in perplexity" (Theaetetus 155d). Though they use the same Greek term, the Plato translation is more accurate. Philosophers are typically bamboozled, bewildered, trying to work through some conceptual blockage or difficulty. If you don’t keep your eye on the problem which some philosopher is grappling with, then it will be hard to state accurately the theory or argument or concepts or examples used towards a solution to those problems. If you do keep your eye on their problem, it will be easy. (Okay, then, easier anyway!)

Second, our only tool is argument. Philosophers are in the business of constructing arguments and criticising arguments. We hardly ever do anything else. In the two Assignments you are being invited to do the same. This means you should not treat the exercise of writing an essay in philosophy as similar to the exercise of writing an essay for, say, a History course or an English course or an Anthropology course. In other courses, to caricature, you write one paragraph expressing one thought, and then write another paragraph expressing another thought, and in that way get from the introduction to the conclusion. If you try to tackle a philosophical issue that way, your writing is likely to go all over the place. Some parts will be insightful, but the pressure of paragraph-writing will inevitably let you stray off the mark from time to time - and worse, it will make it hard for you yourself to spot when that happens. Thus the importance of writing out an argument structure, with explicit premises and conclusion, early on in the piece. In short, put something like the following no later than the first page:

Premise 1: blah blah blah

Premise 2: blah blah blah

Premise 3: blah blah blah

therefore

Conclusion 4: blah blah blah

Of course your argument may have more, or fewer, steps than this. But do write out some argument structure.

Third, such emphasis on argument should not worry you. It should set you free. After all, we are not asking you to solve the philosophical problem at hand. Nor to write something entirely new and never written on it before. Heavens sake! We just want you to argue a bit. Nor do we even expect stunning success at it first crack out of the box. I always think of Philosophy 101 as sort of like Welding 101. Welding is a tricky technique to get right. You can master it only by doing it. But no one expects you be able to make a decent weld first day at Poly. There are simply too many things to pick up: which metals will form a weld at all, how to prepare the surfaces, which rods to use for which metals, which gases, how far away to hold the rods, what angle, how long to preheat the metal, etc. etc. etc. At the same time, thank goodness, it’s a finite thing to learn. That is, you aren’t being asked to do something entirely new in the universe, or something impossible, or something vague. Likewise in this course. You are being asked to learn a little skill, a skill that is masterable in the time we give you, a skill which thousands of others have learned: namely, how to think in terms of concepts and arguments. Don’t try to do more. Try to do at least this and Bob’s your uncle.

Fourth, more than you might realise at first, the exact words and phrases and sentences used in a description of some concept or problem or argument do make a difference. This is a truth we don’t often appreciate because most of us, most of the time, do most of our thinking out loud - and gestures and contexts and a constant barrage of "you know"s often take the burden off of precise expression. In prose, however, none of these aids are available. We have to express our ideas with our hands behind our backs as it were. This is especially so regarding your essay Assignments. We who have to read what you write absolutely refuse to mind-read! That’s part of the exercise. This means you are basically trying to make your point to someone who won’t fill in the gaps for you, or read between the lines, or find the mot juste which has escaped you. To make your point clearly to such a reader as that requires a degree of precision which has probably never been required of you. Without such precision, no one but you will have a clue what you are trying to say, however. And if truth be told, almost certainly you don’t either!

Fifth, use quotations sparingly. It is perfectly appropriate to quote a source when attributing a view to someone, or when you feel the point simply cannot be expressed any more clearly. Even in such cases, however, long quotations should be avoided at all costs. One of your main aims in learning to write philosophy is for you to demonstrate that you have grasped the topic and can express your point of view in your own terms. Quoting long tracts from what somebody else has written takes a certain amount of skill, to be sure. But it is not a skill which is of much use to learning to do any of the above. The truth be told, we really aren’t all that interested in how well Hume understood his own objection to induction, say, or even how well Sober understands Hume. We are interested, over-ridingly interested, in how well you yourself understand what Hume or Sober, or you, are on about. And for that job there is no guide at all but how you would actually phrase these philosophers and their concepts and arguments for yourselves.

Sixth, instead of quotations, it is much better in philosophy to learn to work comfortably with examples and counter-examples. Indeed, sticking in an example is one of the best ways I know of to demonstrate that you understand what you, or some other philosopher. When I myself am not sure what exactly I’m about, I find that I gradually begin to use long words more and more and to verbally wave my arms. Sometimes all it needs is someone asking, "For instance…?" to bring me back to earth with a thump. If we really are at sea, this simple question is almost impossible to answer - because, of course, we weren’t thinking of anything in particular at all, this rather than that, something specific and determinate. It was just pie in the sky waffle. Examples keep each of us honest. And more. What we write is written to be read by others. But it’s human nature to blame others when we are misunderstood - "The clot, it’s perfectly plain what I was trying to say". Examples are superlative tools to keep such clot-ish misunderstanding at bay. Our wild and wholly words can be taken seventeen ways, concrete examples usually can’t be.

Seventh, take some care over your grammar and spelling. Every one of us has become used to reading good prose - how many spelling mistakes or incomplete sentences do you find each week in the Listener say? - that it is hard to realise how plain illiterate bad spelling looks on paper. The world out there, rightly, expects someone with a university degree to be fully literate. Full stop. So if you have any deficiencies here, you simply must make them good, and quickly. For instance, buy and actually use a dictionary. In 134.101, be particularly on guard for the following:

"existence" is NOT spelled "existance"
"philosophy" is NOT spelled "phylosopy"
"perceive" is NOT spelled "percieve"

Finally, the actual mechanics of the writing process are important too. It is an extraordinarily bad idea to sit down and write out the final version of your essay from scratch. This is the most serious advice I can give! A much more reliable procedure for producing a good essay is this.

After reading and thinking about the topic you will probably have some idea of what you want to say, what lines of argument you are going to follow, and what kind of conclusion you would like to end up with. Sketch this out in a plan of the essay. (Even a three or four phrase plan is better than no sketch at all.)
Then write a first draft of the essay, amending and modifying the plan as required. Expect to find that in actually writing out some point in detail, you will change your view of the matter somewhat. More often than we suspect, it’s really our fingers that do the thinking, not our heads.
Put the first draft aside for a while. Seriously. Give yourself time to let the first draft percolate.
A day or two later write out the final version, again making changes and amendments, especially if you feel you need to do so to make the essay clearer. One very good technique to see when more precision or exactness is required is to hear it. Read your draft aloud to a mirror. Your ears will often pick up more inanities than your eyes. Trust me.

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