Many students find writing a philosophy paper a daunting experience. It need not be, but it is a different task than writing a paper for many other disciplines. One important difference is that, in writing a philosophy paper, you are not writing a "book report" on what other people have said or argued. Papers in philosophy need to focus on why they said what they said. The people who say or write these things have reasons for doing so. Your task is to bring out those reasons and assess them. You need to see yourself as taking a position in an argument, and as arguing yourself, not just reporting on the positions other people have defended. You are giving your reader reasons to agree with you in your conclusion.

Identify your thesis. For your paper to be focused, it needs to have an identifiable thesis -- an idea or claim you are defending. You may not -- and need not -- have a clear idea what it is when you begin to write, but by the time you finish a rough draft, you should be able to pin down what it is you want to say. It is worthwhile to try to condense your central idea or argument into one or two brief sentences, as tightly focused as possible. You can use these sentences in your paper verbatim, or not, but you should be able to do this. Every paper attempts to persuade the reader of something; take the one idea that you most want your reader to be persuaded of, and make that your thesis. A good philosophy paper is organized entirely around its thesis: it is what pulls the paper together. Your criterion for deciding what goes in and what gets left out of your paper is: does it help me defend my thesis? If so, it stays; if not, it goes. Thus, this is all-important. And if you are writing on an assigned paper topic, you will obviously want to be sure that your thesis addresses it.

You may not know what your thesis is until youíve done some writing, or you may need to change your thesis as you discover what your arguments really show! Donít feel like you have to come up with your thesis first and be married to it forever. But if you know what you want to show, organizing your other thoughts will be much easier.
 

Identify the problems you need to address. Philosophers donít argue just for the hell of it (usually). They take positions and defend them because they think there are reasons for doing so. When you argue, you need to consider the best reasons there are for disagreeing with the position you defend. Then, if you can show that those reasons arenít enough to justify disagreeing with you, you will really have accomplished something! Be fair to your opponents. If your opponents are idiots, thereís not much point in arguing with them. Do your best to understand and explain why a reasonable and intelligent person would hold the view with which you are disagreeing, and engage that form of their view. A significant part of your grade will be based on the degree to which you consider the strongest arguments against your thesis and come to grips with them.

Resources. Further ideas for writing philosophy papers may be found in some of the following books introducing students to the discipline of philosophy:

Jonathan Jacobs, A Philosopherís Compass (Harcourt Publishers)
Mark Woodhouse, A Preface to Philosophy (Wadsworth Publishing)
Anthony Weston, A Rulebook for Arguments (Hackett Publishing)
Douglas Soccio, How to Get the Most Out of Philosophy (Wadsworth)

You can also find lots of web pages with tips on writing philosophy papers here (look under Study Aids: Writing Philosophy).

Format

Papers should be typed or printed double-spaced, with a normal typeface (please no italic typefaces) and normal margins. Please do not add a cover sheet or (even worse) a plastic or paper cover. Just put your name on the first page (and, ideally, on all other pages), and staple your paper together. (If you do not, and pages get lost, that is your problem, not mine.)

Mechanics

Style, including spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc. influences your grade, even if I do not grade it explicitly. It drastically affects how readily, clearly, and accurately ideas get out off your paper and into my head. Spelling and grammar checkers can help, but they are not adequate by themselves. Proofread your paper yourself, get someone else to proofread it if you can.

Composition

Some people believe that really good philosophy must be very deep, and thus difficult to understand. You will not be rewarded for such writing in this course. Your goal should be to make your paper as clear, as unambiguous, and as easy to understand as the subject matter allows. Write as simply, clearly, and directly as you can. Use fewer words rather than more when you can. A good way to test your writing is to read your paper aloud to someone else, or even to yourself. Your paper should make sense to most reasonably intelligent people (even someone not taking this course). I will be happy to read and comment informally on drafts of your paper, if you get them to me in time to do so.

Attributions

As with any paper, any time you quote an author or attribute a claim to him or her, you must cite the reference. The first time you cite a particular work in a paper, give a full citation in a footnote or endnote (see a manual of style for details on how to do this), along with a comment that subsequent page numbers in text will refer to this work. Then you can just give page numbers for subsequent citations. Note: this doesnít work if you are citing two or more authors or works. Then you need to distinguish them by, for example, including the name of the author for each citation.

Intellectual Honesty

Whenever you turn in any assignment in this course, the understanding is that what you are turning in is your own original work. You have an obligation to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, by always attributing any argument or idea that you have borrowed (even if you have modified it) to its source. You are encouraged to discuss the paper topic with other students in the class (and with me, obviously!), but you are responsible for making your paper your own work, except for the sources that you acknowledge and cite in the paper itself.
 
 

Before you turn in a paper, review your writing with these questions in mind:

Organization
­ Does my introduction give the reader an accurate picture of the issues I will discuss and the conclusions at which I will arrive?
­ Does my division of the material into sections and paragraphs reflect the way in which the material naturally is divided into separate ideas and topics? Do I sometimes do too much or too little with a paragraph?
­ Is it clear how each paragraph relates to those surrounding it? Do I supply the reader with transitions to ease the passage from one idea to the next?
­ Does the conclusion adequately summarize the point I am making? Does it merely repeat what I have said already, or does it end on an original note?

Evidence
­ Have I supplied convincing evidence and argument for the different points I wish to make? Am I relying too much on assertion without defense?
­ If I am using the texts of others, have I supplied quotations and citations to show that I am interpreting them correctly? Are the relevance and meaning of the quoted material explained in my own words?

Style
­ Have I presented my ideas in the form of an argument for my conclusion? Have I avoided writing a book report on someone elseís ideas?
­ Are my sentences clear and easy to follow? Are they so complicated or convoluted that the reader will have a difficult time following them?
­ Do I use awkward phrasing? Do the sentences sound right? (Here's where reading aloud helps.)
­ Have I avoided passive voice constructions ("It is argued thatÖ")? Are my verbs active and interesting? Do I use forms of "to be" too much?
­ Is my personality reflected in my writing? Does the work sound impersonal, like anyone could have written it?
­ Is my style repetitive? Do I use the same words or the same sentence structure repeatedly?
­ Have I avoided clichés (e.g. "Throughout time philosophers have argued...")?
 
 

Assignment: Assess the following argument:
(a) in every voluntary act the agent acts on his or her own motive.
(b) All motives aim at the attainment of some good.
(c) In every voluntary act, therefore, the agent aims at the attainment of his or her own good.
(d) An act in which one aims at the attainment of oneís own good is a selfish act.
Therefore, every voluntary act is selfish.

Bad Paper Example

Since the beginning of time, man has searched for the answers to the most deep philosophical questions. One deep question is the nature of selfishness and human motives. Many philosophers have asked, "Is every voluntary act selfish?" Some have even given arguments for this conclusion. One argument is the one given in our paper assignment. But this argument is false and wrong. It can never work because the premises are false.

I believe that not all people are selfish. People often do good things and are caring for one another. My parents raised me to be caring and taught me the difference between right and wrong. One thing which I learned is right is that people should not be selfish. People have the capacity to help each other and helping is always unselfish. If people were selfish, how could we live together as we do in harmony with people doing such good things for each other? Humans were not made to always be selfish! I believe that the argument is wrong. Because of the reasons I have stated.

The premises must be false in this argument since the argument is wrong. Also, premise (b) is faulty. The dictionary tells us that a motive is "An impulse, as an emotion, desire, or psychological need, acting as incitement to action." Nowhere here does he say that motives aim at the attainment of some good. Why would someone think that? It is ludicrous and crazy, and shows that probably the author is selfish.

I believe that people are good and I believe that people are unselfish. As we walk through life, we cannot be convinced of these untruths, or let them sway us. A person will always be good, and will not submit to the temptations of their desires, which are to satisfy their own needs.

Good Paper Example

The purpose of this paper is to show that the argument for the thesis, "every voluntary act is selfish," is unsound. The paper is divided into two main parts. First, I will show that the argument is invalid. Second, I will examine the truth of premise (d).

Let us begin by asking whether (c) really follows validly from (a) and (b). From these two premises it is reasonable to conclude that any voluntary action attains to some good. Specifically, if in every voluntary act the agent acts on her own motive, and all motives aim at attaining some good, then every voluntary act aims at attaining some good. But notice that premise (c) in the argument is not the same as the conclusion we have just inferred. Premise (c) states: every voluntary act is an act such that it aims at the attainment of the agentís own good. But this proposition does not follow from premises (a) and (b). It is too specific. The good that is aimed at when an agent acts is not necessarily the agentís own good. Another way of putting this is as follows. It might be true both that in acting voluntarily, I have a motive, and that my motive necessarily aims at the attainment of some good. But it could, at the same time, be false that my action aims at the attainment of my own good. It could aim at the attainment of someone elseís good. Thus, the argument is invalid.

Next, I will focus on the truth of premise (d). This premise is a poor definition of what it is to be selfish. Let me explain how. Although it is true that aiming towards the attainment of oneís own good is a necessary condition of being selfish, it is not sufficient. In other words, in order for an action to be selfish, the agent must be aiming at her own good. But that alone is not enough to make an action selfish. A selfish act is an act where one attains her good at the expense of another personís good. For example, beating up oneís Philosophy instructor for a decent grade is selfish. On the other hand, a catnap under an olive tree is an action that attains to the agentís good without significant loss to anotherís. The catnap satisfies the definition of a selfish act given in (d), but we cannot correctly consider that action to be selfish. Therefore, premise (d) is false.

In conclusion, we have seen that the argument for the proposition "every voluntary act is selfish" is neither valid nor has all true premises. For both these reasons, therefore, this argument is not sound.

Adapted from Scott Hendricks (Clark University) and Scott Labarge (University of Santa Clara).