philosophical writing is different from the writing you'll be asked to do in other courses. Most of the strategies described below will also serve you well when writing for other courses, but don't automatically assume that they all will. Nor should you assume that every writing guideline you've been given by other teachers is important when you're writing a philosophy paper.

what does one do in a philosophy paper?

a philosophy paper consists of the reasoned defense of some claim your paper must offer an argument. It can't consist in the mere report of your opinions, nor in a mere report of the opinions of the philosophers we discuss. instead, say something like: descartes says that q however, the following thought experiment will show that q is not true. You'll usually begin by putting some thesis or argument on the table for consideration. For instance, should we accept the thesis? should we reject it? or should we conclude that we don't yet have enough information to decide whether the thesis is true or false? no matter which of these aims you set for yourself, you have to explicitly present reasons for the claims you make. You should try to provide reasons for these claims that might convince someone who doesn't already accept them. a good philosophy paper is modest and makes a small point but it makes that point clearly and straightforwardly, and it offers good reasons in support of it people very often attempt to accomplish too much in a philosophy paper. The usual result of this is a paper that's hard to read, and which is full of inadequately defended and poorly explained claims. Originality the aim of these papers is for you to display familiarity with the material and an ability to think critically about it. Don't be disappointed if you don't make an utterly distinctive contribution to human thought in your first attempts at philosophical writing. An ideal paper will be clear and straightforward see below , will be accurate when it attributes views to other philosophers see below , and will contain thoughtful critical responses to the texts we read. If you do want to demonstrate independent thought, don't think you have to do it by coming up with a novel argument. You can also demonstrate independent thought by offering new examples of familiar points, or new counter examples, or new analogies. You're just trying to present a claim and some reasons to believe it or disbelieve it, as straightforwardly as possible. make an outline before you begin to write, you need to think about the questions: in what order should you explain the various terms and positions you'll be discussing? at what point should you present your opponent's position or argument? in what order should you offer your criticisms of your opponent? do any of the points you're making presuppose that you've already discussed some other point, first? and so on. That is why it is important to think about these questions before you begin to write. I strongly recommend that you make an outline of your paper, and of the arguments you'll be presenting, before you begin to write. This lets you organize the points you want to make in your paper and get a sense for how they are going to fit together. Extended Essay Ib English B For instance, you want to be able to say what your main argument or criticism is before you write. If you get stuck writing, it's probably because you don't yet know what you're trying to say. I find that making an outline is at least 80% of the work of writing a good philosophy paper. If you have a good outline, the rest of the writing process will go much more smoothly. make the structure of your paper clear you should make the structure of your paper obvious to the reader. How can you do this? what you need to do is to make it clear what sort of move you're making at each point in your paper. Hence, we should reject x's claim that p. you can't make the structure of your paper obvious if you don't know what the structure of your paper is, or if your paper has no structure.