WritePhilosophy
25 pieces tagged WritePhilosophy.
A new WritePhilosophy.com
A new version of WritePhilosophy.com is launching today. WritePhilosophy is a resource for students and teachers of philosophy, built on guides, articles and quizzes which help to immerse students in the concepts, language and principles of philosophical writing.
Philosophical Arguments (WritePhilosophy Guide)
A philosophy paper consists of an argument for a thesis. The quality of your paper will be judged primarily on how well your argument supports your thesis. But what is a thesis? How specific should it be? How do we construct arguments, breaking them down into a series of premises and a conclusion? What makes an argument persuasive?
Validity and Soundness (WritePhilosophy Guide)
We laid out two criteria for a persuasive argument: that the conclusion follows from the premises, and that the premises are all true. But what does it mean for a conclusion to "follow from" the premises? In deductive inference, we want to know whether an argument is valid and whether it is sound. What do these terms mean and how are they used?
Abstracts and Introductions (WritePhilosophy Guide)
Where to start? Writing an introduction or abstract for your philosophy paper can be daunting - and with good reason. The first paragraph of your paper is also the most important. But how do you write a good introduction? What should you include and what must you leave out? And how can writing an introduction help you to structure your paper?
Reading Effectively (WritePhilosophy Guide)
It sounds odd to say that you don’t know how to read academic papers. You start at the beginning, keep reading until the end—right? But the problem of being unable to cope with academic reading is probably the most common complaint amongst students at all levels. The truth is that reading for academic purposes is just not the same as other kinds of reading. You have to read actively, selectively and purposefully.
Analysing an Argument (WritePhilosophy Guide)
How can we read complex papers to extract the philosophical argument? What is the Principle of Charity? Reading philosophical texts can be challenging. Extracting the thesis and rendering the argument into premises-and-conclusion form is a great way to understanding the author's reasoning.
Structure (WritePhilosophy Guide)
"Poorly structured" and "unstructured" are very common criticisms in feedback on essays. But what does that mean, and how should you respond? Not all structures are created equal. This guide reviews six common essay structures to help you create a stronger structure for your paper.
Using Literature (WritePhilosophy Guide)
How many sources should a philosophy paper use? How do you cite these works and avoid accusations of plagiarism? How do you present other philosophers' ideas and arguments in your paper? Should you include quotations? These are very common questions which students face. Let's look at the ways you should and should not use literature in your essays.
Conceptual Analysis (WritePhilosophy Guide)
Philosophers perform conceptual analysis to understanding the meaning of terms from 'death' to 'love', 'good' to 'evil' and 'science' to 'art'. How do we evaluate conceptual analyses? What are necessary and sufficient conditions? What makes a conceptual analysis too strong or too weak?
Distinctions (WritePhilosophy Guide)
Philosophers often draw distinctions, dividing things into categories. How do we evaluate distinctions? What is a 'proper distinction'? What makes a distinction exhaustive or mutually exclusive? And what does this have to do with suckling pigs and mermaids?
Criticising an argument: Reductio & Dilemmas
Two powerful ways of criticising a philosophical position, reductio ad absurdum and dilemmas, and how to respond when they are used against your own view.
Counterexamples (WritePhilosophy Guide)
Some of the most powerful philosophical criticisms provide a counterexample to a claim. But how do we formulate counterexamples? And if there is a counterexample to a claim you want to defend or an argument you want to make, how should you proceed? We'll look at Gettier's famous counterexamples to find out.
Fallacies (WritePhilosophy Guide)
A fallacy is a mistake or error in reasoning. Fallacies can be accidental errors, or can be deliberately crafted to be misleading. Many different types of fallacy have been described across many fields. Understanding fallacies is useful for philosophers to identify fallacious reasoning in arguments which we are criticising, and to avoid committing them in our own work.
Formalising Arguments (WritePhilosophy Guide)
Formalising arguments allows us to look at the underlying logical form of the premises and conclusions. We can use this tool to determine the validity of the argument. How do we find the logical form of a proposition? This guide introduces the basics of propositional logic.
Truth Tables (WritePhilosophy Guide)
Truth Tables are a useful tool for analysing propositions and arguments alike. They allow us to give precise definitions for our logical connectives. They also allow us to show systematically that a proposition is a tautology or contradiction, and to prove that an argument is valid or invalid. How do we create truth tables?
Logical Equivalence (WritePhilosophy Guide)
What does it mean for two propositions to be logically equivalent? When can we swap out a proposition for another? Using the method of Truth Tables, we can formalise a way to discover whether two propositions are logically equivalent, and deploy this method to transform our claims into the most useful form to deploy them in arguments.
Editing (WritePhilosophy Guide)
How do we draft, edit and proofread philosophical papers to ensure that what we're turning in is high-quality? What's the difference between a Zero Draft, a First Draft and a Final Draft? This guide article gives you a range of tools, tests and techniques to improve your paper immeasurably through editing and proofreading.
Banned Words (WritePhilosophy Guide)
You can improve your philosophical writing by removing certain words and phrases. Some phrases weaken your papers by introducing vagueness and ambiguity, by wasting words, or by acting as a crutch to prevent you saying what you really need to say. Here we've compiled a list of "banned" words and phrases. By banning yourself from using these, you can improve your philosophical style.
Areas of Philosophy (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Can you tell epistemology from metaphysics? Aesthetics from ethics? We have created this quiz to test your understanding of the terms for different fields or areas of philosophy.
Fallacies Quiz (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Can you tell your ad hominem from your Eminem? Pick out a straw man from amongst the scarecrows? We created this quiz to test your understanding of the argumentative fallacies from the Fallacies guide.
Paradoxes Quiz (Write Philosophy Quiz)
Do you know your liar paradox from your Ship of Theseus? Can you tell a Catch 22 from an Unexpected Hanging? This WritePhilosophy.com quiz will test your paradox identification skills.
Logical Validity (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Can you tell a valid argument from an invalid one? This quiz will allow you to practice identifying valid arguments. If you struggle with the quiz, go back and check out the 'Validity and Soundness' guide article.
Logic: Basic Propositions (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Test your skills at formalising arguments by trying your hand at this quiz. Can you identify which sentences have which basic propositional forms?
Logic: Compound Propositions (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
This quiz will test your ability to formalise more complex sentences into propositional form. You should try this after you're confident in formalising basic propositions.
Festive Fallacies: When the snowman brings the snow
When the nights are long and the days short, there is some solace in the familiarity of classic Christmas songs. But stuffed with pigs-in-blankets and addled on mulled wine, festive pop lyricists seem particularly prone to fallacy. What better way, then, to teach errors in reasoning than to dissect these Xmas classics? Humbug!