September 23, 2024
Stating and defending our opinions comes pretty naturally to us, as social creatures who talk. But writing a philosophy essay does not come naturally to anyone. The reason is simple. In a conversation, you can respond interactively to your partner. When someone doesn’t understand what you say, you can explain it differently or more thoroughly. Or you can illustrate with an example. Or you can relate it to something that you know they already understand. And so on. But an essay isn’t interactive. You can’t respond to your reader. Instead, you have to anticipate what reactions they might have. That’s a completely separate skill.
This guide gives you a framework for writing philosophy essays.
Introduce your topic and your claim about that topic. Make it interesting!
Set the stage. Explain any background concepts or claims that the reader has to understand in order to understand your claim.
Reason towards your claim. Explain your thinking. The more you can break it down into steps, the better.
Anticipate, and respond to, an objection that someone might have.
Briefly summarize what’s been done.
You want to introduce a topic and your claim about that topic. That claim is called your thesis. (Ask yourself: do I actually have a thesis? Or is there just a topic that I’m interested in? “Having a topic” isn’t enough. You need to have something to say about that topic.) Do not waste time giving historical background, or stating generalities about philosophy. You need to focus solely on your topic and your claim about that topic. Your job in the introduction is to introduce these in such a way as to make them interesting.
Now you might ask, What should my thesis be? This would be a good time to look at the Pink Guide’s page on this and do Step 1 first, then Step 2, and so on. But there is one additional point that I want to make. I want to warn you against making the most common mistake, which is to choose a thesis that is much too sweeping or broad. (“Here is what I think about physicalism,” or “Here is why I disagree with Frege’s philosophy,” or “This is my view of what knowledge is” is the kind of thing I mean.) Your thesis should be a specific point that is itself about a specific point that arises from the readings we have done. Doing philosophy is not so much responding to this or that overall view, but responding to this or that specific move that someone makes as part of an overall view.
Explain whatever important concepts or terminology will be required in order to understand what the topic is. In some cases this takes a while, in other cases it doesn’t. Imagine you started talking with someone on a bus about your essay—how would you bring them up to speed on its topic, so that they’re ready to hear your line on it?
The nature of your stage-setting depends on the kind of point you’re going to make. If you’re taking a position in some debate, explain how that debate arises. Or if you’re going to defend some view against an objection that has been made to it, explain what that view is and what that objection is.
You state your claim. Do your best to come up with a way to state it in one sentence. (Polishing this one sentence may take some time but it is time very well spent.) Follow that sentence with whatever elaborations or illustrations help to get its point across more fully. If possible, use an example to illustrate your claim.
Here you want to explain the thinking that leads to your claim. You’re trying to be as explicit as possible, so it helps to make liberal use of words and phrases that indicate steps in your thinking.
This is the hardest part of the essay and is often what separates the B from the A specimens. The reason is that there’s a temptation to take the easy route, which is to describe a stupid objection and then make the easy reply to it. That will definitely not impress your reader. What will impress your reader is you describing an objection that looks pretty good, and then explaining why that initially plausible objection is mistaken.
The better the objection is, the more impressive it is when you explain why it fails.
The tone you want here is that of a teacher patiently explaining something to an intelligent student who has fallen into an understandable error. (In a longer essay, for a third- or fourth-year course, you would consider multiple objections.)
There is no fixed format or structure for this. It depends on what the objection and reply are. If the objection rests on a misunderstanding of your claim, for example, your reply would be to clear up that misunderstanding. Or if the objection rests on an assumption that you reject, your reply would be to explain how it does that, and explain why you reject that assumption. Or if the objection involves fallacious reasoning, your reply would involve making the error explicit by giving a parallel, and obviously flawed, example of that same pattern of reasoning.
This will be brief. (For a short essay, a sentence or two.) Just remind the reader what they’ve learned. Maybe indicate some other question in the neighbourhood, again to heighten the reader’s interest in the topic.
Philosophers are typically less picky on this than professors in other departments, but I do require:
page numbers
long quotations block-formatted rather than inline
parenthetical citations for quoted or cited works
After the end of your essay, a list of the works that you parenthetically cited. Title it “Works cited.” See the link to the Turabian author-date system (below).
If your essay is long—say, more than 8 or 10 pages—then it’s a good idea to have numbered sections with subtitles.
A paragraph introduces and develops a single line of thought. You should not change topic within a paragraph. Ideally its first sentence should announce its topic. People often call the first sentence of a paragraph the “topic sentence.”
An exception to this is the navigational aid paragraph which tells the reader where they are in the overall structure.
Leaving these out can easily result in your reader being confused or lost. You don’t want to make a brilliant point only to have your reader wonder what it has to do with the other parts of your essay.
Especially in philosophy essays, it’s very important to keep score on who’s saying what. For example, you might find yourself discussing John Stuart Mill’s discussion of what he thinks is an unsuccessful reply to an objection to his ethical theory. Who would the players be?
Mill (who asserts his theory)
the (perhaps unnamed) objector
the (perhaps hypothetical) defender of Mill’s theory (not Mill himself!)
Mill, again (who thinks that the defender’s reply on his behalf fails)
you (the author of the essay that surveys all this and makes some point of your own about it)
That’s a lot to keep track of. Be sure to make the roles of the various claims that occur in your paper clear to the reader.
Awkwardly structured sentences are difficult to understand. Do justice to your brilliant thoughts by expressing them clearly. Short is usually best. Craft your sentences over and over to achieve clarity and concision.
You’ve written something like, “It is considered unjust to violate someone’s privacy” or “Aristotle’s argument is not deemed conclusive.” The reader is made to ask, Considered by whom? Deemed by whom? Say who you’re talking about.
This is something that has the grammatical form of a question but isn’t sincerely asking anything: it’s meant more as a way to express your assumption that the reader will agree with how you would answer it.
One problem with rhetorical questions is that your reader might not agree with you. (Lee Kuan Yew, for example, famously argued that only economically advanced countries, with stable civic societies, are suitable for Western-style democracy.) But even if the reader does agree with you, it’s more respectful not to use a rhetorical device as a way of telling them that you’re just going to assume that they do.
A common pitfall in a philosophy paper is to use fancy-sounding vocabulary unnecessarily because it “sounds smart.” Stray from common English only when needed, and either explain or cite usage of any technical or otherwise uncommon vocabulary you find you need to use.
It’s completely fine to use the word “I” to refer to yourself, as in the example just given. In some academic disciplines this is not allowed, but we’re fine with it in Philosophy.
The Pink Guide is a great resource that covers several aspects of taking philosophy courses. (The link is to the page about essay-writing.)
Professor James Pryor of New York University has written Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper. Some of what he says may surprise or annoy you. But all of it is true and useful.
Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is a standard reference, but it is much more comprehensive than you would need. The Chicago Manual of Style has an extremely useful summary of the Turabian author-date system.