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1,000-Word Philosophy: Philosophy for Everyone

“Professional philosophy can seem abstract, esoteric, and hyper-specialized. But we all ask and try to answer philosophical questions myriad times daily: philosophy is the purview not just of the expert, but of all thoughtful people. 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology is an open-access journal of philosophy. Its essays are introductions rather than argumentative articles. Its intended audience is the general reader and students in philosophy, and philosophical, courses. Our goal in writing and sharing these essays is to provide high-quality introductions to great philosophical questions and debates. We hope that philosophers and non-philosophers alike will benefit from perusing these essays.”

About 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Today we will interview the editors of 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology ( 1000WordPhilosophy.com ), an open-access project dedicated to providing excellent introductions to philosophical issues that are ideal for students and public philosophy purposes.

APA blog : How did 1000-Word Philosophy start?

Andrew Chapman started 1000-Word Philosophy while he was a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Grad students find themselves teaching a lot of topics that they’ve never taught before, and so grad students with different specialities often ask one another for a 5-minute refresher course on a specific topic. He noticed how adept his colleagues were at coming up with these amazing summaries of complicated issues off of the tops of their heads and thought that it would be tremendously helpful—for other philosophers and for nonphilosophers—if these summaries were collected and shared somewhere. And thus 1000-Word Philosophy was born.

The specific number of words, 1000, was intended to correspond with about 5 minutes of reading time, although it’s also just a nice, round number. It became apparent though that 1000 words was around the number needed to do a thorough but not overly technical or overly specific job at introducing a topic. And 1000 words is the perfect length for an essay that introduces undergraduates who otherwise would struggle with a long essay to material that is graspable in a much shorter format. That was a serendipitous development!

APA blog : What areas of philosophy do you publish essays in?

We currently have over 80 essays published in 17 categories, and we add more categories when we publish new essays in new areas. We’ve recently added the categories of Philosophy of Race , Philosophy of Education , Buddhist Philosophy , Chinese Philosophy , and Logic and Reasoning .

For a long time we’ve had the categories of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art , Ethics , Epistemology , Historical Philosophy , Metaphilosophy , Metaphysics , Phenomenology and Existentialism , Philosophy of Mind and Language , Philosophy of Religion , Philosophy of Science , Philosophy of Sex and Gender , and Social and Political Philosophy.

Some essays are placed in multiple categories. The Ethics and Philosophy of Religion categories have the most essays.

APA blog :Who reads these essays?

Philosophy instructors, students and general readers from around the globe. We get the most views first from the US, then the UK, Canada, India, the Philippines, and then European and African countries.

Many philosophy instructors use our essays in classes: they often mention that when they contact us about submitting an essay. The accessibility level of the essays ensure that teachers can easily generate discussion, and their length means that students can read about an important topic without being overwhelmed.

From contact we’ve had with general readers, it seems that some of them have less access to formal higher education or are autodidacts. They are just interested in learning more about philosophy and appreciate finding these introductory essays.

The essays are also useful for supplemental readings, beyond the main texts for a class. So they work great for background readings, “if you want to learn more”-type readings (especially since they have suggestions for further readings in them) and readings for when class discussion goes on tangents to interesting, but unexpected, topics.

APA blog : What are some of the most popular essays?

One measure of popularly is number of views. The essay “ Karl Marx’s Conception of Alienation ” has around 70,000 views. The essay on abortion has around 35,000 views. Some of the earlier essays have tens of thousands of views.

The recent essays that address issues about race and gender have been especially particular popular, in terms of shares and discussion on Twitter and Facebook . The essay on Mary Astell , an early modern woman philosopher, was posted just a few months ago and was (and remains) especially popular.

APA blog : Who can contribute?

Nearly all of our essays are by philosophy professors or advanced graduate students in philosophy. People typically are able to develop essays packed with philosophical content, presented in a manner readily understood by nearly anyone, only if they have had significant teaching experience involving dialogue with students. That interaction allows for a better sense for how non-experts often see and understand issues and so allows an author to write effectively for that audience.

APA blog : How are the essays reviewed?

The essays are all reviewed by the editors, all of whom have contributed multiple essays to the anthology and have taken an interest in its growth and success. The essays are also often evaluated by outsider reviewers.

Feedback ranges from concerns about “the big picture” of the essay and its goals and organizations to the extreme details of each word choice: with a 1000 word limit, each word has to count: there’s no room for anything distracting or not necessary for the purposes of the essay.

We do the reviewing and editing using Google docs, which allows for real-time discussion (and debate, sometimes) on what would improve the essay. We hope that this scrutiny from so many different “eyes” results in essays that are really strong introductions to the topics for our intended audience.

APA blog : What’s rewarding about this project?

It’s rewarding to help an author develop an essay that is incredibly clear, concise, direct and vivid, so it is very easy to read and understand for anyone, including students and general readers. This format results in essays that, we hope, have a certain kind of beauty, in being so clear and direct.

It’s also a great pleasure to teach using these essays, since students are really able to understand them and access the ideas and arguments much more quickly and easily, compared to many traditional readings.

For example, one of us recently taught Descartes’ Meditations using Marc Bobro’s pair of essays ; we read them out loud in class, meditating along with Descartes and discussing along the way. In the end, students were much more able to explain the overall argument of the Meditations, compared to when this activity was done with traditional translations. For students who are overwhelmed by longer, more complex readings, this format really helps.

APA blog : What is challenging about this project?

While we get many submissions, it is a “challenge” that we don’t get more submissions. There are many skilled philosophers who could contribute expertly-done essays on important and interesting topics, especially in areas where there are few introductory-level writings on the topics. We can hope that many of them haven’t contributed only because they are unaware of the anthology. Now more of them are aware!

APA blog : What are the current goals for the anthology?

We are working to diversify the set of essays, in many ways, and diversifying the team of people working on the project. We are seeking more essays by women and philosophers of color, on any and all topics. And we are seeking essays that introduce important areas and issues in philosophy that have been underrepresented.

For example, there are calls for including “global philosophy” in courses or “diversifying the canon.” We suspect that a lot of instructors would really like to do that, but really don’t know where to begin. So we hope to publish excellent introductions to unfamiliar traditions that instructors can use to “get their feet wet,” which would then lead to learning about and teaching (and researching) more advanced sources. We have made some progress with this – with essays on Chinese ethics and political philosophy and Buddhism – but this is just a start and so much more is needed.

Although this is a globally-accessible project, it is US-based, and so we are also very interested in essays that address unique philosophical issues of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in America, such as African-American philosophy and Native-American philosophy, among other traditions.

Finally, we have a good foundation in many “traditional” areas of philosophy, historical and contemporary, but there are still many essays needed to really fill that in. To use the page for an introductory philosophy or ethics course, we have a lot of what someone would want to use, but not everything. We are working on identifying what’s essential for that teaching purpose, but missing, and getting those essays commissioned.

APA blog : What are the future goals for the anthology?

We will always keep the material online and freely (and globally) accessible to all, but we also want to have the materials available in low-cost print book or books.

We would also like to do some technical upgrades so the webpage and essays are found by more people who are looking for this type of material. There is high demand for “public philosophy” and great introductory materials, and we need to do more so people who are seeking will find our essays and authors. If anyone can help us with any of our goals, we’d appreciate it!

Editorial Board for 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology :

Founder, Editor: Andrew D. Chapman, University of Colorado, Boulder

Editor: Shane Gronholz, Gonzaga University, Washington

Editor: Chelsea Haramia, Spring Hill College, Alabama

Editor: Dan Lowe, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Editor: Thomas Metcalf, Spring Hill College, Alabama

Editor-in-Chief: Nathan Nobis, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia

1000 Word Philosophy
Editor: Nathan Oseroff
public philosophy
teaching philosophy

A new journal survey: the pjip operations survey, should we continue to read and honor immoral historical philosophers, treading water, or self-care and success as a graduate student, i don’t read enough, the ancient practice of rest days, finding meaning in moving: my experiences as an aussie grad student.

[…] Nathan Nobis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College. He is also Editor-in-Chief of 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. […]

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A Guide to Writing Philosophy Papers

In some respects, writing an undergraduate-level philosophy paper is not unlike writing an undergraduate-level paper in any of the other humanities or social sciences. In fact, one could argue that philosophical writing should act as a model for writing in other disciplines. This is because one of the central aims of western philosophy, since its inception in Ancient Greece, almost two and a half millennia ago, has been to lay bare the structure of all forms of argument, and most undergraduate writing, in any subject, requires the use of argument to defend claims. However, there are also important differences between the writing styles appropriate to philosophical papers and papers in other subjects. Most notably, philosophy papers usually focus more on logical structure than on content: the point is not to synopsize exhaustive literature reviews, but, rather, to focus as much as possible on relatively narrow sets of claims, and investigate their logical inter-relations. Philosophers are less interested in exhaustive cataloging of the latest information on a topic, than in the relations of logical, argumentative support that well-established claims bear to each other, and to certain enduring, controversial claims, like the claim that God exists.

In the following, I provide a four-part guide to writing an undergraduate-level philosophy paper. First, I explain what philosophical arguments are, and how they can be evaluated. The point of any philosophy paper is to formulate and/or evaluate philosophical arguments, so this brief, rudimentary discussion is essential as a starting point. Second, I explain the structure and style appropriate for a philosophy paper. Third, I give students some ideas about how to choose a topic and formulate a writing plan appropriate to a philosophy paper. Fourth, and finally, I provide a short primer on logic, which can help students formulate and evaluate philosophical arguments.

Before proceeding, let me remark about the scope of this guide. Although it is intended as a guide to writing philosophy papers for any philosophy WID class, many philosophy instructors would disagree with at least some part of what follows. Western philosophy has been dominated by two divergent traditions for the last two hundred years or so: the “continental” tradition and the “analytic” or “Anglo-American” tradition. The former is associated primarily with philosophers from continental Europe, especially Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault. The latter is associated primarily with philosophers who worked in the UK and the US (though many of its most prominent representatives are German natives). Frege, Russell, Carnap, Austin, Grice, Strawson, and Quine, are among the most famous figures associated with this tradition. Although it is difficult to briefly characterize the difference between these two traditions, roughly speaking, while the analytic tradition takes logic, mathematics, and science as models for doing philosophy, the continental tradition is more literary and impressionistic in its approach to philosophical problems. I am trained in the analytic tradition, and the following writing guidelines reflect this. Thus, before using this as a guide to your philosophical writing, make sure that your class and instructor are in the analytic tradition. Although much of the advice I offer below is, I hope, relevant to classes in the continental tradition, it might also seriously misrepresent philosophical writing as understood from the continental perspective.

Even within the analytic tradition, there can be substantive disagreements about student writing. For example, a colleague who works in the analytic tradition read an earlier draft of this guide and was, for the most part, impressed; however, he disagreed with my view that external sources are better paraphrased than directly cited. Although I think most instructors working in the analytic tradition would agree with most of the guidelines I provide below, you should have your instructor skim them to make sure that he or she does not take exception to any of them. As a guide to an initial, rough, paper draft, the following is, I think, an invaluable resource. Subsequent drafts should incorporate specific comments from the instructor whose class you are taking.

1. Philosophical Arguments

Understanding Arguments

The point of a philosophical paper is to make and evaluate philosophical arguments. ‘Argument’ is a term of art in philosophy. It means more than a mere dispute. An argument, as philosophers use this term, is a set of claims, that is, a set of declarative sentences (sentences which can be true or false). One of the claims is the conclusion of the argument: that which the argument attempts to prove. The other claims are the premises of the argument: the reasons that are given in support of the conclusion. The conclusion is a relatively controversial claim that the author aims to establish on the basis of relatively uncontroversial premises. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval philosopher and theologian, famously provides five ways to prove the existence of God. The conclusion of Aquinas’s arguments is that God exists – a controversial claim. He tries to establish this conclusion on the basis of less controversial premises, e.g., that objects are in motion, that anything in motion must have been put in motion by a different thing already in motion, and that this chain of causes must begin at some point.

Because the construction and evaluation of arguments is the point of a philosophy paper, clarity, precision, and organization are of paramount importance. One cannot determine whether or not some set of premises supports a conclusion unless both premises and conclusion are formulated clearly and precisely. For example, consider the following argument: “Laws can be repealed by the legislature. Gravity is a law. Therefore, gravity can be repealed by the legislature.” On one level, this argument appears to make sense: it appears to have the same form as many sound arguments, like, “Beverages can be warmed in the microwave. Tea is a beverage. Therefore, tea can be warmed in the microwave.” However, there is obviously something wrong with the first argument. The problem is that the world “law” is used in two different senses: in the first premise and the conclusion, it means roughly the same as “social rule enacted by political means”, while in the second premise, it means roughly the same as “natural law”. Because the word “law”, as it is used in the second premise, means something entirely different from its use in the conclusion, the premise is of no relevance to the conclusion, and so, provides no logical support for it. This shows why it is so important to be as precise and clear as possible in philosophical writing. Words often mean different things in different contexts, and, unless their meaning is made as clear and precise as possible, it is impossible to tell whether or not the claims words are used to formulate support each other.

Organization is important to make clear the complex logical relations that different claims bear to each other. Consider Aquinas’s First Way to prove the existence of God, to which I allude above. The conclusion is that God exists. The premises are that objects are in motion, that objects can be put in motion only by other objects already in motion, that there is a chain of causes extending into the past, and that if this chain of causes were infinite then there would be no motion. But how, exactly, do these premises conspire to establish the conclusion that God exists? The key to answering this question is appreciating the structure or organization of the argument. The structure of philosophical arguments can often be captured in a kind of flow-chart diagram. Each ‘node’ is a claim (premise or conclusion), and links between nodes represent logical support. So, for example, in Aquinas’s First Way, the node which represents the premise that objects are in motion does not link directly to the node which represents the conclusion: how can the claim that objects are in motion, alone, give sufficient logical support for the claim that God exists? After all, atheists acknowledge that objects are in motion, yet deny that God exists.

The structure of Aquinas’s First Way to prove the existence of God is approximated in the following diagram.

Note that the claim that objects are in motion (premise 1) must be joined with the claim that objects in motion are put in motion by other objects already in motion (premise 2), in order to support the claim that there is a causal chain of objects in motion extending into the past (premise 3), which constitutes the “sub-conclusion” of this “sub-argument”. Premise 3 must then be joined with premise 5 – the claim that this causal chain begins at some point – in order to support the claim that there is a first cause responsible for all the motion in the world, identified by Aquinas as God (premise 6). But premise 5 is not obvious on its own. It needs support from still other premises. For example, Aquinas claims that if there were no start to this chain of causes, none of the subsequent causes would occur (premise 4). Together with premise 1, premise 4 then supports premise 5, which, together with premises 3 and 6, supports the claim that there must be a first cause, namely, God (C). So premise 5 is another “sub-conclusion” of a “sub-argument”, which supports the ultimate conclusion (C).

The lesson from this example is that different claims have complicated relations of support to each other. Some premises support the conclusion only when conjoined with other premises. And other premises are like “sub-conclusions”, which must be supported by still other premises in “sub-arguments”, before they can be used to help establish the ultimate conclusion. Since the goal of writing an undergraduate philosophy paper is to formulate and evaluate arguments, organization is crucial. The author must make clear for the reader not just what the different premises and conclusions claim, but, also, how they relate to each other, that is, in what way they support each other.

Evaluating Arguments

There are only two ways that any argument can go wrong. An argument is good when its premises count as good reasons for its conclusion. What makes a premise a good reason for a conclusion? First, the premise must be true, or at least more plausible than the conclusion. For example, suppose I argue for the conclusion that Washington DC is likely the next home of the Stanley Cup champions on the basis of the following premises: the Bruins are likely the next Stanley Cup Champions, and they are based in Washington DC. This argument fails because at least one of its premises is false: the Bruins are based in Boston, not Washington DC. However, sometimes even true premises fail to qualify as good reasons for a conclusion. For example, suppose I argue for the conclusion that Washington DC is likely the next home of the Stanley Cup champions on the basis of the following premises: the Redskins are likely the next Superbowl Champions, and they are based in Washington DC. Here, the latter premise is true, and the previous premise may very well be true. However, the argument is still bad. The reason is that, even if these premises are true, they do not support the conclusion. The claims that the Redskins are likely the next Superbowl Champions and that the Redskins are based in Washington DC, are irrelevant to the conclusion: the claim that Washington DC is likely the next home of the Stanley Cup champions. So, there are two ways any argument can go wrong: either the premises it offers in support of its conclusion are false or implausible, or, even if they are true, they fail to support the conclusion because, for example, they are irrelevant to the conclusion.

Any philosophical writer must constantly keep these two potential pitfalls of argumentation in mind, both in formulating her own arguments and in evaluating the arguments of others. Undergraduate philosophy papers are often devoted exclusively to evaluating the arguments of well-known philosophers. Such critical papers must be guided by four basic questions: (1) What, precisely, do the premises and conclusion claim? (2) How, precisely, are the premises supposed to support the conclusion, i.e., what is the organization/structure of the argument? (3) Are the premises true/plausible? (4) Do the premises provide adequate support for the conclusion? Note that philosophical critiques of arguments seldom attack the conclusion directly. Rather, the conclusion is undermined by showing the premises to be false or implausible, or by showing that the premises, even if true, do not provide adequate support for the conclusion. Conclusions are attacked directly only on the grounds of imprecision or lack of clarity.

Despite the fact that arguments can be criticized on the grounds that their premises are false or implausible, most philosophical writing is focused not on determining the truth of premises, but, rather, on determining whether or not premises provide strong enough support for conclusions. There are three reasons for this. First, the most enduring philosophical arguments take as little for granted as possible: they rely on premises that are maximally uncontroversial – likely to be accepted by everyone – in order to prove conclusions that are controversial. Second, most philosophers have a strong background in logic. Logic is the science of argument: it aims to identify what all good arguments have in common and what all bad arguments have in common. But logic can be used only to evaluate the support that premises provide for a conclusion, never the truth or plausibility of the premises themselves. Any argument must take some claims as unargued starting points; otherwise, the argument could never get off the ground, as any premise would require a prior argument to be established. But logic can evaluate only arguments, so it cannot be used to evaluate the unargued starting premises with which any argument must begin. Third, the premises upon which many arguments depend often depend on observation, either in everyday life, or in specialized, scientific contexts such as experiments. But philosophers are not, for the most part, trained in experimental methodologies. They are trained in determining what follows logically from experimental results established in science or from common, everyday observations.

I discuss strategies for evaluating and formulating philosophical arguments in more detail below, in section 4. Now I turn to the structure and style appropriate for a philosophy paper.

2. Appropriate Structure and Style for a Philosophy Paper

Organizing the Paper

Although the philosophical canon includes a wide variety of styles and structures, including argumentative essays, axiomatically-organized systems of propositions, dialogs, confessions, meditations, historical narratives, and collections of aphorisms, most of these styles and structures are inappropriate for the novice, undergraduate, philosophical writer. Because the main concern of undergraduate philosophical writing is the formulation and evaluation of arguments, style and structure must be chosen with these goals in mind. As we have seen, precision, clarity, and organization are key to the understanding, formulation, and evaluation of arguments. If one’s language is not clear and precise, it is impossible to know what claims are being made, and therefore, impossible to determine their logical inter-relations. If one’s arguments are not clearly organized, it is difficult to determine how the different premises of an argument conspire to support its conclusion. As we saw above, with the example of Aquinas’ First Way to prove the existence of God, arguments are often composed of “sub-arguments” defending “sub-conclusions” that constitute premises in overall arguments. Unless such logical structure is perspicuously represented in a philosophy paper, the reader will lose track of the relevance that different claims bear to each other, and the paper will fail to enlighten the reader.

The best way to impose clarity and structure on a philosophy paper is to begin with a brief, clear, and concise introduction, outlining the organization of the rest of the paper. This introduction should be treated as a “map” of the rest of the paper that will prepare the reader for what is to follow. Alternatively, one may think of it as a “contract” with the reader: the author promises to discuss such and such related claims, in such and such an order. The introduction should make clear the logical inter-relations between the different claims that the paper will defend, and the order in which the claims will be discussed. With such an outline in hand, the writer can then organize the rest of the paper into numbered, sub-titled sub-sections, each devoted to the different parts of her argument, in the order outlined in the introduction. This helps maintain focus and clarity throughout the paper for the reader.

One of the greatest pitfalls in philosophical writing is distraction by tangential topics. Philosophical themes are extremely broad, and many of them are relevant to almost anything. So it is very tempting for a novice philosophical writer (and even for seasoned veterans) to stray from her original topic in the course of writing the paper. This throws the writer’s main goal – that of clearly articulating an argument capable of convincing a reader – into jeopardy; however, this danger can be avoided if the writer makes clear in the introduction exactly what components of a topic, and in what order, she intends to discuss and why, and then uses this to organize the rest of the paper. If the writer does this, readers should know exactly “where they are” in the overall argument, at any point in the paper, simply by noting the number and title of the sub-section they are reading, and referring to the introduction to understand its role in the paper’s overall argument.

A good introduction to a 10-page philosophy paper should take up no more than two-thirds of a page. It should accomplish three main objectives: (1) setting up the context for the paper, i.e., which philosophical debate or topic is the focus, (2) expressing the thesis of the paper, i.e., the conclusion it aims to defend, and (3) explaining, in broad terms, how the paper aims to defend this conclusion, i.e., what are the components of the argument, and in what order they will be discussed. The first objective, setting up the context, often requires reference to historically important philosophers known for defending claims related to the thesis of the paper. The components of the argument might include, first, an overview of how others have argued for or against the thesis, then a few sections on different assumptions made in these arguments, then a section in which the author provides her own argument for the thesis, and then a conclusion.

Consider the following example of an introduction to a paper about Aquinas’ First Way to prove the existence of God.

Aquinas, famously, provides five arguments for the existence of God. In the following, I focus on his First Way to prove the existence of God: the argument from motion. The claim that there can be no causal chains extending infinitely into the past plays a crucial role in this argument. In this paper, I argue against this claim, thereby undermining Aquinas’s First Way to prove the existence of God. First, I explain Aquinas’s argument, and the role that the claim about infinite causal chains plays in it. Second, I explain Aquinas’s defense of this claim. Third, I raise three objections to this defense. I conclude by drawing some broader lessons for the question of God’s existence.

Notice that, despite its brevity, this introduction is very specific and clear regarding what the author intends to accomplish in the paper. The thesis is stated clearly and concisely. Brief reference to Aquinas, his five proofs for the existence of God, and the specific proof on which the paper focuses provide necessary context. Specificity and clarity are aided further with the use of numbering. The reader knows to expect four sections following the introduction, and she knows exactly what each section will try to accomplish, and its role in the overall project of the paper. She knows to expect three objections to the argument that is the main target of the paper, in the third section after the introduction. And the writer can now easily structure the paper into five, numbered sub-sections (including the introduction), with appropriate titles, meant to periodically remind the reader of where she is in the overall argument.

When the writer starts with such a well-defined structure, it is relatively easy to avoid the pitfall of tangential distractions. Beginning with such an introduction is not meant to be unreasonably constraining. In the course of writing the paper, an author might revise her thinking about the topic, and be forced to reconceptualize the paper. She would then have to begin by revising the introduction, and, consequently, the organization of the paper. This is a natural part of paper revision. So, the introduction should not be treated as though it were written in stone. In early drafts, the introduction should serve as a provisional source of constraint for organizing one’s thoughts about the topic. As one’s thoughts evolve, the introduction can be rewritten, and the paper reorganized, to reflect this. But beginning with an introduction that specifies the organization of the paper in substantial detail serves as an important constraint on one’s writing and thinking, insuring that one’s topic is investigated systematically.

1. Plain Language for a Non-Specialist Audience: Much canonical philosophy is opaque and difficult to understand for the novice. A common reaction to this in undergraduate writing is the use of obscure “academic-sounding” language, of which students have only minimal mastery, in an attempt to sound intelligent and equal to the task of explaining and criticizing canonical philosophical arguments. This must be avoided at all costs. Good philosophy papers must employ clear, plain language, in short sentences and short, well-organized paragraphs. It is impossible to evaluate the cogency of arguments unless they are expressed in terms that are easily understood. Students must not assume that instructors know in what senses they intend esoteric, philosophical vocabulary, nor what lessons they have drawn from the sources they have been reading. Unless a student can express and defend claims using words with which they, and any educated layperson are familiar, it is doubtful that they fully understand these claims. Students should write for an imagined audience composed of family members, friends and acquaintances. They should use words that any educated, non-specialist would understand in order to explain the more opaque canonical arguments their papers discuss, and in order to formulate their own responses to these arguments. This attitude both insures that the language students use is clear and precise, and shows the instructor the degree to which students have understood the more opaque canonical arguments they discuss.

2. Illustration with Examples: One of the most important components of a good undergraduate philosophy paper is the copious use of concrete, everyday examples to illustrate abstract and sometimes obscure philosophical points. For example, the claim that a moving object must be put in motion by a different object already in motion is one of the key assumptions of Aquinas’s first argument for the existence of God. But this is a fairly abstract and potentially confusing way of expressing a familiar fact. Such abstract and potentially obscure means of expression are inevitable in philosophy because philosophers aim to defend maximally general conclusions: claims that are true in all circumstances, everywhere and always. In order to defend such general claims, familiar observations must be couched in the most general terms possible, and this often invites obscurity. Undergraduate philosophical writers must clarify such potentially confusing language by appeal to concrete, everyday examples.

For example, Aquinas’ claim about the causes of motion is actually a claim about the causes of any change in any object, including what we typically call “motion,” like a rolling ball, and other changes, like the rising temperature in a heated pan of water. A student should make this clear by illustrating Aquinas’s claim with such everyday examples. For example, one might write something like, “Aquinas claims that every moving or changing object is caused to move or change by a different object that is already in motion or changing. For example, a rolling ball is caused to move by a kick from a swinging foot, or a boiling pan of water is caused to boil by a flame giving off heat.” Such illustration of abstract philosophical principles with concrete, everyday examples serves two extremely important functions. First, it makes one’s exposition and evaluation of others’ arguments clear and tangible for the reader. Second, it shows one’s instructor that one has understood obscure yet crucial philosophical assumptions in one’s own terms.

3. The Principle of Charity: The point of any work of philosophy, from the most canonical treatise to the humblest undergraduate effort, is to determine which claims are supported by the best reasons. The point is not to persuade some particular audience of some claim using rhetoric. Philosophers always aim at identifying the best possible reasons to believe some claim. For this reason, when criticizing the arguments of others, philosophical writers should adhere to a principle of extreme charity. They should interpret arguments with which they disagree in the most favorable terms possible. Only then can they be sure that they have done their utmost to identify the truth of the matter. Criticism is inevitable in an undergraduate philosophy paper. In order to responsibly defend some conclusion, the student must give a thorough overview of what others have said about it, criticizing those with whom she disagrees. But students must bend over backwards to insure that these criticisms are fair. Since her goal is to arrive at the truth of the matter, a student author must not stack the deck against those with whom she disagrees. She must empathize with her antagonists; appreciating as deeply as possible the reasons why they disagree with the conclusion she defends. This puts the student author in a position to criticize those with whom she disagrees fairly and responsibly.

Consider, once more, Aquinas’s First Way to prove the existence of God. It is relatively easy to criticize this argument by appeal to modern physics. Aquinas assumes that every object in motion must have been put into motion by another object already in motion. But he was working with pre-Newtonian physics. According to post-Newtonian physics, an object can be in uniform motion without being acted upon by an outside force. So, technically, Aquinas’s premise is false. However, this is a nit-picky point that is unfair to Aquinas, and misses the spirit of his argument. Aquinas’s argument from motion can easily be rephrased as an argument from acceleration to make it compatible with post-Newtonian physics. Even if uniform motion does not require an external force, acceleration does, and once Aquinas’ premise is rephrased to respect this, the rest of the argument proceeds as before. Anyone seeking to criticize Aquinas’s argument is well served by considering the most charitable possible interpretation. If fatal flaws remain even after one has bent over backwards to accommodate Aquinas’s ignorance of later developments in physics, etc., one’s critique of his argument is more effective.

4. Self-Criticism: There is another implication of the philosopher’s commitment to discovering the claims that are supported by the best reasons, as opposed to just winning arguments. Works of philosophy must include self-criticism. The responsible philosophical author is always cognizant of potential pitfalls in her own arguments, and possible responses by antagonists she criticizes. In the course of criticizing an opposing view on some matter, a philosophical writer must always consider how her target might respond. In the course of defending some claim, a philosophical writer must always anticipate and respond to possible objections. Papers by professional philosophers often include whole sections devoted entirely to possible objections to the theses they defend. It is a good idea for undergraduate philosophical writers to follow this example: often, it is useful for the penultimate section of a paper to address possible criticisms of or responses to the arguments provided earlier in the paper. Not only does this constitute a fair and responsible way of writing philosophy, it helps the student think about her own views critically, improving the final product.

5. Undermining an Argument Vs. Criticizing a Conclusion: Suppose I raise some insurmountable problems for Aquinas’s first argument for the existence of God. It is important to keep in mind that this is not the same as arguing against the existence of God. Just because one argument for the existence of God fails, does not mean that there are not other arguments for the existence of God that succeed. Students should not think that criticizing an argument requires disagreeing with its conclusion. Some of the greatest critics of certain arguments for the existence of God were themselves theists. In fact, if you agree with the conclusion of a bad argument, it makes sense to criticize the argument, showing where it is weak; this can help you construct an alternative argument that avoids this problem. Criticizing an argument is never the same as arguing against its conclusion. To criticize an argument is to show that its premises do not provide adequate support for its conclusion, not to show that its conclusion is false. In order to do the latter, one must provide a new argument that supports the claim that the conclusion is false. For example, in order to show that God does not exist, it is not enough to show that no arguments for God’s existence are sound; one must also provide positive reasons to deny God’s existence.

An analogy to criminal trials makes this distinction clear. The goal of the prosecution in a criminal trial is to prove that the defendant is guilty. They must construct an argument that provides good reasons for this conclusion. However, the goal of the defense in a criminal trial is not to prove that the defendant is innocent. Rather, the defense aims to criticize the prosecution’s argument, to show that the reasons provided by the prosecution for the conclusion that the defendant is guilty are not strong enough to support this conclusion, because there remains a reasonable doubt that this conclusion is true. The difference between the tasks of the prosecution and the defense in a criminal trial parallels the distinction between arguing against (or for) a conclusion, and merely criticizing an argument for a conclusion. Students should keep this distinction in mind when writing philosophy papers. When they are defending any conclusion, e.g., that God exists or that God does not exist, they must provide arguments for this conclusion, much as the prosecution must provide evidence and reasons that prove the defendant guilty. When students are criticizing an argument, they are not defending the denial of the argument’s conclusion. Rather, like the defense in a criminal trial, they are merely undermining the reasons given for the conclusion.

6. References: Undergraduate philosophy papers must be grounded in relevant and reputable philosophical literature. Attributing claims to others, including canonical philosophers or discussions of them in the secondary literature, must be supported by references to appropriate sources. However, direct quotation should, on balance, be avoided. Instructors are interested in whether or not students understand difficult philosophical concepts and claims in their own terms. For this reason, paraphrase is usually the best way to cite a source. Using one’s own words to express a point one has read elsewhere, however, does not excuse one from referring to one’s source. Any time a substantial claim is attributed to another person, whether or not one uses the person’s own words, the source should be referenced. There are occasions when direct quotations are appropriate, for example, when one is defending a controversial interpretation of some philosopher’s argument, and the precise wording of her claims is important.

It is important for a student author to get a sense of what the recent philosophical conversation about a specific topic has been. Otherwise, she has no way of knowing how to contribute to it. There are many ways for a student to explore the philosophical literature relevant to a topic she has chosen. It is advisable to begin with readings assigned for class. Textbooks, most recent philosophical journal articles, and recent secondary literature usually include detailed lists of references, which provide a useful guide to the relevant literature. Works cited in multiple places are particularly good sources for students to consult. The Philosopher’s Index and the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy are good on-line starting points for exploring the philosophical literature. These sources provide references to recent articles written about most philosophical topics. Students may also want to explore less specialized internet-based resources, like Google Scholar. However, one must be careful with on-line content. Many web-based resources are not subject to appropriate professional review, and are therefore unreliable. Students must insure that the claims they make are supported by recent, reputable philosophical literature. Simply asking one’s instructor can assuage any worries about whether or not a paper draft meets this standard.

As for citation format, philosophers are generally flexible: some journals require Chicago Style formatting, while others require MLA style. Most instructors will accept any style as long as it is used correctly and consistently. So students should consult their instructors about which citation format to follow. Non-standard sources like websites and lecture notes should also be cited in a format that instructors approve.

7. The First Person Pronoun: In high school composition classes, students are often taught to avoid using the first-person pronoun, “I”. The reasoning behind this is that use of “I” tends to encourage the expression of subjective opinions, whereas the goal of much essay writing is to provide an objective defense of some thesis. However, this rule of thumb is an overly blunt instrument. Certain uses of the “I” are typical of academic, philosophical writing. For example, authors often express their plans for a paper, e.g., the thesis they intend to defend, using the first-person pronoun, as I did in the sample introduction provided above. As long as the “I” is used in the context of laying out one’s intended plan for the paper, or circumscribing the scope of one’s claims, it is entirely appropriate. For example, it is entirely legitimate to write, “In the following, I defend Aquinas’s Fifth Way to prove the existence of God against a common criticism. However, space limitations preclude me from considering every version of this criticism, so I focus exclusively on Hume’s.” The spirit behind the “anti-‘I’” rule must, however, be respected. Students must avoid expressing subjective opinions. Expressions like “I feel that …”, or “It seems to me that …”, or “In my experience…” should be avoided. The point of a philosophy paper is to defend a thesis by appeal to objective reasons, that is, reasons that any reasonable person should accept.

8. The Present Tense: Another stylistic feature that is typical of philosophical writing is the almost exclusive use of the present tense. Tense consistency is often a challenge for undergraduate writers: often past, present, and future tenses are used within the same sentence or paragraph. This must be avoided. In philosophy papers, the rule of thumb is: always use the present tense, even when discussing arguments proposed by philosophers in the past. The fact that some argument, for the existence of God for example, was first proposed in the past is irrelevant for philosophical purposes. Arguments are treated as timeless contributions to the philosophical conversation, and students should treat canonical arguments as though they still constitute persuasive reasons for believing some claim. Thus, in the introduction provided as an example above, I write, “Aquinas, famously, provides five arguments for the existence of God.” The present tense should always be used when explaining any philosopher’s argument, any reason he or she provides for accepting some conclusion. This simple rule also insures tense consistency. In the rare circumstance in which some kind of historical context must be provided, e.g., a discussion of Descartes’ education by Jesuits, the past tense may be appropriate. But such circumstances are exceptional because philosophy papers focus on the timeless arguments that have been provided in defense of claims that are still controversial, not on the historical details or biographies that led particular philosophers to formulate these arguments.

9. Repeating Words vs. Using Synonyms: Another rule-of-thumb often promulgated in high school composition classes prescribes the use of synonyms over repetition of the same word. The motivation for this is clear: when students are forced to avoid repeating words, they must search for synonyms and this helps expand their vocabulary. However, by the time a student enrolls in a University-level philosophy course, her vocabulary should be sufficiently developed. Philosophy instructors value clarity and precision far above conspicuous displays of vocabulary. This is because, as we saw above, the soundness of an argument often depends on the precise meanings of the terms with which it is expressed. The meanings of so-called “synonyms” often vary in very subtle, nuanced ways. And these variations in meaning are often very significant in the context of philosophical arguments. Consider for example the words “liberty” and “freedom”. In some contexts, these words are interchangeable; they constitute synonyms. However, there are many philosophical contexts in which these words are not interchangeable. For example, the question of whether or not our decisions are free, or determined by our genetic endowment and environmental influences is a perennial philosophical puzzle. However, “freedom of the will” cannot be paraphrased as “liberty of the will”. The reason is that “liberty” has certain connotations which restrict its use to political contexts, while “freedom” can be used to characterize both political freedom, and freedom from natural constraints, like one’s genetic endowment, as well. Substituting the word “freedom” with the word “liberty” in a philosophy paper would only compromise clarity: the reader would not know whether freedom from political or from natural constraints was at issue. For this reason, it is best to repeat precisely the same terms for the same key concepts throughout a philosophy paper.

3. Strategies for Choosing a Topic and Formulating Arguments

Philosophical creativity and imagination, like their scientific or artistic counterparts, are mysterious. It is difficult to formulate rules for coming up with topics and arguments for philosophy papers. Different individuals will succeed at this task in different ways. Here, I discuss three broad strategies for conceiving and composing an undergraduate philosophy paper; however, this list is not meant to be exhaustive. Philosophy papers can be characterized as (1) narrow focus papers, (2) broad focus papers, and (3) application papers.

Narrow Focus Papers

The narrow focus strategy is perhaps the most straightforward strategy for composing a philosophy paper. The point of such a paper is to focus as much as possible on a specific argument by a specific philosopher and to discuss the strengths and weakness of this specific argument. One begins by correctly explaining the target argument. Then one raises objections, either by showing that one or more of the premises is false or implausible, or by showing that the premises, even if true, fail to support the conclusion. One then considers how the author of argument might respond to these criticisms, and ends by replying to these responses. In the course of writing such a focused, critical analysis, the student should include a survey of other criticisms that have been raised, and make clear how her criticism is unique.

Such papers can be extremely narrow. For example, they might focus on just one premise, or sub-argument of a larger argument. The introduction provided as an example above focuses just on Aquinas’ argument that there can be no causal chains extending infinitely into the past. The focus is on just one crucial sub-argument of one of Aquinas’s five arguments for the existence of God. Another possibility is to look at some historical debate about a particular premise of some canonical argument, and contribute to it. For example, one might consider one objection of an early critic of Aquinas’s arguments, imagine how Aquinas might reply to this objection, and then raise an improved objection of one’s own, for which this reply does not work. Or one might look at a classic criticism of some premise Aquinas uses in an argument, and offer a novel response on behalf of Aquinas.

Another kind of narrow focus paper concerns philosophical definitions. One of the principal projects of canonical philosophy, since Plato, has been the attempt to define philosophically important concepts, such as TRUTH, JUSTICE, and KNOWLEDGE. This has given rise to an important kind of philosophical debate. Philosophical definitions provide necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as an example of some concept. For example, one classical definition of knowledge states that for a person to know some claim, the person must believe the claim; she must have good reasons for believing it, and the claim must be true. This definition claims that belief, truth and justification are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for knowledge. However, one of the classic papers of Twentieth Century philosophy raises a counterexample to this definition: an example of a justified true belief that, intuitively, should not count as knowledge. This counterexample shows that belief, truth and justification are not sufficient for knowledge, contrary to the classical definition. This has spawned a cottage industry, involving attempts to modify the definition of knowledge to accommodate the counterexample, followed by new counterexamples to these new definitions. Such give-and-take about the meanings of important philosophical concepts is typical of much academic philosophy. It also constitutes a great strategy for composing a narrow focus, undergraduate philosophy paper: identify some classic philosophical definition of a philosophically important concept, raise a counter-example to the definition, and then consider ways the definition might be modified to accommodate the counter-example. This cycle can be repeated through numerous iterations, including new counter-examples to new definitions, followed by newer definitions accommodating these counter-examples, etc.

Narrow focus papers are mainly critical: they aim to undermine particular arguments, assumptions, or definitions proposed by specific philosophers. For this reason, it is useful for a student writing a narrow focus paper to think of her role as analogous to that of a defense attorney in a criminal trial. Her goal is not to prove that the conclusion to some argument is false. Rather, her role is to show that the reasons some philosopher has provided for a specific conclusion are insufficient to establish that conclusion.

Broad Focus Papers

Unlike narrow focus papers, broad focus papers do not restrict their scope to particular arguments, assumptions, or definitions made by particular philosophers. Instead, such papers identify a broad topic that has been discussed by many philosophers throughout history, identify different positions that have been taken on this topic, sketch the different kinds of arguments that have been provided for these different positions, and then take a stand on the topic by defending one of these arguments as superior to the others, or providing a new argument. For example, rather than focusing on just one assumption in one of Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God, a student may choose to treat the question of the existence of God more broadly, sketching the different positions on this topic, and some of the classical arguments that support them. The student may then defend theism or atheism by offering an improved version of one of these arguments that avoids some of the classic criticisms of it, or by providing an argument of her own.

Broad focus papers are, in general, more challenging than narrow focus papers. Undergraduates are rarely asked to draft papers longer than 15 pages. However, it is extremely difficult to do justice to a broad topic in philosophy in so little space. Philosophical questions and claims tend to ramify: they tend to open cans of worms – other questions and claims that are equally if not more difficult to resolve. For this reason, the best advice for undergraduate philosophical writing is to focus on as narrow a topic as possible. It is possible to write a decent broad focus undergraduate paper. However, it is very difficult, and students who focus as much as possible on specific claims and arguments make life much easier for themselves.

Application Papers

Perhaps the most interesting strategy for composing an undergraduate philosophy paper – the strategy that allows the most scope for individual creativity – is to illustrate some philosophical concept, claim or argument with a concrete example drawn from art, film, fiction, popular culture, science, or one’s own experience. For example, a classic dispute in epistemology – the philosophical study of knowledge – concerns our justification for believing the testimony of others. On one view, this justification is derived from our own observation that people are, for the most part, reliable. On the opposing view, trusting testimony is justified in itself, not in virtue of observing that people are typically reliable. A classic argument for this opposing view is that young children could never learn anything from adults if they had to wait to observe that people tend to be reliable before trusting their testimony. This argument makes substantial assumptions about how young children learn. It therefore suggests an interesting topic for an application paper: see whether the latest literature in developmental psychology supports this assumption.

Often, showing how some common experience, drawn from everyday life, fiction, film, or popular culture, illustrates some philosophical principle, argument, or claim is very useful. Not only does this help clarify the philosophical principle, argument, or claim; if the common experience is sufficiently vivid and compelling, it might even provide some support for the philosophical principle, argument, or claim. For example, consider the classical philosophical definition of knowledge mentioned above, in the discussion about philosophical definitions. According to this definition, a person knows some claim just in case she believes it; she is justified in believing it, and it is true. The counterexamples that philosophers have raised to this definition have been fairly abstract and contrived. However, it is possible to illustrate the problems with the definition by more plausible, real world examples. For example, consider the claim that the sun moves. We know this to be true today. But what about people who lived prior to Copernicus? Copernicus proposed that, contrary to the assumptions of astronomers that lived before him, the earth moves around the sun rather than vice versa. So pre-Copernican astronomers believed that the sun moves around the earth. This means that they also believed that the sun moves. Since we know the sun moves, this belief of theirs was true. Furthermore, they had good reasons for this belief, and were therefore justified in believing that the sun moves. Copernicus had not yet formulated an alternative hypothesis and all the evidence seemed to support their view. So pre-Copernican astronomers had a true justified belief that the sun moves. But, arguably, they did not know this, since the reason they thought the sun moves – that it circles the earth – is not the true reason it moves – that, like any star, it is caught up in the motion of the galaxy of which it is a part. This concrete historical example illustrates what is wrong with the classical definition of knowledge.

Working through such a concrete example from the history of science not only clarifies a philosophical point, it also provides some support for this point by showing that it is easily illustrated with concrete examples from the history of human knowledge. Furthermore, it immediately suggests how a paper focused on this example can be further extended. For example, one might imagine how a defender of the classical definition of knowledge would reinterpret this case in a way that vindicates the classical definition. One could then respond to this reinterpretation. In general, application papers can be based on very clear and simple argumentative structures: they argue that some concrete example illustrates a philosophical thesis, and then they consider how those who deny the thesis might deal with the example.

4. A Short Primer on Logic

As we saw above, in section 2, although philosophical arguments can go wrong in two ways – either the premises are false or implausible, or they fail to support the conclusion – philosophers tend to focus on detecting and avoiding failures of the latter kind. Here, I provide a short primer on the various ways that premises in philosophical arguments succeed and fail to support their conclusions.

Kinds of Support

There are broadly two kinds of support that premises provide for conclusions of arguments. First, in deductively valid arguments, the premises guarantee the conclusion, i.e., if we assume the premises are true, we cannot, at the same time, deny the conclusion. Here is a classic example: All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. If we accept the premises, we cannot, at the same time, deny the conclusion. So, this is the strongest kind of support that premises can provide for a conclusion. Notice that, when determining whether or not an argument is deductively valid, it is not necessary to establish whether or not the premises are true. Validity is a matter of the support the premises provide the conclusion, not their truth. The question is: if the premises were true, would the conclusion also have to be true? So, for example, the following argument is deductively valid, despite its questionable premises: All George Washington University students are Dalmatian. Barack Obama is a George Washington University student. Therefore, Barack Obama is Dalmatian. Note that this argument has the same logical form as the previous argument about Socrates: “humans” has been substituted with “George Washington University students”; “mortal” has been substituted with “Dalmatian”, and “Socrates” has been substituted with “Barack Obama”. Despite the fact that the second argument’s premises and conclusion are false, it is a deductively valid argument because the premises guarantee the conclusion. That is, if the premises were true, the conclusion would also have to be true.

In deductively valid arguments, the premises supply the strongest possible support for the conclusion. One can refute an argument claiming to be deductively valid by showing that even if the premises were true, the conclusion could still be false, i.e., there is still at least a slight probability that the premises are true and the conclusion is false. For example, the following argument, though plausible, is not deductively valid: Every morning I’ve lived, the sun has risen. Therefore, tomorrow morning, the sun will rise. As we’ll see next, this is an inductively strong argument: the premise provides strong support for the conclusion. But the argument is not deductively valid because the premise does not guarantee the conclusion: it is possible that the premise is true but the conclusion is false, e.g., if the sun explodes tonight, it won’t rise tomorrow morning.

The second kind of support that premises can provide conclusions is evident in inductively strong arguments. In such arguments, though the premises do not guarantee the conclusion, as they do in deductively valid arguments, they make the conclusion more likely . Such arguments are common in science and politics. Most arguments in which the conclusion is based on a public opinion poll are inductive arguments. For example, suppose you do a blind taste test comparing Coke to Pepsi with 5% of the GWU student population, finding that 60% of this sample prefers Coke to Pepsi. If you then generalize, concluding that 60% of the GWU student population prefers Coke to Pepsi, you are making an inductive argument: the premise is the result of the poll, and the conclusion is the generalization from the 5% sample to the whole GWU student population. The strength of the support this premise provides this conclusion depends on the size of the sample, and how it is obtained. Sometimes, for example, such arguments rely on samples that are not obtained randomly, and therefore contain biases relative to the population to which they generalize. This is one way of criticizing an inductive argument: if the sample is biased, the argument is inductively weak.

In another sort of inductive argument, the premises express certain observations that need to be explained, while the conclusion is a plausible explanation of those observations. Such forms of inductive argument are common in criminal trials. The prosecution presents the jury with facts, e.g., the defendant’s alleged motives, her presence at the crime scene at around the estimated time of the crime as testified to by a reliable witness, etc. They then conclude that the best explanation of all these facts is that the defendant committed the crime of which she is accused. However, such premises never guarantee the conclusion, since there may always be alternative explanations for the evidence. The defendant may have been at the crime scene by coincidence, or the witness may be lying, or the prosecution may be trying to frame the defendant, etc. This is why, in such arguments, the premises never guarantee the conclusion, as they do in deductively valid arguments. At best, they provide defeasibly strong reasons to accept the explanation that constitutes the conclusion. But such arguments can always be criticized by providing an alternative explanation of the evidence that is just as good or better.

A classic philosophical argument of this type is the argument for the claim that nature is the product of intelligent design. Proponents of this argument begin with a list of facts about nature, e.g., that it is orderly, complex, goal-directed, and dependent on highly unlikely background conditions. They then argue that the best explanation for these facts is that nature was designed by a supernatural intelligence. However, as with the case of arguments made in court, these facts do not guarantee this conclusion. There may be alternative explanations of these facts that are just as good or better. For example, Darwin argues that many such facts can be explained by his theory of evolution by natural selection, with no appeal to intelligent design.

Argument types in which the premises do not support the conclusion are called “fallacies”. Philosophers have studied the ways that arguments can go wrong for millennia, and they have identified dozens of fallacies. Here are five common fallacies that it is useful to keep in mind when evaluating or formulating arguments in a philosophy paper.

Begging the Question: Arguments that commit this fallacy are also known as circular arguments. Such arguments assume what they are trying to prove. Recall that the point of philosophical, and, indeed, any argumentation, is to try to prove a controversial conclusion on the basis of less controversial premises. For example, as we saw above, Aquinas tries to prove the controversial claim that God exists on the basis of uncontroversial premises, like the claim that objects are in motion. But sometimes the premises of an argument are equally or more controversial than the conclusion. In fact, sometimes the premises of an argument covertly assume the conclusion they are trying to prove. Consider the following argument for the existence of God, for example. “God wrote the Bible. Therefore, everything the Bible says is true. The Bible says God exists. Therefore, God exists.” This argument is circular, or begs the question, because it assumes what it is trying to prove. For God to write the Bible, he has to exist. So, in this argument, the premises provide no independent justification for the conclusion: they are just as controversial as the conclusion because they covertly assume the conclusion’s truth.
False Alternatives: Arguments that commit this fallacy rely on at least one premise that claims that there are fewer alternatives than there actually are. Consider the following example: “Either France supports the United States or France supports the terrorists. France does not support the United States. Therefore, France supports the terrorists.” This argument is fallacious because the first premise is a false alternative. France might not support either the United States or the terrorists.
Unjustified Appeal to Authority: Arguments that commit this fallacy rely on premises that appeal to an authority with no justification. Consider the following example: “There are passages in the Bible that prohibit homosexuality. Therefore, homosexuality is immoral.” The conclusion is not supported by the premise because the argument fails to establish that the Bible is a legitimate authority on moral matters.
Ad Hominem: The name of this fallacy is a Latin term meaning the same as “to (or against) the man”. Such fallacies are often committed in the course of critiquing another argument. For example, suppose an Evangelical Christian has just finished arguing that abortion is immoral, and a critic responds not by identifying any weaknesses in the argument but, rather, by pointing out the arguer’s religious beliefs as a reason for dismissing the argument. The critic may say something like, “Clearly we cannot accept the reasoning of someone with such superstitious convictions!” This is an example of the Ad Hominem fallacy: instead of criticizing the argument, the critic is attacking the person who presents the argument. In logic and philosophy, we are interested in whether or not the premises of an argument support its conclusion. The identity of the person making the argument is irrelevant to this. People with whom one disagrees on many matters can nonetheless produce sound arguments. A person’s personal convictions or personality are irrelevant to the strength of her arguments.
Straw Man: This is another fallacy that often arises in the course of criticizing someone else’s argument. It occurs when the critic misrepresents the argument she is criticizing, formulating a version of it that is easier to refute. This is where the fallacy gets its name: a “straw man” is easier to knock down than a “real man”. Consider the following example. Suppose a person defends abortion rights on the grounds that no law regulating a person’s control over her own reproductive decisions is equitably enforceable. If someone were to criticize this argument on the grounds that (1) it claims killing a fetus is morally unobjectionable, and (2) this assumption is false, then the critic would be guilty of a Straw Man fallacy. The argument makes no claims about whether or not killing a fetus is morally unobjectionable. The critic has burdened her target with a difficult to defend assumption that she never made. In terms discussed above, such a critic does not respect the principle of charity that guides all good philosophical writing. Philosophical writers have an obligation to present their antagonists’ arguments in as favorable a light as possible before criticizing them. Only then can they be sure that they are seeking to establish claims that are supported by the best reasons, rather than merely scoring rhetorical points.

Undergraduate philosophical writing is about evaluating and constructing arguments. A good argument is one in which strong reasons are provided in support of some claim. In order to evaluate and construct arguments, the claims that comprise them must be expressed in clear and precise language. In addition, these claims must be perspicuously organized, such that the complex relations of support they bear to each other are apparent to any educated reader. The goal of philosophical writing should be discovering which claims are supported by the best reasons, not scoring cheap rhetorical points. For this reason, philosophical writing must be guided by a principle of extreme charity: views antagonistic to the author’s must be considered carefully and fairly, and presented with the utmost sympathy. The author must anticipate likely criticisms of her own views and respond to them. Undergraduate philosophical writers must master the art of conveying abstruse philosophical concepts in clear, plain language, writing for an imagined audience of educated non-specialists, like family and friends. This makes undergraduate writing clearer, and demonstrates to the instructor that the student has understood difficult concepts in her own terms. The use, as much as possible, of concrete examples to illustrate abstract philosophical concepts is strongly recommended.

Finally, the best undergraduate philosophy papers focus on relatively narrow and specific topics, e.g., a specific argument or assumption made by a specific philosopher. One cannot establish an ambitious philosophical claim in the 10-15 pages usually allotted for undergraduate philosophy papers. Thousands of years and pages have been devoted to determining whether or not God exists, for example. Yet the question remains controversial. Do not assume that you can accomplish, in 10-15 pages, something that professional philosophers have failed to accomplish in thousands of years. Philosophical arguments tend to open cans of worms because they invariably make assumptions or raise difficult issues that go beyond the topic on which they focus. The art of writing philosophy consists in avoiding such potential digressions, and contributing to specific, constrained debates.

The foregoing is a good guide to composing an initial rough draft of a term paper for an undergraduate philosophy class. Different instructors might not agree with all of my recommendations; however, most will agree with most of them. Once a student receives feedback from her instructor on a rough draft, she will be able to fine-tune the paper to the instructor’s particular preferences. Although the foregoing should help students make a good start on a philosophy paper, there is no substitute for frequent consultation with one’s instructor. Do not fear “bothering” your instructors about helping with paper drafts. As long as you follow the relevant instructions on their syllabi and give them plenty of time, they are obligated to help you with your writing. The persistent pursuit of detailed feedback from one’s instructor is the best resource you have for succeeding at undergraduate philosophical writing. This guide provides a solid foundation from which to start.

How to do argumentative philosophy papers

Here are some guidelines for writing philosophy papers. This guide is for writing argumentative papers. More descriptive papers of an historical sort will require a modified version or perhaps a different guide.

How to Do PHILOSOPHY ESSAYS*

I. Introduction

Thomas Edison's much quoted remark that invention is l%

inspiration and 99% perspiration is perhaps a case of

self-effacing understatement. Nevertheless, his point, when

applied to the matter of writing philosophy essays, deserves

attention. No one can systematize or lay down rules that will

result in inspiration or creativity. This little guide,

however, is written with the conviction that a large share of

the burden of the composition of an essay is almost mechanical

and rules can be laid down such that, if they are followed, a

reasonably good result can be confidently predicted.

II. Groundwork

a. First Thoughts

Let us start with a couple of typical philosophy essay

topics: "Aristotle on Happiness" and "What is Justice in the Moral

Thought of Mill?"

l. BEGIN BY GETTING SOME DEFINITIONS, in this case,

definitions of "happiness" and "justice."

Start with a good dictionary.

2. WHAT ARE THE ETYMOLOGICAL derivations of key

philosophical terms? What are the root metaphors on the

basis of which the technical terms are constructed? What

do they have in common? What kind of things can be "put

together?" The point I am getting at is that you ought to

be trying to get at the conceptual presuppositions that

underlie any philosophical problem. These usually begin

in ordinary language.

3. Do the key concepts have a clear application to the

world? That is, is there any difficulty in deciding,

given the concept of happiness, about instances of

happiness? Is it clear to you what would count as an

instance of happiness or of justice in the context of morality?

What problems are raised by the application of these

concepts to the world?

4. Order the problems. This point is crucial. After

having discovered a nest of problems through your initial

groundwork you should now ask yourself, "which problems

require a solution before the other problems can be

solved? What is basic and what depends on the basic?"

For example, isn't it necessary to know first what Aristotle

understands to be the structure of the human soul before

we can consider what happiness in the soul is? Don’t we

have to understand which is the more comprehensive notion,

morality or justice, before we can say how they are related?

Remember: Some problems are more basic than others.

Order your questions. It will save a lot of time.

b. Research

In the case of our essays in this course, you need only

concentrate on the primary readings. You will be

looking for basically three things: (1) definitions, (2)

distinctions, and (3) arguments.

l. Definitions. How does your author define key

philosophical terms? If he offers no definitions in the

text you are using, does he presume certain definitions?

Write down the definitions which are explicit. Write out

definitions you think are implicit. Does the failure to

define terms leave his arguments ambiguous?

2. Distinctions. How does the author "cut up" the world

with his concepts? What are the different senses in

which he uses words. Many philosophical problems are

greatly aided in their solution by distinguishing senses

of words. To do this it will be useful to fill your head

with lots of examples and ask how the relevant word or

concept would cover these. Make a list of different uses

of a concept. How are these uses alike? How do they

differ?

3. Arguments. Your most important job is to

extract an argument from the text. All arguments have

premises and a conclusion. . The conclusion should be a

statement of the author's position. The premises contain

the statements of the evidence leading to these

conclusions. Extract these arguments. The backbone of

your essay will be the examination of these arguments.

You will be using two standards for examination: (a) Is

the argument valid, that is does the conclusion follow

logically from the premises (that is, assuming the

premises are true, does the conclusion then follow.) (b)

Are the premises true? Are they intended by the author

to be self-evidently true or does he adduce evidence for

them? Working from the basic argument you will begin to

hunt for hidden premises, alternative premises that would

make an invalid argument valid, etc. All the time your

eye will be on the conclusion and the question: "Is it

true?" Can he prove it? Can I prove it? Remember:

Philosophy is mainly concerned with arguments.

III. Preparation of Essay

a. The outline. Among the most common flaws in

undergraduate essays are lack of clarity in thought and

expression and lack of coherent organization. Student essays

tend to ramble and this indicates a mind at sea. It is

possible, however, to minimize these problems by employing a

purely mechanical device. Make an outline. Now I do not mean

an outline of the form: I. Introduction. II. Argument,

III. Conclusion. This is too superficial and consequently

worthless. An outline should be detailed and represent a

logical progression of thought. There should be a heading or

sub-heading for every paragraph in the essay. Nothing should

be put into the essay that has not been justified in your

mind beforehand and already represented in the outline.

Every paragraph in the essay should have a distinct place in

the exposition and/or criticism of the arguments. The

exposition should unfold premise by premise, the criticism

point by point.

b. The outline (Second Stage). The creation of the outline

should be guided by thought of what the topic requires, that

is, given the topic, what are the orderly steps to be taken

in dealing with it? In the second stage you will begin going

through the outline point by point and thinking about what to

say for each point. You will now discover a happy result.

Your essay will be about 75% finished! The actual writing of

the essay will be almost anti-climactic.

The main work of your essay--which is an exercise in

philosophical thinking and not the search for a stylish turn

of a phrase--is in your head and not on paper. The paper is

just a record of your real work. The creation of a tight,

critically justified outline will help eliminate the cotton

candy that many students use to pad their essays. It is not

necessary to begin with a paragraph on the greatness of your

subject or the world-moving importance of your problem. There

is no need to end with a stirring tribute to the glory of

philosophy and the meaning of life. These are superfluous.

You are writing an essay for someone who has heard these

platitudes a thousand times before. Their addition is

extremely irritating to most professors. Their absence is

bound to make a good impression. Start with your substantive

points. End your essay when these are completed.

Remember, don't try to do everything at once. Be

systematic. Take your points one at a time. And by all

means, do not worry about being too narrow. Your major worry

will almost always be about being too superficial.

IV. Writing the Essay.

a. If you have spent adequate time on the

outline, you should now be in a position to produce your essay.

Having thought out all the major points beforehand, you

can now give your complete attention to the

special problems of communicating these points. One overall

principle should guide you: clarity. Your writing should be

a window to your thinking. You will most likely be able to

achieve this if you stick to straightforward English prose.

Every sentence should express one clear thought. Grammar and

syntax count. Remember, there is nothing childish about a

short, clear, declarative sentence. It is a good sentence if

it clearly and accurately reflects your thought when read.

b. Hints on Composition

i. Define the key philosophical terms you introduce.

Obviously you cannot define everything. Nevertheless,

when you use a philosophical term in your argument you

should make the reader aware of the meaning.

ii. Purge your writing of all jargon. Jargon comes in

two varieties: the blatant and the subtle. They are

equally obnoxious. Some examples of the first variety

are: "interpersonal," "meaningful" and "relevant." Some

examples of the second are: "important," "in terms of,"

and "valid." The use of jargon words and phrases can

only be avoided by careful scrutiny of every sentence of

your essay.

iii. Use examples and counter-examples when possible. Nothing

conveys the thrust of an argument as well as a cleverly

chosen example. Examples illuminate principles.

Nothing conveys your argument against a position as well

as a devastating counter-example. Nothing supports an

argument an impressively as the anticipation of possible

counter-examples to the argument and the answers to

these.

iv. Remember that your reader is not inside your head.

Don't expect your reader to make the associations and

leaps that are not explicitly laid out in the paper but

which went on in your thinking. In philosophy it is

almost impossible for your reasoning to be too explicit.

Remember: Straightforward sentences.

Arguments. No padding.

*Adapted from “Some Hints For Composing Philosophy Essays” by L. P. Gerson

=============

Here is a copy of my email sent 7 Dec 2011 regarding course papers:

Dear KUL students,

Following the customary way I teach graduate and undergraduate courses, I will be quite willing to offer you comments on your outlines of your course paper. I believe I wrote earlier to indicate that we would be willing to do this up to 1 January 2012 .

To be clear, let me reiterate that I am offering to comment on outlines and not full paper drafts. This is because I believe the outline is what is key to the philosophical discussion written in the full paper. (Also, I prefer not to have the role of proofreader.) The outline should be one page only and should be arranged in hierarchical fashion. I suggest something such as the following but I leave it to you precisely how to proceed with the paper.

NOTE: Many of you know the value of what follows here. However, I have NEVER had a graduate student in my classes who has NOT found what I suggest below here and on the website to be valuable to her or her thought and work. Hence, I recommend you give it considerable thought both for this assignment and for any other argumentative paper you might have to prepare. I speak on the basis of 29 years experience teaching graduate courses and grading graduate course papers. Quite a number of my students have published papers which were first written as course papers for me, I mention incidentally. From what we have seen in your submitted short essays assignment, we know you are a very strong group of students with much talent for philosophical study. What I suggest here I believe will prove valuable for your continued philosophical development in many ways.

Below is what I have in mind for an outline. HOWEVER, your outline should be carefully constructed on the basis of your research. If you have not done the research, you cannot do the outline properly. This is the sort of outline that should be the result of research and reflection in accord with the guide at http://web.me.com/mistertea/Aquinas_and_the_Arabic_Philosophical_Tradition_on_Creation/Writing_Argumentative_Philosophy_papers.html .

1. Introduction (written last, 3 paragraphs)

1.1. General importance philosophical issue to be explored (as with a journal article, this should entice the reader to want to read your paper)

1.2. The specific issue the paper will address (as with a journal article, this should communicate clearly what you are doing and why you are doing it)

1.3. How you will proceed in this paper toward the achievement of the end or goal of the paper

This should signal clearly to your reader how you will proceed: "In the body of this paper I first A. . . . With that clarification, I then secondly B . . . This then

enables me to proceed to evaluate C . . . . I then D . . . .

You cloud also do 1.3 by a series of systematic questions that must be considered and answered in this paper.

2. Body (however many paragraphs your topic requires)

2. 1. A (see 1.3)

2.2. B (see 1.3)

2.3. C (see 1.3)

2.4. D (see 1.3)

3.Conclusion(s). This should be repetitive for clarity sake.

3.1. corresponds to 1.3: This should clearly point out how you have handled and answered or responded to the issues indicated in 1.3

3.2. corresponds to 1.2: This should reiterate how you solved the issue or interpreted successfully the issue mentioned in 1.2

3.3. corresponds to 1.1: This should indicate the value or importance of what you did in the paper in a more general way

For a guide to writing philosophy essays, I strongly suggest you study "How to do philosophy essays" which I have put on the course website at:

http://web.me.com/mistertea/Aquinas_and_the_Arabic_Philosophical_Tradition_on_Creation/Writing_Argumentative_Philosophy_papers.html .

NOTE: Do not send me your outline and request my comments unless you have first studied this guide.

Cheers, Richard Taylor

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Writing a Philosophy Essay

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Is there a God? Are there objective, universal moral norms or rules? What is meant by ‘reality’? Do we have free will? In studying philosophy, students aim to do the following:

understand such philosophical questions and the concepts, arguments, and theories that philosophers use to address them
think critically about such arguments and theories
develop their own answers to philosophical questions

Writing philosophy essays is a key part of studying philosophy. Make sure first to understand the assignment, looking out for the questions asked and paying attention to prompts such as “outline” or “evaluate” or “compare”. Most philosophy assignments will ask you to demonstrate your understanding of the subject through exposition of arguments and theories, and many will also test your ability to assess these arguments and theories by writing a critical evaluation of them. Write your paper so that the reader understands how your exposition and evaluation answer the questions and address all parts of the assignment.

Read the Texts Carefully, Asking Questions

Before you write a paper, though, you need to understand the course texts and recommended readings. Philosophical works need to be read slowly and with focused attention. As you read, ask yourself the following:

What philosophical question(s) is the author addressing?
What exactly is meant by key ideas or concepts in the text (e.g., Plato’s “Forms”, Aristotle’s “substance” and “accident”, Kant’s “categorical imperative,” Sartre’s “being-for-itself”)? Each discipline has its own technical language, which students must learn.
What arguments does the author make (e.g., Aquinas’s five arguments for the existence of God)?
What theories does the author propose (e.g., a dualist mind-body theory or—one of its competitors—a physicalist theory of mind)?

Organize Your Ideas into a Logical Structure

Take notes as you read. Then put your ideas for the essay into a logical order. Because philosophy papers proceed by logical argument, creating a point-form outline that captures the structure of your argument is generally a good strategy. An outline will allow you to spot problems in your argument more easily.

Augment Your Thesis with a Road Map that Reveals the Structure of Your Argument

Most assignments will require you to present a clear thesis statement that sums up the position for which you are arguing. In the introduction you should also provide a ‘road map’—a few sentences that announce in sequence what you intend to accomplish in each of the key stages of your paper. Road maps often rely on first person (“First, I will analyze . . . “), but if your professor prefers that you don’t use the first person, you can instead describe what your essay will accomplish (“First, the essay will analyze . . . “).

Show Your Understanding through Clear and Accurate Exposition

Try to make your expository writing as clear and accurate as possible, and try to show the logical connections between the different parts of a philosophical system. Avoid vague or overly brief exposition, serious omissions, or misunderstandings.

In some first year courses, an early assignment may ask you to write a short paper expounding but not evaluating a concept or theory. For example: “Explain what Plato means by Forms.” Subsequent assignments in the course usually involve evaluation as well as exposition (e.g., “Outline and evaluate Plato’s theory of Forms”). In some courses, assignments may call for detailed interpretation of a text rather than an assessment of it. “Was Hume an idealist?”, “Was Wittgenstein a behaviourist?” and “Was Marx a nihilist about morality?” are examples. Such questions are posed when there is disagreement among scholars about how to interpret a philosopher. In such essays, you will need to examine texts very closely, find passages which support a yes or no answer, choose where you stand in the debate, and defend your answer.

Critically Evaluate a Philosophical Theory

When studying a philosophical theory, you will need to think about both its strengths and weaknesses. For example, is a particular theory of art (such as the view that art is the expression of emotion) comprehensive: does it apply to all the arts and all types of art, or only to some? Is it logically consistent or does it contain contradictions? Are there counterexamples to it?

As you think about your topic, read the course materials, and take notes, you should work out and assemble the following:

the strengths of a philosopher’s theory
the arguments the philosopher gives in support of the theory and those the philosopher did not provide but which might still support it
possible criticisms of those arguments
how the philosopher has replied or could reply to these criticisms

Finally, ask yourself how you would evaluate those replies: do they work or not? Be selective, especially in a shorter paper. In a 1,000-word essay, for instance, discuss one or two arguments in favour and one or two against. In a 2,000- or 2,500-word paper, you can include more arguments and possible replies. Finally, plan carefully: leave enough space for your assessment.

A different type of critical evaluation assignment may ask for a comparative appraisal of two or more theories. For example, “Which account of human decision-making is stronger: X’s free will theory or Y’s determinist theory?” In such essays, your thesis could be that one account is better than the other or, perhaps, that neither account is clearly superior. You might argue that each has different strengths and weaknesses.

Develop Your Own Answers to Philosophical Questions

In the type of critical assessments above, you are already, to some extent, articulating your own philosophical positions. As you read texts in a course on, say, philosophy of mind or philosophy of art, you should be asking, based on what you have read so far, which theory is the best? Don’t be content to just understand theories and know their strengths and weaknesses. Push yourself to think out your own account of mind or art.

Some upper-year essay assignments may throw a fundamental philosophical question at you: “What is art?”, “Do we have free will?”, “What is morality?”, or “What is reality?”. Here, you will present your own answer, giving reasons, answering objections, and critically evaluating alternative approaches. Your answer/thesis might be an existing theory or a synthesis of two or more theories, or (more rarely) a completely new theory. Now you are not only expounding theories or critically evaluating them; you are also developing your own philosophy!

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Results of 2020 PhilPapers Survey posted 2021-11-01 by David Bourget We've now released the results of the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, which surveyed 1785 professional philosophers on their views on 100 philosophical issues. Results are available on the 2020 PhilPapers Survey website and in draft article form in " Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey " . Discussion is welcome in the PhilPapers Survey 2020 discussion group .

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Methods for dialogue: How can I help my students become philosophers?

In a high school classroom, students may have strong opinions but little sense of justification for them or of the value of submitting opinions to a careful and caring analysis. Too often the atmosphere is divisive, with different groups vying for dominance or simply ignoring one another. In the satiric movie, Clueless , the heroine gives a tour of her well-to-do Californian high school to a new student and points out the various stereotypical groups, each keeping with its “own.” This humorous scene is actually close to the truth! Moving beyond group identity as the major source of one’s world view is an important challenge for many students.

Although high school students have already experienced nine to ten years of schooling, they often do not know how to frame questions, listen to others (especially to one’s peers within a class situation), accept or give criticism of ideas without interpreting critiques personally. Given the strong rule of the peer group, high school students may be particularly reluctant to risk embarrassment or ridicule by disagreeing with one another or the teacher. A course in philosophy can be a lesson in communal as well as individual reflection and can help them transcend the strict social and ideological categories that rule many American high schools.

A careful reading of Ann Margaret Sharp’s and Laurance Splitter’s Teaching for Better Thinking will offer excellent ideas for teaching methodologies which address both these social and intellectual concerns. The “Philosophy for Children” movement as developed by “The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children” focuses on the nature and role of a community of inquiry as the key methodological form of nurturing philosophical reflection. A community of inquiry develops over time and is always open for revision and refinement. Its essential notions comprise:

* the coming together of a group of individuals who may include varying social and intellectual perspectives; * questions which emerge from the interest of the group itself, not simply imposed by the teacher; * a constant self-awareness of respect for others and responsibility for one’s own ideas; * a willingness to listen to others, whether we share their view or not; * a willingness to explain and justify, as well as amend and change, one’s own ideas according to the community criteria of reasonableness; and * an eagerness to submit ideas to careful scrutiny but within an atmosphere of care and concern for the persons within the community.

As you develop or implement a course or segment in philosophy keep these ideas in mind and be attentive to providing structured opportunities for your students to think for themselves but at the same time to develop a willingness to demand intellectual honesty and rigor. Philosophy should not be a lecture course, even if you are teaching the works and ideas of the great philosophers. Make time for them to think through the ideas they encounter and to test their own ideas against them.

Guidelines for Writing

(Developed by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth)

Writing should be a central component of education in philosophy. Even in those courses where critical and analytical skills are developed through discussion, debate, translation, or other exercises, writing should be a frequent and integral activity. In addition to experiencing and learning new information, our students must be afforded the time to articulate their ideas and opinions in writing. Ultimately, the writing process will not only reinforce learning, but also contribute to a student’s ability to argue a position and critically analyze an issue.

Depending on the age and experience of your students, you may have to devote more or less attention to the “nuts and bolts” aspects of the writing process. It is important that all students, regardless of age, thoroughly understand your expectations concerning all aspects of a writing assignment. For example, an introduction to the research process itself, as well as to issues concerning proper citation and academic honesty, will help students avoid potential pitfalls once they begin working. Providing your students with a detailed account of your methods of evaluation before they begin the assignment is another useful way to prepare them for the task ahead.

There are a number of different types of formal and informal papers you may ask students to write. Here are some suggestions of writing assignments we have found effective for philosophy courses:

Position Paper: Students are asked to argue a stance on an issue. They are required to support their positions with evidence and information they have collected in class and through research. An interesting adaptation of this assignment is to have students write a paper in which they are forced to argue a position with which they disagree. This can be a very powerful assignment as it challenges students to rely only on critical thinking and analytical writing as they attempt to express an opinion that contradicts their own beliefs. Be aware that some students may be hesitant to undertake this kind of writing, as you may be asking them to support an extremely unpopular position or argue against a deeply held, personal belief. You should therefore consider carefully the kinds of positions you are asking students to defend.

Compare and Contrast Piece: In this format, students objectively describe two or more competing stances on an issue discussed in the course. They are required to synthesize the various arguments or logic behind a group’s or individual’s position and then evaluate the different accounts.

Traditional Research Paper: Students work with primary and secondary sources and are asked to form an original argument/thesis based on their findings. Variations of this type of paper may include a critical research paper in which students focus on the argument/thesis of one primary work and develop their own counter-arguments or a review of a scholarly paper or article.

Close Reading Exercise: Students narrow their focus on a short piece of primary text (a verse, quote, short passage, etc.) by analyzing and interpreting it in their own words with or without secondary resources. They should find support for their interpretation by paying close attention to the different dynamics of the passage like figurative language, diction, tone, literal content, etc. to explain the meaning and theme(s) of the text as a whole. This exercise is also good for fueling discussions when students share their individual thoughts with one another.

Creative and Free Writing: While there are a variety of writing exercises that might fall under this category, past CTY instructors recommend assigning students to write newspaper editorials, speeches, shorter response to arguments, or daily journal entries as other methods to reinforce course material.

Guidelines for In-Class Debates

Although these guidelines are meant as suggestions only, and may need to be modified to meet the specific needs of your class, they cover topics that are essential to any successful debate (including the basic elements of a debate, the necessity of a feedback session after the debate, tips for students, etc.). In-class debates represent a significant time investment for both the class and the instructor; before you begin preparations for the debate, please ensure that you can devote sufficient attention without sacrificing other aspects of your course. [The following text is adapted from “General Debate Information” by the Communication Within the Curriculum Department at the University of Pennsylvania.]

What is debate?

One way to characterize a debate is “a discussion in which reasons are advanced for and against some proposition or proposal.” Although similar to argumentation, debate sets itself apart insofar as it is more rigidly structured; instituting clear goals and processes allows for a more thorough and objective consideration of the reasons presented.

Why debate in class?

The process of debate allows participants to analyze differing viewpoints, so that the audience can understand where opinions diverge and why. Debate is also an excellent way to model the analytical and communicative processes that students are learning whenever they examine course material. In-class debates challenge students to think critically about course material and provide a forum for them to develop the art of expressing their ideas.

We recommend that you remain focused on the analysis of the issue that emerges during the debate and allow the students to reflect on what constitutes a successful argument, which often becomes a debate itself. It is important to keep in mind that each debate should be followed by an exhaustive discussion and evaluation of both the issue discussed and the debate itself. In addition to giving students an opportunity to reflect on the different positions presented during the debate, this feedback session will allow them to consider more carefully the defining features of good argumentation.

Setting up an In-class Debate

The most important aspect of any debate is the topic. For a good debate you or the students will need to create a statement, called a resolution, that people can either affirm or negate. Instructors should provide a clear interpretation of the resolution during the preliminary stages of the debate so that students can focus their research efforts and develop strong, succinct arguments. Ideally people will be able to affirm or negate the resolution for a variety of reasons, with many possibilities for constructing sophisticated positions on each side. It is also important to guard against framing a resolution that allows people to focus on unproductive, tangential questions. Most instructors require students to research the topic that they are debating. Often instructors guide students to good sources so that they are using the best information when they present to the class. Lastly, the instructor should be aware of the maturity level of the students and choose a topic that is appropriate both for the individual class.

Debate begins with research. If it is possible at your site, consider devoting class time to research in the library. Although more time and labor intensive than providing students with pre-selected research material, conducting their own research (with your supervision) will give students both the opportunity to hone their research skills and a greater sense of responsibility for the arguments they put forward in the debate.

Based on their research, students should construct cohesive arguments in support of their positions. It is important to understand that a position is what each team is assigned (either as the affirmative or negative in relation to the topic) but arguments are a way of supportingthat position. A thesis is a statement that captures the main argumentative points that the team will present as support for their position. A thesis should be more than “I disagree with the resolution that ‘the United States government should abolish the estate tax,’” since this fails to capture the way in which each group will support its position. A thesis such as “We should retain the estate tax because it prevents the development of dynasties, which are economically inefficient” is more desirable because it succinctly captures the main threads of argument that you will develop throughout the debate.

Each group should compose a complete persuasive speech that supports its thesis. (Notice that for the above example the speech would have to argue, at a minimum, that the estate tax prevents dynasties and that dynasties are inefficient). Once each team has a good idea of how it will argue its position, attention should be turned to anticipating the arguments of the opposing team. What sorts of arguments can be made in support of the opposing position? Are there problems with the opposing team’s arguments? What arguments might the opposing team construct for their rebuttal? Should these potential arguments be preempted by addressing them in the opening speech? How should the group respond if such arguments are brought up in the course of the debate?

The logistics of creating a format that allows everyone to participate without taking too much class time can be tricky, but here are a couple of rules of thumb to consider. You can have students debate one-on-one or in teams. Teams of more than 3 people may pose difficulties that require the instructor to plan accordingly. For example, each student may have a different idea of the direction the group should take. On the other hand, working with peers who may have a different perspective from oneself can be a rewarding experience for students. If you choose to have students work in teams it is a good idea to select the teams yourself, allowing you to place students with differing viewpoints on the same team.

Each debate should consist of four to six speeches and each debate requires 30-50 minutes of class-time. Post-debate questions and discussion is often very lively and very useful, so you should build in time for these activities. Without a post-debate feedback session students may not grasp the deeper significance of the debate nor focus on the skills which the debate, and the preparation leading up to it, helped instill in them. It is also useful to solicit evaluations from observers external to the debate, whether they be other students in the class who were not involved in a particular debate or other members of your school community (if there was a larger audience for the debate).

Debate Format

**Note: What follows are suggestions for structuring the actual debate. Depending on such factors as the nature of your course, the maturity level of your students and time constraints, you may need to deviate from the plan below. However, one thing that should remain constant for all debates is that the instructor be a strong supervisory presence at all stages, from guiding research efforts to stepping in during the actual debate to make sure that time constraints are followed, that students stay on-task, that the speeches are appropriate, etc.

Each speech in a debate has a different purpose. Typically each side will present three speeches during the debate. Each side can be represented by one person or a team. For the purposes of this explanation we’ll assume that people are debating in teams. Although students should be taking notes on the opposing side’s arguments throughout the debate, it may be useful to have each side submit their opening speeches in writing to the other team to facilitate a more focused rebuttal.

The first speech, called the “opening,” introduces the argument of each team. In the second speech, or the “rebuttal,” each team critically analyzes the opposing team’s argument. The third speech is a “summation” in which each team pulls their strongest arguments from all the previous exchanges and makes their strongest appeal to the audience. Sometimes a question and answer period is substituted for the “rebuttal,” or is an additional period inserted into the above format. Question and answer periods require swift thinking as each side is given equal time to ask direct questions and to quickly and succinctly answer the questions posed to them. Often 1-2 minutes of preparation time are given to debaters between speeches. One possible debate structure is as follows:

PRO TEAM-Opening 5 minutes

CON TEAM-Opening 5 minutes

Break (prep. time) 2 minutes

PRO TEAM-Rebuttal 4 minutes

CON TEAM-Rebuttal 4 minutes

**Optional: Q&A Period 6 minutes

**Optional Break 2 minutes

CON TEAM-Summation 4 minutes

PRO TEAM-Summation 4 minutes

It is possible to have the entire class debate in a class session by alternating short speeches by members of the class. In this format it is also possible to debate a question with more than two positions. Debates can also be made more complex by having each speaker both analyze the opposing team’s argument and defend their own in every speech. The above debate structure does not account for time spent reflecting on the debate in a feedback session.

Debate Tools for Students

Providing students with the following tools for effective debating will help to ensure that the discussion remains focused and productive.

Signposting: Signposts are just labels for each idea in a speech and give clarity to any sort of oral communication. In debate they are especially important because they help the audience understand how the argument is put together. You can be a little more obvious about your signposting in debate than you would in a typical speech to make sure people are following it. It’s perfectly acceptable to say “My first point is…”

Consistent vocabulary: Use the same word each time you refer to a particular concept. If you use synonymous words or phrases when referring to the same concept, some members of the audience may think you are embarking on a new and different concept. Likewise, highlight subtle differences between concepts by using different vocabulary when speaking about them.

Listening: When you debate you will spend as much or more time listening as you spend speaking. It is your listening skills, not your speaking skills that will determine the quality of your performance in the round. You will need to listen actively to understand your opponent’s argument so that you can develop a proper response. Some elements of active listening:

* Come to class prepared * Listen for the main ideas that organize each speech * Distinguish between the content of the speaker’s argument and the logical structure of the argument * Take notes * Ask yourself how each part of a person’s speech supports (or does not support!) their thesis * Identify gaps in your understanding of the speaker’s argument. Are they due to incomplete understanding on your part? Are they due to flaws in the speaker’s reasoning or communication? * Wait until the speaker has completed a thought before you evaluate it * Give great attention to the particular words a speaker chooses. The meaning of vocabulary chosen by the speaker can have great effect on the meaning of an entire argument * At the end of each speech ask yourself whether the speaker supported all the claims they made in their thesis * Demonstrate that you are listening attentively by making eye contact and responding, (verbally or non-verbally), where appropriate.

Debate can be a powerful teaching and learning method if used properly. Key elements to the debate include:

* The goal/rationale for the debate in the context of class content (why are you doing the debate – what do you want the students to get out of the debate) * A clear topic/resolution for debate * Clear debate structure procedure (length of debate and pro/con speeches) * Time for proper research and position development * Time for debriefing, discussion, reflection, etc.

Helpful Links

http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/lesson/lesson304b.shtml (General index of classroom debate resources)

http://www.saskdebate.com/index.asp?tmenu=3&smenu=2 (On using debate in the classroom)

(Sample rubric for debate assessment)

Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy

The committee of the American Philosophical Association devoted to enhancing and developing pre-college philosophy in the United States.

American Philosophical Association

The American Philosophical Association was founded in 1900 to “encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy.” It is one of the largest philosophical associations in the world with over 11,000 members to whom it offers an array of services.

Squire Family Foundation

Working with philosophers and educators to ensure that all students in American secondary schools have an opportunity to study philosophy.

Writing Philosophical Commentaries

-Compiled by Donovan Wishon, Fall 2004

Writing a philosophical commentary or response is slightly different from writing a paper in other classes (even other philosophy classes). Because professional commentaries are often presented at philosophy conferences, they need to be fairly condensed and organized so that their audience can readily follow the discussion. Generally, they should include clear subdivisions of sections, each of which have specific roles within the commentary. While Dave will furnish to illustrate how they should be organized, the following describes the format for a typical philosophical commentary, and also provides some more general writing advice.

I. Introduction:

(1) A philosophical commentary should begin with a clear statement of the philosophical issue or problem addressed in the target paper. The problem should be “situated in intellectual space.” Often this is best accomplished by means of a quick example of the philosophical problem that the author of the target article addresses. You want your audience to have a fairly clear idea of the general philosophical issues under discussion as well as the importance of those issues.

(2) Second, your introduction should include a clear statement of the target author’s position, conclusion, or resolution regarding that philosophical issue or problem.

(3) Finally, your introduction should include a brief statement of aims in your commentary. This should be an evaluative statement of the target author’s position as well as a statement of your position on the philosophical issue or problem. This does not mean that your commentary must be critical of the target article’s position. There are several strategies you might possibly employ. (a) You might want to expose some weakness, flaw, or gap in the reasoning in the position argued in the target article. (b) You might want to challenge the soundness of the article; in other words, you might want to criticize the target article’s position for resting upon a dubious premise or principle. (c) You might want to extend the conclusions of the target article to additional consequences not considered within the target article. (d) You might want bolster the argument within the target article by providing extra support for a weak premise or inference or by anticipating and addressing possible criticisms of the target article’s position. Note: You will do the actual work of employing these possible strategies within the body of your commentary; however, you want to clearly state what the aim of your commentary will be (for example, to criticize, to amplify/extend, or to further support the article’s position). These of course are not the only strategies you might employ; feel free to discuss any other ideas you might have with Dave or the editor of the class journal.

II. Short Distillation of Target Article’s Argument:

The second section of your commentary should be a short distillation of the target paper’s argument. This section should be between 1 and 3 paragraphs long. Summarize the author’s argument. Do not rehash your target paper blow-by-blow. Instead, condense the target article’s argument into its key propositions, defenses of premises, and conclusions. Try to give a charitable presentation of the target article and try to avoid evaluation.

III. Defending Your Assessment:

The largest portion of your commentary will be the defense of your assessment. You will probably want to begin by restating your evaluation of the target article. This is also the section where you do the actual work of attacking the reasoning of the target article’s arguments, attacking its soundness, pointing out additional implications of its arguments, or bolstering the argument’s conclusion by offering additional support for poorly-defended premises. Counterexamples are one highly effective way of demonstrating how a target article’s reasoning is bad. Whether you criticize or support the target article’s position, it is a good idea to anticipate possible criticisms of your own position. You shouldn’t try to address every possible criticism of your position, but you need to your position. Try to be concise and to use revealing examples. The length of this section of your commentary will be variable, but a length of 4 paragraphs is a good general guideline.

IV. Conclusion:

Your conclusion should restate your thesis and situate position in “intellectual space.” If you supported the target article’s position, you might state what work still needs to be done. If you criticized the target article, you might suggest preferred strategies for addressing unresolved philosophical issues. This is your last chance to convince your reader that they have not wasted their time reading your commentary.

Some Additional Suggestions:

(1) Be sure to give your commentary a title. The editor is quite likely crazy, and you never know what title your commentary will end up with if you leave it up to someone else.

(2) Your assessment claim should be your thesis. Be specific! Make your evaluation claim and indicate how your argument is going to unfold (i.e. how you are going to go about defending your assessment). Think of your thesis as providing a road map of what is coming up in the rest of your commentary.

(3) Make sure you cite all of your quotes and paraphrasing. Furthermore, try to avoid quoting. Quote only when you think it is absolutely necessary. Paraphrasing is almost always preferable to direct quotes. However, if you must quote, be sure to introduce the quote. Also, you should explicate the quote and try to give some reason as to why it is there.

(4) Keep in mind that commentaries are not simply a “trashing” of someone else’s work (even though that is fun). Be charitable. Point out what is valuable in the target article as well as what could stand for improvement. Don’t be a jerk.

(5) Finally, be prepared to revise (and revise again). The editor and referee reports will almost certainly offer helpful suggestions for improving your commentary.

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Monday, February 13, 2017

How to have a philosophical discussion (5/9/2021 update).

"Hmm, I really don't know much about that topic. I really should learn something about the issues before we have a conversation about it: if I don't do that, I'll just be making stuff up. Do you know much about the topic, or what good sources are? If so, what do you think I really need to know about it?"

Instead, many people are apt to respond in very confident, and often aggressive ways, even if they honestly don't know much about the topic . Their confidence is driven by their strong emotions — it's not driven by having carefully studied the issues, in fair and unbiased ways: it's not because they are a genuine expert on the issues, or even close.

An added layer here is that people often become emotionally invested in their views because of what groups they are members of. So, instead of learning about the issues in honestly fair and balanced ways, they ask what their political, religious, social, or other " identity-making " groups hold on the issues, feel that they must accept that view, and then accept it and passionately defend it. They feel that this is what "people like them" must believe: any other views are obviously and certainly wrong, and see people who hold alternative views as, at least, uninformed and naive, and, more typically, stupid, malicious, and bad, if not outright evil.

All this does not contribute to productive discussions since, at root, people are passionately certain that they are right and righteous and other people are wrong and vicious, even though they really know very little about the issues . There many discussions of these phenomena, such as this NY Times article ‘Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation .

All this is known as, or related to, what's called " confirmation bias ": we see to confirm our biases ! We do this to "confirm" our uniformed prejudices!

What can be done about this?

At the least, acknowledging out loud that this is how things often are is important: recognizing the possibility and likelihood that we are doing this ourselves is essential: we ourselves are part of the problem, and we can be part of the solution, one discussion at a time.

Some more suggestions are found below.

1. Topic?

To have a productive discussion, wou need to clearly identify a topic or issue. Sometimes that's easy, sometimes people "dance around" a topic — raising related issues about a topic — before getting an exact topic.

For examples, people might be discussing the topic of abortion: one person might be trying to think about the ethics of abortion, whereas another might be thinking about what the legality of abortion should be. Another example: people might be discussing drugs: one person is thinking about whether using drugs is a bad, unwise choice (or not) and another is thinking about what sort of social policies would be best overall.

2. Conclusions?

You need to identify a conclusion (s) about the topic. Sometimes you need to think about what various words in those conclusions mean : ask, "What do you mean?"

It can be very helpful to make a list (on paper) of all the possible (or relevant conclusions) on the topic: what are all the possible views people might hold here? These can be broad views ("Doing this is wrong") and narrow views ("Doing this is wrong in these exact circumstances: ____.") Even people who disagree can make these lists together.

3. Premises?

You need to identify a premise(s) or reason(s) given in favor of that conclusion. For many moral issues, at least one premise is often an empirical or scientific claim, and at least one premise is a moral principle , that is, a claim about when an action is wrong or not. Sometimes you need to think about what various words in those premises mean : ask, "What do you mean?"

In discussing issues with people you think you disagree with, it is often useful for people to try to state the reasons that they think people who disagree with them have for their views on the issues. People, unfortunately, often have no accurate understanding of what people who disagree with them think, and why they think that. Being able to "mirror" someone else's views: "You think this __ because you believe ___" and then confirming that's correct or not, and then getting correction if needed is essential for effective discussions.

Note: we will want to strike question-begging premises , that is, premises that assume the conclusion. Learning how to do that is important.

4. Unstated Premises?

For any premises given in support of a conclusion, you usually need to also identify an unstated premise(s) or reason(s) given in favor of that conclusion: these are part of the argument, but are sometimes not yet stated. (However, sometimes they are!) These premises need to be identified so the full argument is stated. Doing this is often called stating the argument in logically valid form . This handout and this video give guidance on doing that:

5. Soundness?

Once the full pattern of reasoning is stated, i.e., it is in logically valid form, you need to evaluate the argument as sound or not: are the premises true or false, supported by good evidence or not? If at least one premise is false, then the argument is sound and does not provide a good reason to accept the conclusion. You need to check the facts to see if any factual claims are true, and try to identify any strong counterexamples to any moral principles.

Passionate people often have a hard time acknowledging that any arguments given in support of their point of view are, or could be, bad arguments. But they should: not all arguments given even for true or quite reasonable conclusions are good arguments! Become comfortable with acknowledging that!

This process of stating and evaluating arguments can and should be repeated with any and all premises given in favor of a conclusion, and for different conclusions and the premises given in their favor. You must focus on one and only one argument at a time.

More details forthcoming!

Note: this was updated on 5/9/2021 to include the initial psychological and emotional observations and the bolded sections below those.

No comments:

What is Philosophy?

Author: Thomas Metcalf Category: Metaphilosophy Word count: 1000

Listen here , video below

If you’ve ever wondered whether God exists, whether life has purpose, whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what makes actions right or wrong, or whether a law is fair or just, then you’ve thought about philosophy. And these are just a few philosophical topics.

But what is philosophy? The question is itself a philosophical question. This essay surveys some answers.

1. Defining Philosophy

The most general definition of philosophy is that it is the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and knowledge. [1] Indeed, the word itself means ‘love of wisdom’ in Greek.

Whenever people think about deep, fundamental questions concerning the nature of the universe and ourselves, the limits of human knowledge, their values and the meaning of life, they are thinking about philosophy. Philosophical thinking is found in all parts of the world, present, and past. [2]

In the academic world, philosophy distinguishes a certain area of study from all other areas, such as the sciences and other humanities. Philosophers typically consider questions that are, in some sense, broader and/or more fundamental than other inquirers’ questions: [3] e.g., physicists ask what caused some event; philosophers ask whether causation even exists ; historians study figures who fought for justice; philosophers ask what justice is or whether their causes were in fact just; economists study the allocation of capital; philosophers debate the ethical merits of capital ism .

When a topic becomes amenable to rigorous, empirical study, it tends to be “outsourced” to its own field, and not described in the present day as “philosophy” anymore: e.g., the natural sciences were once called “natural philosophy,” but we don’t now just think about whether matter is composed of atoms or infinitely divisible: we use scientific experiments. [4] And most of the different doctoral degrees are called “Doctor of Philosophy” even when they’re in sociology or chemistry.

Philosophical questions can’t be straightforwardly investigated through purely empirical means: [5] e.g., try to imagine a lab experiment testing whether societies should privilege equality over freedom—not whether people believe we should, but whether we actually should . What does moral importance look like in a microscope?

The main method of academic philosophy is to construct and evaluate arguments (i.e., reasons intended to justify some conclusion). Such conclusions might be that some theory is true or false or might be about the correct analysis or definition of some concept. These arguments generally have at least some conceptual, intellectual, or a priori , i.e., non-empirical, content. And philosophers often incorporate relevant scientific knowledge as premises in arguments. [6]

2. Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy deals with fundamental questions. But which questions, specifically, is philosophy about? Here’s a standard categorization: [7]

Logic : Logicians study good and bad arguments and reasoning, and they study formal, symbolic languages intended to express propositions, sentences, or arguments. [8]

Metaphysics : Metaphysicians study what sorts of entities exist, what the world and its constituents are made of, and how objects or events might cause or explain each other. [9]

Epistemology : Epistemologists study knowledge, evidence, and justified belief. An epistemologist might study whether we can trust our senses and whether science is trustworthy. [10]

Values : In value theory, philosophers study morality, politics, and art, among other topics. For example: What makes wrong actions wrong? How do we identify good people and good lives? What makes a society just or unjust? [11]

There are many sub-branches within these fields. Many other fields— the sciences, art, literature, and religion—have a “philosophy of” attached to them: e.g., philosophers of science might help interpret quantum mechanics; philosophers of religion often consider arguments about the existence of God. [12]

There are also unique and important philosophical discussions about certain populations or communities, such as feminist philosophy and Africana philosophy. [13] People from all cultures contribute to philosophy, more than are typically discussed in Western philosophy courses. [14] Western academic philosophy has often neglected voices from non-Western cultures, and women’s voices. [15]

Philosophers sometimes import tools, knowledge, and language from other fields, such as using the formal tools of statistics in epistemology and the insights from special relativity in the philosophy of time. [16] When your project is understanding all of existence [17] in the broadest and most fundamental way, you need all the help you can get.

3. The Point(s) of Philosophy

Academic philosophy doesn’t present a body of consensus knowledge the way chemistry and physics do. [18] Do philosophical questions have correct answers? Does philosophical progress exist? Does philosophy get closer to the truth over time? [19] These are all matters of philosophical debate. [20] And philosophical debates are rarely resolved with certainty.

So what’s the point? Here are some answers: [21]

To discover truth, wherever and whatever it is. [22]
To learn how to better live our lives. [23]
To understand our own views, including their strengths and weaknesses.
To examine our own lives and be more conscious of our choices and their implications.
To learn how to better think and reason. Recall: The main method of philosophy is to present and examine arguments. [24]

And arguably, all of us are already naturally interested in at least some philosophical questions. Many people find that philosophy is a lot of fun. And it’s difficult to dispute that it is very important to find the answers to philosophical questions, if the answers exist. It’s important to know, for instance, that slavery is wrong and whether scientific consensus is generally trustworthy. So as long as it’s at least possible to find the answers to these questions, we should try.

Also, there are strong correlations between studying philosophy and high achievement in other academic areas, such as GRE scores and professional-school admission. [25]

4. Conclusion

We’ve contrasted philosophy with other fields. We’ve looked at the branches of philosophy. And we’ve looked at the purposes or benefits of philosophy. But what is philosophy, really? Given everything we’ve said so far, we can provide at least a partial definition of ‘philosophy’ as follows:

A largely (but not exclusively) non-empirical inquiry that attempts to identify and answer fundamental questions about the world, including about what’s valuable and disvaluable.

Is this a good definition? That’s a philosophical question too.

Acknowledgments

This entry has benefited enormously from the comments and suggestions of Shane Gronholz, Chelsea Haramia, Dan Lowe, and Nathan Nobis.

[1] Berkeley 2003 [1710]: 5; Blackburn 1999: 1.

[2] Some of the oldest formal philosophy writing we have is attributed to a group of ancient Greek philosophers called the ‘Pre-Socratics,’ because they wrote before Socrates and Plato did (cf. Curd 2019). The earliest Upanishads may go back even further (Olivelle 1998: 4 ff.).

[3] This is similar to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s (n.d.) definition: “the rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole or of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience.”

[4] See e.g., Berryman 2020 on ancient atomism.

[5] Metcalf 2018.

[6] Most philosophers believe that the sciences provide knowledge relevant to traditional philosophical issues. That is, most philosophers endorse the meta-philosophy of ‘naturalism,’ according to which philosophy should be informed by the natural sciences. The usual justification for naturalism is based on the track-record of the natural sciences, including their tending toward consensus. See Bourget and Chalmers 2014: 476; Metcalf 2018; and Papineau 2019. For examples of the relevance of science to traditional philosophical issues, see Ingram and Tallent (2019: § 8); Wilce 2019; and Knobe and Nichols 2019. In these examples, special relativity may be relevant to philosophy of time; quantum mechanics may be relevant to philosophy of logic; and social science may be relevant to ethics.

[7] This is a version of common anthologies’ categorizations. See e.g., Blackburn 1999: vii and Rosen et al. 2015.

[8] Logicians can also study logics about obligation (McNamara 2019), about necessity and possibility (Garson 2019), and whether useful logics can contain sentences that are both true and false simultaneously (Priest et al. 2019).

[9] Van Inwagen and Sullivan 2019.

[10] Steup 2019; Metcalf 2020.

[11] Value theorists also study specific topics, such as our obligations to animals (Gruen 2019) and whether governments can be legitimate (Peter 2019). See also Haramia 2018 (the entry on applied ethics in 1000-Word Philosophy ) for an overview of applied ethics.

[12] Indeed, one area where people see many connections is with religion. So what’s the difference between philosophy and religion? This is not an easy question to answer, but most religious practice proceeds from a shared starting-point consensus body of putative knowledge, and these beliefs are almost all about God or gods, the afterlife, and how to live a pious life. In contrast, in philosophy, everything is constantly open to question, and the topics are much broader than gods and the afterlife.

[13] See e.g., McAfee 2019 and Outlaw 2019.

[14] Van Norden 2017.

[15] See e.g., Van Norden (op. cit.) and Buxton and Whiting 2020.

[16] Indeed, one popular metaphilosophical view is methodological naturalism about philosophy, according to which philosophy should use the methods of the natural sciences. Some naturalists go so far as to say that traditional philosophical methods should be replaced by scientific methods. See Metcalf 2018 and Papineau 2019 for more discussion. As for tools and knowledge from other fields, statistical and probabilistic analysis is common in many areas of philosophy (see, e.g., Weisberg 2019) and special relativity may tell us something important about the philosophy of time (Ingram and Tallant 2019).

[17] And maybe even the objects that don’t exist; see Reicher 2019.

[18] Bourget and Chalmers 2014. Arguably, there is consensus about many philosophical questions, but we don’t consider those questions in academic philosophy, at least not anymore. For example, almost everyone knows that slavery is wrong and that women should be allowed to vote if anyone is. See also Gutting 2009 for a general survey of some apparent philosophical discoveries.

[19] Cf. Chalmers 2015.

[20] See, e.g., Miller 2019.

[21] See Bierce 2008; de Montaigne 1987: 204; Russell 2010: 20 for some other statements about the nature or purpose of philosophy.

[22] Bierce 2008.

[23] De Montaigne 1987: 204.

[24] See e.g., Groarke 2019.

[25] Daily Nous n.d. However, we do not yet know what proportion of this is a ‘selection effect’—people who are already smart major in philosophy—and how much of this is a ‘treatment effect,’ i.e., majoring in philosophy actually makes you smarter.

Berkeley, George. 2003 [1710]. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge . Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Classics.

Berryman, Sylvia. 2019. “Ancient Atomism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019 Edition.

Bierce, Ambrose. 2008. “The Devil’s Dictionary.” In Project Gutenberg (ed.), Project Gutenberg.

Blackburn, Simon. 1999. Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy . Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Bourget, David and David J. Chalmers. 2014. “What Do Philosophers Believe?” Philosophical Studies 170(3): 465-500.

Buxton, Rebecca and Lisa Whiting. 2020. The Philosopher Queens: The Lives and Legacies of Philosophy’s Unsung Women. London, UK: Unbound Publishers.

Chalmers, David J. 2015. “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?” Philosophy 90(1): 3-31.

Curd, Patricia. 2019. “Presocratic Philosophy.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Daily Nous. n.d. “Value of Philosophy.”

De Montaigne, Michel. 1987. Complete Essays . Tr. M. A. Screech. London, UK: Penguin Books.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. N.d. “Philosophy.” In The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (eds.), Encyclopaedia Britannica , Online Edition.

Garson, James. 2019. “Modal Logic.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Groarke, Leo. 2019. “Informal Logic.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019 Edition.

Gruen, Lori. 2019. “The Moral Status of Animals.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Gutting, Gary. 2009. What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ingram, David and Jonathan Tallant. 2019. “Presentism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Knobe, Joshua and Shaun Nichols. 2019. “Experimental Philosophy.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019 Edition.

Markosian, Ned. 2019. “Time.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

McAfee, Noëlle. 2019. “Feminist Philosophy.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019 Edition.

McNamara, Paul. 2019. “Deontic Logic.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Miller, Alexander. 2019. “Realism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Olivelle, Patrick (tr. and ed.). 1998. The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation . New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Outlaw, Lucius T. Jr. 2019. “Africana Philosophy.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Papineau, David. 2019. “Naturalism.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Peter, Fabienne. 2019. “Political Legitimacy.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Priest, Graham et al. 2019. “Paraconsistent Logic.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Reicher, Maria. 2019. “Nonexistent Objects.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Rosen, Gideon et al. 2015. The Norton Introduction to Philosophy , Second Edition. New York, NY and London, UK: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Russell, Bertrand. 2010. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism . Oxford, UK: Routledge Classics.

Sartwell, Crispin. 2019. “Beauty.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Steup, Matthias. 2019. “Epistemology.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Van Inwagen, Peter and Meghan Sullivan. 2019. “Metaphysics.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Van Norden, Bryan W. 2017. Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto . New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Weisberg, Jonathan. 2019. “Formal Epistemology.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

Wilce, Alexander. 2019. “Quantum Logic and Probability Theory.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Winter 2019 Edition.

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Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers

Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro, and Andrea Roselli (eds.), Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers , Routledge, 2023, 260pp., $180.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781032288567.

Reviewed by Andrew L. McFarland, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Over the last several decades conversations about dispositions (or powers) have been commonplace among philosophers. [1] According to dispositionalists, properties like fragility are said to have triggers (or stimulus conditions)—like dropping a glass onto the floor—that bring about their manifestations, e.g., breaking, cracking, shattering, etc. What’s more, triggers and manifestations are often claimed to play some sort of individuating role with respect to powers. These considerations raise a philosophical question. Are powers— fragility , flammability , solubility , and the like—ontologically simple or complex? If they are complex, can we understand them compositionally? For example, is breaking a part of the power of fragility ? Or is talk of parthood merely an instance of speaking with the vulgar? This thought-provoking collection of twelve essays edited by Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro, and Andrea Roselli, addresses the ontological complexity of dispositions. The editors partition the essays into three sections: Part 1, “Parts of Powers” discusses part-whole relations “within a power”; Part 2, “Composition of Powers”, discusses mereological relations “among powers”; Part 3, “Power Mereology in Science” is devoted to issues in the philosophy of science. For this review I will try to summarize some main takeaways from each essay and offer critical and constructive remarks where appropriate.

In their introduction, the editors motivate the discussion with the claim that the literature on powers and dispositions often assumes that powers are simple, fundamental entities. Further, they claim that multi-track accounts—accounts which say that powers are individuated by more than one type of stimulus/manifestation—only “organize the complex manifestation of certain powers into ‘tracks’ but do not explain how this complex manifestation derives from the power” (1). Austin expands on this criticism later in Ch. 3. Multi-tracking accounts only tell us about the “counterfactuals assigned to a single power” (63). This can tell us about the “truthmaking relations that power is involved in”, but “these relations are incapable of providing meaningful information about the nature of powers” (63). Thus, these accounts treat powers as “little more than ‘black boxes’ whose extrinsic complexity stems from a we-know-not-what intrinsic metaphysical foundation” (64).

The first two contributions, Aaron Cotnoir’s chapter, “Carving up the Network of Powers” (Ch. 1), and the second essay from Robert Koons, “Parts and Grounds of Powers” (Ch. 2), are by far the most formal and systematic of the essays.

Cotnoir develops a graph-theoretic network of powers that can—following Plato’s metaphor—be carved according to natural joints, and he considers three methods for carving this network: subcollection , clustering , and coordination . Meanwhile, Koons develops an approach on behalf of the “extreme nominalist” (42), which builds powers out of equivalence classes of conditional facts, and invokes a sui generis conditional that expresses “the fact that if a certain n- tuple of thing were in a certain condition A , some joint power of those things would manifest itself in outcome B ” (42). Both Cotnoir’s and Koons’ systems offer ways to assess the “naturalness” of the resulting complexes: Cotnoir suggests that “unnaturalness” can be measured by the degree of crosscutting between clusters, while Koons suggests a criterion for determining when entities are of the same natural kind.

In Ch. 3, “Complex Powers: Making Many One”, Christopher Austin identifies two ways in which powers can be regarded as complex: “polygeny”—the idea that for a power there can be “many distinct inputs which causally contribute toward the coming about of its manifestation” (61)—and “pleiotrophy”, “which occurs when a single power has many distinct manifestations which may produce from the obtaining of one or more distinct stimuli” (62). An account of the complexity of powers, Austin argues, must accommodate these varieties of complexity in telling a metaphysical story about when many powers become one. After critiquing the metaphysical inadequacy of multi-tracking accounts, he goes on to consider two strategies, essentialist and emergentist accounts, but concludes ultimately that neither of these approaches is satisfactory. However, the main lesson seems to be that an account of the unity of complex powers needs to fall somewhere between accepting mereological fusions and emergence.

In Ch. 4, “Powers as Mereological Lawmakers”, Michael Traynor takes a bottom-up approach about mereological laws. Traynor begins with two Inclusion Principles, along with remarks by George Molnar (2003), to generate an argument that powers can be parts of objects. He goes on to argue that “powers give rise to mereological laws” and considers implications for this claim with respect to debates about whether mereological laws (paralleling similar arguments about laws of nature) are metaphysically necessary or contingent.

Nicky Kroll’s essay, “Determinable Dispositions” (Ch. 5) forgoes a mereological approach altogether and instead assesses the complexity of dispositions in terms of the determinate / determinable relation. Kroll cites Quine’s (1956) observation that desires can be non-specific and goes on to argue that dispositions can be non-specific as well. He goes on to draw three lessons: (i) that determinable dispositions are distinct from multi-track dispositions; (ii) many alleged multi-track dispositions—fragility, irascibility, knowing French—are in fact determinable dispositions; (iii) standard arguments for the claim that a disposition is multi-track turn out to be invalid.

In Ch. 6, Sophie Allen distinguishes between cases of direct composition —the part and the whole are instantiated by the same individual—and cases of indirect composition —cases where an individual is a proper part of another. Allen gives several quite helpful examples, e.g., “The power to spring is part of the power to jump 7.5m.” (113), to make a compelling case that direct composition of powers takes place. However, she gives relatively short shrift to her criticisms of indirect composition. For example, one might appeal to Kathrin Koslicki (2008), whose hylomorphic mereology posits structural proper parts, as a way of \ responding to Allen’s worry about indirect composition violating extensionality.

In Ch. 7, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss explores the non-mereological issue of the logical complexity (i.e., disjunctive) of variables for interventionist models of causation. She argues that interventionist models should make use of disjunctive variables, like “1 if Person P consumes apples or apple products or does not take a pain killer; 0 otherwise”, but that these conflict with proposed definitions “intervention”. However, she claims that these problems can be addressed if interventionists take the values of variables to be properties that “confer conditional causal powers on their bearers” à la Sydney Shoemaker (1980).

In Ch. 8 Xi-Yang Guo and Matthew Tugby sketch and defend an account of collective instantiation analogous to plural instantiation. Key to their argument is the idea of distributive occurrences of predication and instantiation: G occurs distributively where “ the Fs are G is equivalent to each F is G ” (148). For example, “The students in my class are engaged” might distribute to “Each student in my class is engaged”. By contrast, a predicate like “make a star pattern” in “The lights make a star pattern” does not distribute, since the claim is not equivalent to “Each light makes a star pattern”. Thus, according to Guo and Tugby, “make a star pattern” is a non-distributive, collective predicate. However, I’m not so sure that denying distribution entails collectivity. Take examples of generics or bare plurals. “Mosquitos carry yellow fever” does not distribute to “Each mosquito carries yellow fever”. But it also seems incorrect to say that “carries yellow fever” is collectively predicated of the class of all mosquitos since only a couple of species are associated with carrying the disease. Collective predication/instantiation seems to require more than just being non-distributive.

Joaquim Giannotti’s Ch. 9 considers a special composition question about powers (an analogue to the special composition question for material objects), and argues that a modified version of Marmodoro’s (2017) answer is the best way to achieve a restricted (i.e., neither a nihilist nor a universalist) answer to when powers compose. Gianotti goes on to argue that this refined “Marmodoro Condition”, combined with other premises from quantum theory, yields the conclusion that there is an entity he calls the “powerful cosmos”, an object “composed of all the compossible fundamental powers instantiated across the universe” (168).

In Ch. 10 Michele Paolini Paoletti argues for the compatibility of a “naïve view of powers” and the idea that powers compose. According to Paoletti, the “naïve” view holds that there is a “strict, one-to-one correspondence between powers, their bearers, and their manifestations and activations, on the one hand, and the causes, effects, and causal processes on the other” (185). To close out the collection, the third and final section, Part 3, begins with Matteo Morganti’s (Ch. 11) essay, which explores a “Simple Theory” of property composition, where complex properties are “nothing over and above” their constituents, and argues that one can understand the properties of quantum entangled systems by invoking metaphysical coherentism. Simone Gozzano (Ch. 12) completes the collection by considering whether phenomenal states, like tasting white wine, can be considered complex dispositional properties composed of constituents like the experience of the taste of hay, or the taste of green apple. These are further decomposable into protophenomenal atoms, resulting in a picture that fits into current discussions about Russellian monism and panpsychism.

As one can see the essays display at times very different approaches to the question of the complexity of powers. As a result, the attempt to group certain essays into Parts 1, 2, and 3 is a little strained at times. For instance, Cotnoir’s piece on carving a network of powers seemed more appropriate for Part 2 about the relations between powers, while Allen’s might be a better fit for Part 1 on part-whole relations within a power. In a similar vein, it’s clear that not every essay in the collection is about the mereology of powers—notably Kroll approaches complex powers in terms of the determinable/determinate distinction, Hoffmann-Kolss is concerned with the logical complexity of variables for interventionism, Guo and Tugby sketch an account of collective instantiation, and Morganti explicitly says he’s not concerned with a mereological notion of composition and instead focuses on the factorizability of probabilities for entangled quantum systems. In this respect, the book’s subtitle, “Essays on the Mereology of Powers” is a bit of a misnomer; perhaps “Essays on the Metaphysical Complexity of Powers” would have been more appropriate. After all, understanding the ontological complexity of powers needn’t only be cashed out mereologically, and a research question like this may benefit from looking at the theoretical landscape in several divergent ways.

Overall, there’s much of interest to be gleaned from this book. It covers a wide range of approaches to the question of the metaphysical complexity of powers, both mereological and non-mereological alike. Despite some deviation from the editors’ stated goal of offering a mereological approach to the complexity of powers, I think the book can be framed as having a different and broader aim: to examine the ontological complexity of powers by offering a more metaphysically robust story, one that goes beyond merely saying that powers are individuated by their stimuli or manifestations. With this aim in mind, I think the book shows that there’s quite a bit of potentially fruitful philosophical ground here left to explore.

Koslicki, K. (2008). The Structure of Objects . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marmodoro, A. (2017). “Power Mereology: Structural Powers Versus Substantial Powers” in

Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Downward Causation , Eds. M. Paolini Paoletti, F. Orilia, 110–129. New York: Routledge.

Molnar, G. (2003). Powers: A Study in Metaphysics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quine, W.V. (1956). “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes”. Journal of Philosophy , 53 (5), 177–187.

Shoemaker, S. (1980). “Causality and Properties” in Time and Cause: Essays Presented to

Richard Taylor , Ed. P. Van Inwagen, Reidel: 109–136.

[1] I will follow the convention set by the editors and several contributors by using “power” and “disposition” interchangeably.

283 Philosophical Questions to Spark Deep Critical Thinking

Philosophy has implications for daily life. Pick a handful of these 255 questions as a starting point for thinking critically.

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It can be easy to get so caught up in daily life that we forget to stop and think about our world. Thinking about philosophical questions can help you think critically.

Building a practice of thinking critically of the world will empower you to make decisions that you feel confident in—whether it’s how you vote, spend your time, or use your resources.

If you’re looking for where to start, check out this list of philosophical questions!

What is a Philosophical Question?

A philosophical question often doesn’t have a clear, straightforward answer. They are questions that usually require deep thought and sometimes don’t have answers.

Philosophical questions typically involve human nature, the origins of the universe, morality, ethics, and the afterlife.

Philosophical Questions About Behavior

Humans are complex beings, and our world is also complicated. This can make it hard to parse the good from the bad and right from wrong. Take a moment to consider some of these philosophical questions about behavior and human nature.

What is the difference between good and bad people?
Is it essential to be a “good person”?
What makes people feel more attached to some people than others?
Is tribalism, or looking out for others like you, innately good, bad, or neutral?
If one existed apart from other humans, would they still value goodness?
Are there moral commonalities amongst diverse people groups and cultures?
Are individuals important, and if so, in what ways?
Are humans more important than other animals? Why or why not?
Are some people more important than others?
Is the death penalty right or wrong?
What should be the repercussions for wronging someone else?
What is wisdom?
Is wisdom a helpful tool?
Why is wisdom often associated with age?
If a person has an accident and is no longer able to contribute to society, has their value as a person decreased, increased, or stayed the same?
Can people change?
How does one become a “good person”?
If someone’s personality changes, does that mean they have also changed?
Can you ever honestly know another person?
If someone’s intentions were good but the outcome of an action is terrible, at that moment, is the person good or bad?
If someone does a kind deed but has a selfish motive, does that impact the goodness of the deed?
When babies are born, are they good?
If identical twins grew up never knowing each other, how similar and different would they be?
Is there ever a justifiable reason to kill someone?
Are people born with a specific personality, or is the character the result of their circumstances?
Is lying ever a good thing?
If you steal money but use it to save someone’s life, does that justify the theft?
Should someone being ignorant be a valid excuse for their rudeness?
Can we choose our emotions, or do they happen to us?

Watch our video below to learn how to start a conversation with anyone using these killer conversation starters:

Philosophy Questions About Love

“Love is a biological necessity. We cannot live without it” —Stephanie Cacioppo, neuroscientist specializing in love and loneliness

As people, we need to love and be loved. You can express love in many different ways. Use these questions to spark some critical thought on the topic of love, or check out these truth or dare questions while you’re at it.

What is love?
How do you know you are loved?
How do you know that you love someone?
Is the desire to be loved an innate human desire?
Why do people desire love?
Does love necessitate action, or can it exist simply as a feeling?
In what ways are love, lust, and sexual desire different from one another?
Is an understanding of pain necessary to appreciate love?
Does the loss of love change one’s outlook on life?
Can one show love without first being loved? Is love an intrinsic aspect of human nature or a reciprocated act?
Are there different forms of love such as parental, friendship, or romantic? Or are they all diverse expressions of the same substance?
Can romantic love for one person last forever?
Can love ever be a bad thing?
How does unreciprocated love affect people?
What does falling in love mean?
What causes someone to fall in love?
Does love feel different to different people?
Is love, health, or money more important?
Can you choose to feel love for someone?
Does being loved by more people correlate to a person’s value?
Is there a difference in depth of love versus quantity of love?
To love someone well, do you need to show their love how they want to be loved, or can you love them the way you naturally show love?

Pro Tip: If you’re interested in learning more about different ways to show love, read up on the five love languages .

Is there “The one?”
What does it mean to love yourself?
Do you need to love yourself before you can love others?
Is loving yourself selfish?
Is it essential to have a friendship with your partner?
If your partner grew up in an abusive household, are you more understanding of unhealthy behavior?
Would you rather be respected or loved?

Fun Philosophical Questions

Philosophy can be fun! If you think philosophy is all heavily intellectual, overwhelming, abstract, or existential-crisis-inducing, take a moment to ponder if a hot dog is a taco.

Are you currently dreaming, and how do you know?
Do memories exist even if you forget them?
Does grass feel pain when you step on it?
Can trees feel pain?
Does 1+1 always equal 2?
Would it be ethical, unethical, or neutral if time travel were possible?
If time travel were possible, would it be wrong to change history?
What is the purpose of humor?
Why are jokes funny?
If one person doesn’t find a joke funny, does it mean they have a lousy sense of humor, or is the joke flawed?
Are humans responsible in any way for caring for wild animals?
Can inanimate objects be either bad or good?
Does morality bind animals?
Is water wet?
Are hot dogs tacos?
Is it wrong to visit a zoo, thereby financially supporting an establishment that isn’t ideal for the animals?
Is it wrong to purchase fast fashion , rapidly produced clothing that uses manufacturing methods that negatively impact the environment and exploit workers?
In a fictional world, could you have a five-sided square?
How do we know what words mean?
Why do some people feel scared while watching a horror movie even though they know it is not real?
What would you say if you had five minutes to defend the human race in front of a group of aliens who were going to obliterate humanity?
Are there any physiological changes you would make humans make us a better species?
Should the legal age for alcohol consumption be different than it is?
If your life expectancy suddenly increased to 500 years, would you live differently than you currently are? What about if your life expectancy decreased and you only had five more years to live?
If immortality were possible, would you want to be immortal?

Questions from Philosophy About Human Rights

What are human rights? Whose job is it to ensure that all humans have rights? These types of questions can be multifaceted and hard. It can be easy to avoid them or think they’re someone else’s job.

However, your daily choices can have a ripple effect on other people’s lives. Whether with who you vote for or how you spend your money, how you live impacts others.

Take some time to consider what you believe human rights are if everyone is entitled to them, and whose job it is to ensure everyone has rights.

What are human rights?
Is autonomy a human right?
Is liberty a human right?
Is free speech a human right?
What is the difference between a human right and a privilege?
Is it the responsibility of privileged individuals or the government to bridge gaps between privileged and disadvantaged people?
If people are spreading misinformation, should they still be allowed to continue?
Should abortion be legal?
At what point in human development, from a fetus to a baby, does one become a person and gain rights?
Is war ever necessary or even reasonable?
How can societies work to dismantle systemic racism, ableism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination?
If two people’s opinions differ, how should they resolve their differences?
Has technology made it easier or harder to advance human rights?
Is it the responsibility of wealthy countries to support impoverished countries?
Should women’s rights be a priority to men? Why or why not?
What makes a person a person?
If a person has lost consciousness and doctors know they will not regain it, but their organs are still functioning, are they still a person?
Is the internet good, bad, or neutral?
Is being able to financially support a family a human right, or is having a large family a privilege?
Do more humans have fundamental rights in the modern world, or have we lost human rights as time has progressed?
If you could ensure every person on the planet would have access to a single human right, which one would you choose? Would there be any repercussions?
What rights should prisoners of war have?
Do you think those serial killers have an equal value to other people, or do their actions impact their value?
Is privacy a human right?
Is technological advancement minimizing our privacy?

Philosophical Questions About Society and Government

When we look at the societies we live in, they often have good and bad elements. These questions can help you think critically about the structures in place in your country.

Are there any innately evil governmental structures?
What would a perfect society look like?
How involved should governments be in caring for the individuals in their country?
If you could create your society, what would look different from the one where you live now?
What role should the government have in the lives of individuals?
What makes a good leader?
Can someone do a bad thing and still be a good person?
Is prison the best way to protect society and correct individuals?
Does the legal system function fairly?
Is technology good?
Can technology advance society in a way that is beneficial?
Are taxes morally right?
Should it be lawful for citizens to hold protests? What if a handful of the protestors make it violent?
What makes people work together despite differences?
Does societal advancement only happen with collaboration?
In what ways can disagreements advance society?
What makes a crime a crime?
How should citizens who believe the laws in their country be unjust behave? Is it okay for them to ignore those laws and are still bound to do what the law asks of them?
Is it morally wrong to abstain from voting?
Is it wrong for governments not to have healthcare available to all citizens?
Should things that are bad for people be banned by the government, or is it the individual’s responsibility to avoid harmful substances?
Is there an age at which people should be answerable for their actions?
Is it discriminatory not to allow certain people to run for government office?
Is it okay to limit immigration if a country is worried it will lose its culture?
Should the government regulate what food manufacturers can and can’t put in their food?
Is the government responsible for ensuring people receive a livable wage?
Should those who live an unhealthy lifestyle have decreased access to healthcare?
What would the ideal government look like?

Philosophical Questions Related to Culture

Culture can be a complicated issue to wrap your head around. When you travel or talk to someone from a different background, you may immediately notice surface-layer cultural differences such as what food people eat and what type of clothing they wear.

However, as you get to know a culture better, you may realize there are deep-seated differences, perspectives, and traditions.

These questions will help you think about the differences between cultures and if there are any aspects of culture that are innately good or bad.

What is culture?
How does culture form?
Is it important to be mindful of other cultures, and if so, why?
Are some cultures better than others?
Is morality developed within a culture, or is it intrinsic?
Is there a wrong way to discipline children?
In what way is a family-oriented culture better or worse than an individualistic culture?
Are individualistic cultures intrinsically selfish?
What is success?
Does income play a part in how you define success?
Does the culture you were raised in impact your outlook on life?
If someone has recently relocated to a new country, should there be leniency for breaking minor laws they did not know about, or should they be prosecuted the same as their counterpart raised in that culture?
If a group practices human sacrifice as part of their culture, does that make it okay? Would you be wrong to try to save the person they would sacrifice?
Is attractiveness a cultural construct?

Philosophical Questions About Space and the Universe

Humans have long been in awe of space. Our recorded fascination with space reaches back to ancient philosophers.

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upward and leads us from this world to another.” —Plato

However, it has only been in the past 75 years that humanity has started studying space up-close—and there’s still so much we don’t know about the universe we live in. These questions can help you find new ways to think about the world around you and how that informs your day-to-day life.

Where does the Earth come from?
Did a deity or event start the universe?
Does the universe’s origin affect how one lives, and if so, how?
Does the vastness of space impact the way you perceive yourself?
Do things about the universe imply it exists due to chance or design?
Is it the duty of those currently alive to be ecologically responsible?
Is the Earth the only planet inhabited by living beings?
Is anything in the world eternal?
Is time eternal?
Did time, as we now perceive it starts at a specific moment?
Will time continue to run after the human species no longer exists?
If we find another inhabitable planet, would there be any moral implications if humans left the earth and moved there?
Should space travel be accessible to all people?
Is it good, bad, or neutral that humans have invested so many resources into space exploration?
Is there a difference between faith and superstition?
If a deity exists, would it exist within our understanding of morality?

Philosophical Questions to Ask Kids

Philosophical questions can be challenging for children. Philosophy is often large and abstract. Because they’ve been alive for less time, children typically have fewer life experiences than adults to draw on when answering philosophical questions.

However, some of these questions are ones that small children are already wondering about. You may have heard them ask what happened to their goldfish after it died or struggle with differentiating emotions like happiness and sadness.

Introducing a few of these conversations may help the children in your life realize these are conversations you are ready and willing to have any time they have questions.

What does it mean to feel happy?
Why are some things right and some things wrong?
Is it necessary to be nice to people, and why?
What is kindness?
Is being kind and being nice the same thing?
What is the difference between good and evil?
What happens to pets when they die?
What are things that you know to be certain?
What is something that you believe and why?
If superheroes were real, would they be more responsible for protecting people than you are or equally accountable?
Does helping people make you feel good? Why or why not?
What is the difference between adults and children?
What, if anything, makes a person different from an animal?
Is social media good, bad, or neutral?
How do you know that you belong?

Challenging Ethical Questions to Consider

The philosophical subtopic of ethics involves weighing between challenging scenarios and deciding which option is morally right. The challenges raised within ethics can often be incredibly challenging to sort out, and they are ones you may run into in life.

Remember, even if someone sees a topic differently than you do, it’s essential to be respectful and have conversations without getting vertigo from the “dizzying heights of your moral ground.”

Is it wrong to kill one person if it might save the lives of hundreds of others?
Is using euthanasia to intentionally end a life to prevent further pain and suffering immoral?
Should people be allowed to commit medically induced suicide?
Was former President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs unethical? Some argue that it saved many lives by ending the war quicker. Does that change the ethics of killing civilians during a time of war?
Is bribery ever acceptable or ethical?
If your friend’s significant other drinks too much alcohol and flirts with you, should you tell your friend about it and probably hurt them with the knowledge, or wait and see if it was a one-time thing that won’t ever happen again?
Is eating animals unethical or not?
Is it ethical to test products on animals?
If someone passed away in a car accident and their lungs could save someone’s life who would otherwise die before another donor became available, would it be wrong to use the lungs as a transplant if the person who passed was not a registered organ donor?
Is it okay to harm one person if it means protecting others?
Is being a billionaire in a world where people are starving unethical or do you feel that it is alright if they worked hard and earned their wealth?
Is war ever ethical?

Questions About Religion and Morality

These are profound questions that have to do with one’s worldview. Many of these topics, such as life after death, cannot know with certainty, but they are worth thinking about anyway.

Is it possible to not believe anything, or does everyone have beliefs?
What happens after death?
Is there a god?
Is there an afterlife?
Do people have free will?
Is your soul reborn after you die?
Does your worldview impact the way you make day-to-day decisions?
Where do people come from?
Is there an age at which people are morally responsible for their decisions?
Is there such a thing as fate?
Is luck a real thing?
Does chance exist?
Does life have meaning? If so, what is the meaning of life?
Does having a religious experience prove the existence of a god?
Is there absolute truth?
Who determines right from wrong?
Is the world progressively becoming worse?
Why does evil exist?

Abstract Philosophical Questions

Topics like pain, suffering, beauty, and joy are a part of daily life, but how often do you stop to think about them?

Use these questions to help you do just that!

What is beauty?
Are pain and beauty interconnected?
Is it a shared element between a beautiful person, experience, or memory?
Why do people value happiness, beauty, or joy?
If your life were to end tomorrow, would you be happy with how you had spent your time?
What would you want it to say if someone were to write a book about you?
What gives your life meaning and purpose?
Can pain be a good thing?
Does learning a valuable lesson through suffering make it worth it?
Is it essential to care for yourself, or is it more important to care for others?
What is “failure?”
Does failing at something mean you’re bad at it?
Would getting rid of negative traits like aggression in all humans have any negative consequences?
Would removing loss, sorrow, and pain impact one’s ability to enjoy life and love?
What is the difference between happiness and joy?
What makes you happy?
Can you choose to feel joy?
What is friendship?
Why do friendships sometimes end?

Philosophical Questions About Art, Music, and Literature

Art, music, and literature are essential ways that people express themselves and preserve culture.

“Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.” —Lady Bird Johnson

Here are some questions to help you think critically about what art is and how it impacts you.

What makes something “art?”
Is some art better than other art?
Does art need to make a statement or have a deeper meaning?
Is music art?
Should artists be held responsible for the message of their art?
Are artists morally obligated to give trigger warnings if their art could mentally or physically negatively impact someone?
Should there be age restrictions on specific pieces of art?
Should public nudity be acceptable when being presented as performance art?
Should everyone be able to interpret a piece of art as they see it, or is there a “correct” interpretation of an art piece?
Is it morally wrong for museums to display art that depicts slavery? Why or why not?
Should art taken as spoils of war be returned to the country it originated in?
Is it wrong for educators to assign reading that demonstrates racism?
Is it necessary to preserve history?
Is it morally acceptable to enjoy art made by someone who did horrible things?
Why do people enjoy looking at art?
Why does music connect people?
Should music be beautiful?
Is it essential for art to “make a statement?”
Would it be music if you and your friends were to hit pots and pans randomly?
If it comes together when you’re hitting pots and pans and sounds nice, would it be music?
If there is a room full of people talking, could that be categorized as music?
What is the difference between “good” taste in art or music and “bad” taste?
Can cooking be a form of art?
What is the critical difference between a functional and artistically designed room?
Is it possible that what one person sees as “yellow” is what someone else sees as “green,” but they’ve both learned to call it “yellow,” so they will never know?

Society, Government, and Philosophical Dilemmas

Are there any innately evil governmental structures?
What would a perfect society look like?
How involved should governments be in caring for the individuals in their country?
If you could create your society, what would look different from the one where you live now?
What role should the government have in the lives of individuals?
What makes a good leader?
Can someone do a bad thing and still be a good person?
Is prison the best way to protect society and correct individuals?
Does the legal system function fairly?
Is technology good?
Can technology advance society in a way that is beneficial?
Are taxes morally right?
Should it be lawful for citizens to hold protests? What if a handful of the protestors make it violent?
What makes people work together despite differences?
Does societal advancement only happen with collaboration?
In what ways can disagreements advance society?
What makes a crime a crime?
How should citizens who believe the laws in their country be unjust behave? Is it okay for them to ignore those laws and are still bound to do what the law asks of them?
Is it morally wrong to abstain from voting?
Is it wrong for governments not to have healthcare available to all citizens?
Should things that are bad for people be banned by the government, or is it the individual’s responsibility to avoid harmful substances?
Is there an age at which people should be answerable for their actions?
Is it okay to limit immigration if a country is worried it will lose its culture?
Should the government regulate what food manufacturers can and can’t put in their food?
Is the government responsible for ensuring people receive a livable wage?
Should those who live an unhealthy lifestyle have decreased access to healthcare?
What would the ideal government look like?

Final Thoughts: Talk Philosophy with Other People

When it comes to challenging topics like those raised by philosophy, it can be helpful to talk through them with others. Others can help raise perspectives that you may not have considered yourself.

Philosophical questions can also make for interesting conversations with people you already know relatively well. Just remember to be respectful of people who have different viewpoints!

Here are some ways you can use these questions:

Over dinner with a few friends . How would your friends react if you asked about beauty’s nature or the purpose of life? It might be unexpected, but give it a try the next time you see them! Philosophy might not be the best topic if you’re with a big crowd of friends, but it can make for an exciting conversation with a group of four or five.
With your significant other . How you perceive the world informs how you spend your money, what you believe about raising a family, and how you use your free time. It can be stressful, but deal-breaker conversations are essential if you want a relationship to become serious.
With a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or another child in your life . Children have big questions about the world but may not know how to find the words for those questions. Try asking the children in your life an occasional philosophical question to help them begin to strengthen their critical thinking muscles.

If you’re hosting a dinner party and want to talk about something a little less serious, consider using one of these 257 questions .

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240 Philosophical Questions for Deep Critical Thinking & Debate

statue of ancient philosopher thinking about philosophical questions

Philosophical questions are an effective tool to stimulate and develop critical thought. They examine profound matters like free will and human nature; the source and value of happiness; morality and ethics; love, logic, and knowledge; religion, death, and the meaning of life.

Although such questions can open a “rabbit hole” that leads to endless and seemingly unanswerable questions, a list of philosophical questions to ask about life—like the ones provided below—can be used as a springboard for critical thinking.

Such questions help us evaluate arguments, explore foreign ideas, identify potential biases, and think critically about our own beliefs and presuppositions.

We are preparing our our children to enter a society full of questions … and questionable ideas.

Consequently, it is our responsibility to train them to think critically and, above all, seek truth when asking the deep questions that arise in their own hearts.

First, let’s take a closer look at what a philosophy question is. Then I’ll provide some examples to help encourage deep thinking.

What is a Philosophical Question OR TOPIC?

A philosophical question is open-ended. Since philosophy itself means “love of wisdom,” it logically follows that a philosophical question is one that pursues a deep understanding of the subject examined.

The answer to this type of question isn’t necessarily an easy one—nor is it always black or white. It requires thoughtful reflection.

The deeper the reasoning behind the answer the better.

Bear in mind there’s no such thing as a dumb philosophical question . However, don’t be surprised if the way questions are answered borders on the brink of absurdity at times.

But the goal is to inspire thought .

So … even if your students gives nonsensical responses, if they’re willing to explain how they came to their answer, count it as a win.

(Even giving an incomplete answer is better than not pondering the question at all.)

A good example of a philosophical question is one of the three overarching “pillars” of philosophy.

The 3 Basic But Big Questions of Philosophy Deal with Existence

The fundamental questions of philosophy deal with existence and fall into three main categories::

Where did we come from?
Why are we here and how should we live?
Is there hope for our future and life after death?

How we answer those questions determines what we will value and how we will behave.

With that in mind, it’s clear just how important it is to train our children to ask meaningful questions and seek truthful answers.

The study of philosophy can help us do that.

PDF Download of 240 Philosophical Questions

240 Philosophical Questions for Deep Critical Thinking

GET ALL 240 QUESTIONS IN AN INSTANT-DOWNLOAD EBOOK!

Includes strategies for using philosophical questions as debate topics.

It is natural to be inquisitive. Let’s steward our students’ curious natures well!

I’ve gathered 240 philosophy questions to help you (and your students) think through tough philosophical topics together.

It’s tempting to look at these questions as a mere academic exercise.

But philosophical ideas have shaped human history from ancient times until today — for better or for worse .

Look at them, instead, as a means of preparing your students to face (and combat) the deceptive ideas they will soon encounter.

Questions of Free Will and Human Nature

It's human nature to live according to the clock. We only have so much time on Earth.

Are we really free?

The question of free will versus determinism has been debated by great thinkers for centuries.

Some contend that we have complete freedom of choice.

Others believe that humans have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions (determinism).They argue that the choices we make stem exclusively from the nature we are born with and all the influences that surround us.

The Bible teaches that we have free will, and we’re responsible for our actions. As Deuteronomy 30:19 explains:

“… I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live …”

Here are some questions about will and humanity:

Are humans innately good or evil?
Can humans change their behavior if given enough time?
Do humans need God to exist?
What happens when we die?
Does consciousness continue after physical death?
Why does suffering happen?
Should we try to prevent bad events from happening? If so, then how would we go about doing that?
What makes human life so valuable?
What makes us human?
Why does it matter if we’re alive?
Is there anything wrong with being selfish?
Do humans need other people in order to live?
Can animals feel pain? If so, why don’t they try to avoid hurting each other?
Are children born good or evil?
Is it okay to lie to protect yourself?
What is beauty?
Do all people deserve respect?
Did you exist before you were born?
Where do emotions come from?
Can we choose our emotions or do they just happen?
At what age are children held accountable for their actions? How do you determine that?
Where does self-worth come from?
How do you determine one’s self-worth?
Is one human life worth more than another?
Is ignorance really bliss?
What is the goal of humanity?
Can predestination and free will coexist?

Philosophical Questions About Happiness

The philosopher Aristotle held the view that, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

Yet the very definition of happiness is as diverse as the people who seek it. Some seek it in relationships, others in work, hobbies, or pleasure.

One school of thought says finding happiness requires a life in which every aspect contributes toward personal fulfillment.

Another believes that happiness is “happenstance”—an emotion based on positive circumstances.

What do you think?

Here are some questions to ponder about happiness:

How much should we care about making ourselves happy?

What does it mean to be happy?
Can I be happy when faced with suffering?
Is happiness universal or a matter of perspective?
How much should we care about making ourselves happy?
Is it possible to feel happy and sad at the same time?
Is it really necessary to pursue happiness?
Are we happier now as a society than in times past? Why or why not?
Does anyone else’s happiness affect my own?
If someone has less material wealth than me, does this automatically make him unhappy?
What brings true happiness?
Can happiness be measured or quantified, like money and power?
Are certain types of experiences inherently “happier” than others?
Is it always best to seek out pleasure over avoiding pain?
Is happiness just the product of chemical reactions in the brain?

Questions Regarding Morals and Ethics

Questions of morals and ethics are important to examine.

Questions of morals and ethics are important to explore if you wish to develop critical thinking skills.

Morality and ethics both relate to the distinction between good and bad or right and wrong. However, morality is usually thought of as personal and normative, while ethics is the standards of good and bad distinguished by a particular community or social setting.

Because the seriousness of the two topics can elicit emotional responses, if we’re not careful, debates on ethics and morality can get heated quickly.

A good moral or ethical argument takes the whole picture into account.

For instance, how would you answer the question, “ Is killing always wrong? ”

Our first instinct may be a resounding Yes!

But looking at the big picture, we might ask: What if it occurs in self-defense? What about soldiers? Are they held to the same ethical standard civilians are?

These are the types of philosophical questions we encounter in this category.

Here are some additional examples:

Is it possible to make moral judgments without religion?

Is morality relative or absolute?
Where do morals come from?
Is it possible to make moral judgments without religion?
Is killing justified under certain conditions?
What makes something immoral?
How do you define “good” and “evil”?
Why do most people think that lying is bad?
Should all actions have equal consequences?
Does every human life count equally?
Is it ever justified to hurt others?
Is it fair to punish criminals with death?
Does morality come from within or outside ourselves?
Is stealing ever permissible?
Is it ever permissible to deceive others?
Should we judge acts based on their outcomes alone?
Should we always follow the rules even if doing so causes harm?
Is slavery ever ethically defensible?
Is dishonesty always wrong?
Would you kill one person in order to save 1,000?
Are lies permissible if they protect someone’s feelings?
What defines a person?
Are we obligated to help others?
Is it wrong to kill animals?
Are humans replaceable?
What is virtue?

Love is an abstract concept defined in a number of different ways. It’s described as:

a state of mind
a relationship
or a desire.

You’ll find a biblical definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8:

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.…”

Here’s a collection of philosophical questions about love:

Which is more important: love or money? Why?
Is there such thing as true love? If yes, where does it come from?
Do all human beings want to be loved?
Can anyone ever really understand another’s feelings?
Are children born with an innate love for their parents?
Are some relationships better than others?
Can life without love exist?
What makes someone fall in love?
Why do people get married?
Is there a difference between love and lust?
Is marriage necessary?
Does love last forever?
Is it okay to love yourself?
Is love natural or a choice to be made?
Where do we find love?

Hard Questions Concerning Death

Have you heard the cliché: “The only certainty in life is death and taxes”?

Death truly is a certainty of life.

While some people choose to face the reality of death head-on, others pretend like it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps it’s the finality of death that sparks fear.

Regardless of how we feel, our time on earth will end at some point in the future.

How should that impact how we live today?

Discussing death can be healthy when done in the right manner.

How would you like to be remembered after you die?

Here are some questions about death we can use to explore the topic, provoke thought, and potentially positively affect how we live:

Why do people fear death?
Can we know for certain if there is life after death?
How would you like to be remembered after you die?
What happens to the body after you die?
Does “good death” exist?
What would happen if we lived forever?
Should we try to prolong our lives at any cost?
Could immortality be possible?
Is euthanasia wrong in all circumstances?
Is death actually the beginning?
Why is it acceptable to kill insects?
Should terminally ill patients be able to choose death?

Questions with Respect to Universal Human Rights

Man ponders whether universal human rights exist.

Universal human rights are those rights which apply equally to everyone regardless of race, religion, gender, or creed.

They include freedom of speech , equality before law , right to justice , and more.

The philosophy behind human rights is based upon the idea that humans deserve respect and dignity, and—ultimately—the right to life.

They’re largely considered universal because they are natural, belonging to all members of humanity simply by virtue of being human.

Some philosophers argue that such rights can’t be taken away, while others claim they are conditional.

Here are a few questions to help us think critically about human rights:

What makes something a human right?
Do you believe human rights even exist?
Are human rights actually universal?
Are humans rights and entitlement the same thing?
Can torture be justified?
Is liberty a human right?
Is personal autonomy a right?
Do governments have the authority to regulate what people do?
Does democracy guarantee individual liberty?
How much control should individuals have over their own bodies?
If someone commits murder, do they still have the right to life?
Who has the ultimate responsibility for protecting human rights?
Has modern technology made us more or less humane?
Is education a human right for all people?
Is war ever justifiable?
Is due process a universal right no matter the crime?
Is capital punishment ever appropriate?
Are there any downsides to universal human rights?
Is free speech a universal right?

Philosophical Questions About Politics, Government, and Society

This category contains some of the hardest philosophical questions out there. Most of us have strong beliefs about politics, government, and society that make it hard to form an unbiased opinion.

Besides political topics, questions in this category also address social issues , social construct , culture , power , and influence .

We can go so far as to question who gets what— when, where, and how.

If you wish to argue successfully—no matter what side of an issue you align with—it is paramount to understand the opposing viewpoint.

Let’s look at a few questions:

What makes a country democratic?
What responsibilities does a government have to its constituents?
Do democracies always make better decisions than dictatorships?
What constitutes good governance?
Is rebellion against government ever justified?
Is socialism fair? What is “fair”?
If you rob from the rich and give to the poor, is it wrong?
Are laws always good?
Is taxation justified?
What is the ideal government? Why?
Should the will of the people always be followed?
What role do political parties play?
Who defines corruption?
How do I know whether my views are correct?
Is voting compulsory?
Is there such a thing as too much freedom?
Is bribery always bad?
Are police officers obligated to protect criminals?
Should citizens obey unjust laws?
Who decides which laws apply to whom?
Where do we draw the line between criminal behavior and civil disobedience?
Does the state have the moral duty to provide healthcare for its citizens?
Is wealth redistribution morally correct?
Should college be free for all? What about grade school or high school?
Are freedom and liberty the same thing?
What makes someone free?
What makes a crime a crime?
Is it right to govern the number of children families can have to control the world’s population?

Deep Questions to Make You Think

Deep philosophical questions are designed to help you think critically and reflect on the subject at hand.

They are meant to challenge your beliefs so that you may stand more firmly in them , knowing why you believe what you do.

Here are some examples:

What is reality?
What are the limits of science?
Where did all matter come from?
Can I trust my senses?
Is there an innnate moral code?
Does time exist objectively?
Who created God?
Is there a soul?
Are perceptions real?
Is “fair” the same for everyone? Who determines whether or not something is “fair”?
What is time?
What makes you … you?
What is truth?
Is truth reality?
What gives life meaning?
What determines success vs. failure?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
How do I know what’s true?
Should we judge others by their actions?
What’s the purpose of life?
Where do ideas come from?
What is justice?
What is evil?
What makes someone “good” or “bad”?
Can something be true without evidence?
Is fate real?
At what point does consciousness begin?
Can time be altered?
Is there a cause for every effect?

Easy and Funny Questions for Conversation Starters

Some philosophy questions are easy, fun, or even funny! These make the best conversation starters.

Not all philosophy discussion topics have to be as serious as “What is the meaning of life?”

Learning should be fun and engaging, so don’t shy away from humor when asking deep questions or coming up with unorthodox answers.

Sometimes the most amusing questions lead to the most profound realizations.

Here’s a list of somewhat random philosophical questions to start fun conversations with kids, teens, and older students:

If two people understand things differently, who is right?

Is time travel possible? Why or why not?
Do memories still exist if you forget them?
Are animals freer than man?
Are twins unique?
Are animals like people?
Do trees feel pain?
How do you know you’re not dreaming right now?
Are insects conscious of life?
What makes something humorous to some and not to others?
If you save time on something, what happens to that time?
Why do we talk to ourselves?
If you try to fail and do, did you actually succeed?
Can 2+2 ever be something other than 4?

For more ways to engage students in the study of philosophy, try these fun and creative philosophy activities .

Epistemology Questions

Epistemology is concerned with knowledge. It asks questions like::

How does knowledge work?
Why do we need it?
What kind of things count as knowledge?

Epistemologists study these kinds of questions because they’re interested in understanding how humans acquire knowledge.

They also investigate how to differentiate between opinion and justified belief .

As such, epistemological questions analyze which types of evidence can be trusted as reliable sources of information and why.

Needless to say, this category can contain some pretty interesting philosophical questions:

What is the role of reason in determining what’s true?

How do we determine if something is certain?
How do you know if you know something?
Does anyone ever truly learn anything?
Who decides what counts as true knowledge?
Who determines the difference between fact and fiction?
What is the relationship between facts and opinions?
What is the source of human knowledge?
What is knowledge?
What is the nature of certainty?
What is the basis of our confidence in claims made by other people?
What is the role of reason in determining what’s true?
What is the relation between logic and reasoning?
What is the connection between language and thought?
What is the distinction between perception and imagination?
What is intuition?
What is the function of intuition?
What are thoughts?
What is the purpose of thinking?
If two people understand things differently, who is right?
If we had 1000 years to learn, could we know everything?
Is there an end of knowledge?
Is everything subjective?

Logic and the Universe

Some of the hardest philosophical questions involve logic and how the universe began.

The historical discipline of logic largely began with Thales , known as the “Father of Western Philosophy.”

Before this point in history, questions of existence were largely “explained” with Greek mythology.

As it stands today, logic can be described as the discipline of distinguishing good vs bad reasoning.

But who defines “good” and “bad”?

It’s important to note that even the best logical conclusions can be false.

Logic doesn’t equal truth.

( Investigate the difference between logical thinking and critical thinking here if you’re interested).

You’ll notice many questions in this category address our origins and creation:

Can order come from chaos?
Can something be created from nothing?
Where did matter come from?
Is everything relative?
Is there only one universe? How do we know?
Is there such thing as absolute truth?
Are there different levels of existence?
Do we live forever?
Was the Big Bang a real event?
Is space finite?
Is time eternal?
Is logic a created concept?
What time is it really?
Is the mind the same as the brain?
What are numbers?
Does the universe end?
Is there such a thing as perfection?
Does sound exist without hearing?
Are people in a different timezone in the past (or future)?
Where does fear come from?
Does pain exist in itself or just our perception of it?
What is hope?
Could there be a parallel universe?

Philosophical Questions About Religion

Maybe some of the toughest questions are those of religion. Religion for many is the driving force in their lives (and for good reason).

Religious views affect how we raise our children, interact with others, make decisions, and so much more.

As such, questioning religious principles can be tricky. Some parents go so far as to encourage their kids to not question at all.

Others choose a different route, knowing their children will soon enter a world that will challenge them to question what they believe.

Encouraging teens to question their beliefs—in a structured setting with the Word of God in hand—can prepare them to “make a defense” to those who ask about the hope that is within them (1 Peter 3:15).

Here are some questions about religion:

Does God exist?
Does God’s existence depend on our belief in him?
Can love exist without God?
What constitutes religion?
Are miracles real?
Is religion compatible with science?
Why does faith matter?
Who decides which religions are right?
What makes a person a Christian?
Should I follow my beliefs blindly?
Is God a created being?
Can morality exist without religion?
Is there a higher power?

Unanswerable Philosophical Questions

Let’s talk about some of the challenges that arise when we delve into the world of ideas.

Since philosophical thought lives largely in grey territory, it deals with questions that can’t be answered with the usual “yes or no,” “this or that” definitive response.

And as our children search for answers to these philosophical questions, they will encounter deceptive lies disguised as logic.

Many college professors of philosophy today will tell you that life’s biggest questions remain unanswered.

Yet those who possess a biblical worldview have a much different perspective.

Even in a lost, confusing world, the Bible is a compass that always points true North. It declares truth in matters the world deems unanswerable.

That’s why it is so important to teach our children how to think and how to reason from a biblical perspective.

Philosophy and Critical Thinking Go Hand in Hand

Critical thinking involves asking questions, analyzing arguments, evaluating evidence, and making decisions based on those evaluations.

It requires us to use logic, reasoning skills, critical analysis, and judgment.

Sound familiar?

Critical thinking is an essential skill that allows us to make decisions and solve problems effectively.

And while it may not seem so at first glance, it is a skill that enables us to defend our beliefs effectively when challenged.

That’s why we focus so heavily on critical thinking from a biblical worldview in the resources we offer at Homeschool Adventure .

If you’re looking for a way to help your students develop critical thinking from a biblical worldview as they explore the history of ideas, check out Philosophy Adventure :

will your children recognize truth?

Philosophy Adventure teaches students 6th-12th grade how to write skillfully , think critically , and speak clearly as they explore the history of ideas .

It was written to bring history alive! Instead of memorizing facts, students “travel back in time” to walk alongside ancient philosophers.

All the while, they will be challenged to examine what they believe about the world around them, and why they believe it .

By the end of the year, students will have written their very own book of philosophy!

Tips for Using These Questions as Philosophical Debate Topics

Philosophical questions about life are naturally thought provoking.

When used properly, even controversial philosophy topics can be effective springboards for critical thinking—a skill that will benefit your teen for life!

Questions can spark wonderful, stimulating debate among older students, especially those in upper middle through high school.

A family discussing a philosophical debate topic.

And philosophical debates can be fun but also challenging, providing the perfect opportunity to practice critical thinking.

If you’ve never tried debating in your homeschool, you can use some of these philosophical questions to start.

A quick note:

Not all questions are practical for satisfying philosophical discussions.

The purpose of debate in the homeschool setting is to practice and improve critical thinking, active listening, argument formation, and even teamwork.

Its purpose is not to waste time on frivolous arguing.

Those of us who believe that the Bible is the Word of God know that absolute truth exists. Consequently, questions to which Scripture provides clear answers may not be the best choice for learning how to debate .

Likewise, you may want to avoid questions whose answers would have to be based solely on speculation—with no practical way to confirm facts or conclusions.

However, keeping all of that in mind, it can be immensely productive for older, more mature students to try to debate a stance they personally disagree with.

Doing so can help them better understand their opponent … and equip them to effectively counter opposing views they may face in “real life.”

Only you know whether your students are ready for such a task, so use discernment.

Since the list of questions we provided is pretty extensive, here’s an abbreviated list of questions that would make great philosophical debate topics :

Does anyone else’s happiness affect my own?
Is socialism fair? What is “fair’?

How to Debate Philosophy

When you debate a philosophical question, follow the same general outline as any other debate process.

An at-home, sibling-to-sibling or parent-child debate may proceed as follows:

Assign the debate topic, first and second positions (for or against the question), and allow time for students to brainstorm ideas.
Encourage students to organize their ideas into simple arguments or points.
Practice structuring those ideas into a speech with an introduction, rebuttal (for those arguing in the second position), points to make, and a conclusion.
Designate a neutral third party to declare a “winner.”
Start the debate.

Depending on your schedule, this entire process can be done in a single day—or stretched over the course of a week (or even a month).

How to Handle Different Age Groups

Simply adjust how deeply you go into each step, depending on the ages of your students.

For younger middle school students, consider keeping the debate more like a simple discussion and less of an emphasis on structure and speeches.

However, you may want to encourage high school students to organize well-developed arguments and rebuttals.

Philosophical questions about life are naturally thought-provoking.

We actually have even more thought-provoking questions here .

When used properly, even controversial philosophy topics can be effective springboards for critical thinking — a skill that will benefit your teen for life!

About The Author

Jordan Mitchell

Equip students to identify deceptive lies disguised as logic, get 25% off for the next 20 minutes only.

240 Philosophical Questions contains 60+ pages filled with open-ended questions that inspire thought and reflection. Includes built-in tips for discussion and ways to use questions as debate topics.

Philosophical Discussion Essays

Justice and the question of revenge, popular essay topics.

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A Brief Discussion on the Philosophical Principles and Development Directions of Data Circulation

He, Jianfei
Ma, Zhenjun

The data circulation is a complex scenario involving a large number of participants and different types of requirements, which not only has to comply with the laws and regulations, but also faces multiple challenges in technical and business areas. In order to systematically and comprehensively address these issues, it is essential to have a comprehensive and profound understanding of 'data circulation'. The traditional analysis method tends to proceed based on the traditional circulation model of commodities, that is, tangible objects, which has some defects and shortcomings, and tends to be a formalized approach, which is faced numerous challenges in practice. This paper analyzes the circulation of data with a philosophical approach, obtains the new explication of data and executing entity, and provides a new definition of the concepts of data utilization and data key stakeholders (objects). At the same time, it puts forward the idea of ``data alienation'', and constructs a new interpretive framework of ``data circulation''. Based on the framework of this interpretation, it is clearly proposed that ``data alienation'' is the core of ``data circulation'', benefit distribution is the driving force, and legal compliance is the foundation, and further discussed the three modes of ``data circulation''. It further discusses the three modes of ``data circulation''. It is pointed out that ``data circulation'' is different from traditional ``commodity circulation''. To achieve ``data circulation'',a comprehensive information infrastructure needs to be established. from a theoretical point of view, it lays a solid foundation for the development of ``data circulation''.

Computer Science - Other Computer Science

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PDF A Brief Guide to Writing the Philosophy Paper
n philosophical writing:Avoid direct quotes. If you need to quote, quote sparingly, and follow your quotes by expla. ning what the author means in your own words. (There are times when brief direct quotes can be helpful, for example when you want to present and interpret a potential amb.
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The data circulation is a complex scenario involving a large number of participants and different types of requirements, which not only has to comply with the laws and regulations, but also faces multiple challenges in technical and business areas. In order to systematically and comprehensively address these issues, it is essential to have a comprehensive and profound understanding of 'data ...