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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Philosophical Writing helps students to think clearly and analytically, improve their essay-writing skills, and present their knowledge and thoughts in a precise and coherent manner. Acclaimed for its accessible, highly practical approach, this bestselling textbook emphasizes what students should do in crafting a philosophical essay, as well as other types of essays that analyze concepts across a variety of disciplines.
Tracing the evolution of a good philosophical essay from the draft stage to completion, the book's eleven chapters are purpose-built to serve the needs of a wide range of students, with levels ranging from elementary to moderately advanced. Philosophical Writing includes numerous essay examples, techniques for outlining and composing, guidance on evaluating philosophical essays, useful appendices, a glossary, a full-featured companion website, and more.
Now in its fifth edition, Philosophical Writing is fully updated with enhanced language and improved explanations throughout. Two entirely new chapters delve into the intricacies of belief networks and explore the properties of sound interpretations, supported by a wealth of new exercises and discussion questions.
Written with clarity and humor by a leading analytic philosopher, Philosophical Writing:
- Helps students organize their beliefs, assess their interpretations, and critically evaluate the ideas of others
- Explains the basic concepts of logic and rhetoric, the structure of a philosophical essay, and the criterion of good philosophical writing
- Describes key tactics for analytic writing, such as definitions, analysis, counterexamples, and dialectical reasoning
- Discusses the concepts of author and audience as they apply to a student's philosophical writing
- Offers advice on common problems that students encounter when writing a philosophical essay
Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, Fifth Edition, remains an ideal textbook for lower- and upper-division courses in philosophy, particularly introductory philosophy classes, as well as courses with significant writing components that cover logic, rhetoric, and analysis.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Note to the Fifth Edition
Note to the Fourth Edition
Note to the Third Edition
Note to the Second Edition
About the Companion Website
Introduction
1 Author and Audience
1.1 The Professor as Audience
1.2 The Student as Author
1.3 Three Attitudes About Philosophical Method
2 Logic and Argument for Writing
2.1 What Is a Good Argument?
2.2 Valid Arguments
2.3 Cogent Arguments
2.4 Fallacies
2.5 Quantification and Modality
2.6 Consistency and Contradiction
2.7 Contraries and Contradictories
2.8 The Strength of a Proposition
2.9 Bad Arguments with True Conclusions
3 The Structure of a Philosophical Essay
3.1 An Outline of the Structure of a Philosophical Essay
3.2 Anatomy of an Essay
3.3 Another Essay
4 Composing
4.1 How to Select an Essay Topic
4.2 Techniques for Composing
4.3 Outlining
4.4 The Rhetoric of Philosophical Writing
4.5 Successive Elaboration
4.6 Conceptual Note Taking
4.7 Research and Composing
4.8 Sentences and Paragraphs
4.9 Polishing
4.10 Evolution of an Essay
5 Tactics for Analytic Writing
5.1 Definitions
5.2 Distinctions
5.3 Analysis
5.4 Dilemmas
5.5 Scenarios
5.6 Counterexamples
5.7 Reductio ad Absurdum
5.8 Dialectical Reasoning
6 Some Constraints on Content
6.1 The Pursuit of Truth
6.2 The Use of Authority
6.3 The Burden of Proof
7 Some Goals of Form
7.1 Coherence
7.2 Clarity
7.3 Conciseness
7.4 Rigor
8 Problems with Introductions
8.1 Slip Sliding Away
8.2 The Tail Wagging the Dog
8.3 The Running Start
9 How to Read a Philosophical Work
9.1 Find the Thesis Sentence
9.2 Precision of Words, Phrases, and Sentences
9.3 Proving the Case
10 Reading, Writing, and Networks of Belief
10.1 Understanding and Interpretation
10.2 Networks of Belief
10.3 Numerosity, Connectedness, and Unity
10.4 Generality
10.5 Accommodation
10.6 Tenacity and Certainty
10.7 Blocks
10.8 Porosity
11 Virtues of Good Interpretations
11.1 Good Interpretations and Correct Ones
11.2 Simplicity
11.3 Coherence
11.4 Consistency
11.5 Defensibility
11.6 Proportionality
11.7 Completeness
Appendix A: “It’s Sunday Night and I Have an Essay Due Monday Morning”
Appendix B: How to Study for a Test
Appendix C: Research: Notes, Citations, and References
Appendix D: On Grading
Appendix E: Essay Checklist
Appendix F: Glossary of Philosophical Terms
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Introduction
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Note to the Fifth Edition
Note to the Fourth Edition
Note to the Third Edition
Note to the Second Edition
About the Companion Website
Begin Reading
Appendix A: “It’s Sunday Night and I Have an Essay Due Monday Morning”
Appendix B How to Study for a Test
Appendix C: Research: Notes, Citations, and References
Appendix D: On Grading
Appendix E: Essay Checklist
Appendix F: Glossary of Philosophical Terms
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Philosophical Writing
An Introduction
FIFTH EDITION
A. P. Martinich
Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial technologies or similar technologies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Applied forPaperback ISBN: 9781394193394
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © The M.C. Escher Company
For my grandchildren
with their bright eyes and fresh thoughts
Note to the Fifth Edition
I read and revised the text of the fourth edition. Clarity and brevity were my rules of thumb. Two chapters 10 and 11, have been added for the fifth edition. Some of the ideas in these two chapters were developed in my course, “Interpretation and Meaning.” The main ideas occur in different form in “Interpretation and Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2001), 82: 309–31, and “Four Senses of ‘Meaning’ in the History of Ideas,” Journal of the Philosophy of History (2009), 3: 225–45.
I want to thank my editor Will Croft and managing editor Pascal Raj François; other staff at Wiley to whom I am grateful are Sarah Milton, Aswini Murugadass and Sivasri Chandrasekaran. Several others helped me. Jo Ann Carson read chapters 10 and 11, Jeff Leon read chapter 10; Ryan Born proofread chapters 10 and 11; and Leslie Martinich helped in many ways.
Much of the revision of this edition occurred in Einstein Bros. Bagels, on the Drag near the University of Texas at Austin. The hardworking, helpful, and darn nice staff have my gratitude. Their manager Andrew, who rightly cares as much for his staff, as he does his customers, has my special gratitude.
Note to the Fourth Edition
This edition contains several new sections, such as one on how to read a philosophical essay, one on quantification and modality, and one on rhetoric in philosophical writing. It also includes new and more examples. Another feature of this edition is a website that complements the material in the book. The website contains four kinds of material: (1) some additional explanation of some topics treated in the book; (2) some additional examples of topics discussed in the book; (3) some additional exercises, which I think of as being primarily for the benefit of the student; and (4) a few additional topics that were not essential to the purpose of the book but will still be helpful to many students. The website can be found at www.wiley.com/go/Martinich.
I thank Leslie Martinich, who helped enormously with editing, as always; Neil Sinhababu, who updated the appendix on using internet sources; and J. P. Andrew, who commented on the section on quantification. My editor at Wiley‐Blackwell, Deirdre Ilkson, has been helpful and supportive on this and other projects; and Sarah Dancy and Allison Kostka have ably shepherded this edition through the publication process.
Note to the Third Edition
This edition contains a number of changes. In general, I have tried to improve the sample essays and other examples, correct errors of fact, and make the prose more straightforward. Some of the most important changes are several new appendices, such as the one about the use of the internet by Neil Sinhababu. I thank Jo Ann Carson and Charles Hornbeck for several suggestions and, as usual, I thank my wife Leslie for her versatile help.
Note to the Second Edition
Writing to a friend, Pascal apologized for the length of his letter: “If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.” In revising the sections that appeared in the first edition of this book, I often found ways to make them shorter, and, I think, better. But I also had ideas about how I could add other topics to the book in order to make it better. Primarily these are sections on definition, contraries and contradictories, distinctions, and a glossary of terms that may be helpful in your philosophical writing.
In preparing the second edition, I have happily acquired debts to some of my current and former students who commented on the text: Stephen Brown, Sarah Cunningham, Nathan Jennings, and Lisa Maddry. My wife Leslie, as usual, read the entire manuscript. Also, I thank my very helpful editor Steve Smith.
Finally, a large part of my thinking and reading about philosophy has been done in Miami Subs and Grill on the Drag. I thank the owners, Michael and Lisa Mermelstein, for their hospitality.
About the Companion Website
This book is accompanied by a companion website.
www.wiley.com/go/Martinich5e
The website contains four kinds of material:
Some additional explanation of some topics treated in the book.
Some additional examples of topics discussed in the book.
Some additional exercises, primarily for the benefit of the student.
A few additional topics that were not essential to the purpose of the book but will still be helpful to many students.
Introduction
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Philosophical essays may have many different structures. For experienced writers, the choice of a structure is often neither difficult nor even conscious. The essay seems to write itself. For inexperienced writers, the choice is often tortured or seemingly impossible. I offer this book to the latter group of people, of which I was a member for more than three decades. And rather than survey many possible structures, I have concentrated on what I think is the simplest, most straightforward structure that a philosophical essay might have. My purpose is to help students write something valuable so that they might begin to develop their own styles. The project is similar to teaching art students to draw the human hand. The first goal is accuracy, not elegance.
Elegance is probably not learned but is the product of a kind of genius, and genius begins where rules leave off. The topic of this book is something that can be learned: how to write clear, concise, and precise philosophical prose. Elegance is desirable, but so is simplicity. And that is what I aim for.
Avrum Stroll (1921–2013) once said, “Half of good philosophy is good grammar.” Like any good aphorism, it is difficult to explain. Before I try to describe part of what it means, let me forestall a possible misunderstanding. Although good philosophical writing is grammatical, there is virtually nothing about grammar in this book in the sense in which your eighth‐grade teacher, Mrs. Grundy, discussed it. Virtually all students know the rules of grammar, and yet these rules are often flagrantly violated in their philosophical prose. Why does this happen?
One reason is that philosophers often try to assign things to their proper categories, and those philosophically contrived categories are not clear, or at least they are initially hard to understand. Philosophers have sometimes divided reality into the things that are mental and the things that are material. Sometimes they have divided reality into things that are substances (things that exist on their own) and things that are accidents (things that are properties or depend upon other things for their existence). There is even a grammatical correlation between these categories. Nouns correlate with substances (man with man), and adjectives correlate with accidents (rectangular with rectangular). When philosophers argue that things that seem to belong to one category really belong to another, grammar is strained. Most theists maintain that God is just. But some (theistic) philosophers have maintained that this cannot be true. The reason is that if God is just, then God has the property of being just, and if God has a property, then he is not absolutely simple and might therefore be corruptible. So, these philosophers have said that God is (identical with) the just or that God is (identical with) justice, even though these latter claims stretch the grammatical limits of most natural languages.
Sometimes the attempt to say something new and correct about the limits of reality causes the grammar to break down completely, as when Martin Heidegger says, “Nothing nothings.” The noun nothing cannot be a verb, so the pseudo‐verb nothings is unintelligible. Further, Heidegger seems to be construing the word nothing as a noun, as if nothing named something, when obviously it cannot. (Of course, Heidegger would disagree with my grammatical remarks, and that is just one more reason why philosophy is difficult: It is hard to get philosophers to agree even about grammar.)
Thomas Hobbes was one of the first to discuss the propensity of philosophers to mistakenly combine words that belong to one category with words that belong to a different and incompatible category. This is known as a category mistake. Roughly, a category mistake is the logical equivalent of mixing apples and oranges. The sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” involves several category mistakes. Colorless things cannot be green or any other color; ideas cannot sleep or be awake; and nothing can sleep furiously. Objects belonging to one of these categories don’t fit with objects that belong to some of the others. One of his examples is “The intellect understands.” According to Hobbes, the intellect is the name of an accident or property of bodies, which is one category, while understands, even though it is grammatically a verb, is the name of a body (humans), which is another category. And thus he holds that the sentence “The intellect understands” is literally absurd. What Hobbes thinks is literally true is the sentence “Man understands by his intelligence.” In a related way, John Locke thought it was a serious mistake to say “The will wills (or chooses).” What is true is “A human being wills (or chooses).”
It is quite possible for someone to disagree with Hobbes about whether the sentence “The intellect understands” makes sense or not, and to criticize the philosophico‐grammatical view that underlies his grammatical judgment. Philosophers often disagree about what is absurd and what is not. Consider the sentence “Beliefs are brain states.” Does this sentence express a category mistake or a brilliant insight into the nature of the mental? Philosophers disagree. So it is not always easy to say whether some philosophical thesis constitutes a great philosophical insight or a laughable grammatical blunder. Thus, added to the inherent difficulty of philosophy is the difficulty of philosophical writing, which often groans under the burden placed on syntax and semantics.
Another reason that students often write patently ungrammatical sentences is that the philosophy they have read seems ungrammatical to them. It seems that way because the thought being expressed is radically unfamiliar. Since philosophers often invent categories or concepts that are unfamiliar to students or revise familiar categories, there is no place for the category in the student’s initial system of thoughts, and it is hard to adjust one’s concepts to make room for the new or revised category. Often the category will be initially situated in an inappropriate place, or the wrong things will be placed in it. In a word, the category is strange. As a consequence, when students come to explain, criticize, or even endorse propositions using that category, they may produce incoherent and ungrammatical sentences. Their writing, though muddled, is an accurate representation of their understanding. This is nothing to be ashamed of; it’s nothing to be proud of either. It’s just part of the process of learning to think philosophically.
If you find yourself writing a sentence or paragraph that is grammatically out of control, then your thought is probably out of control. Consequently, you can use your own prose as a measure of the degree to which you understand the issue you are writing about and as an index to the parts of your essay that need more consideration. (I owe the ideas in this paragraph to Charles Young.)
This explanation of why half of good philosophy is good grammar inspires a partial criterion: Good philosophical writing is grammatical. If a person can write a series of consistently grammatical sentences about some philosophical subject, then that person probably has a coherent idea of what she is discussing.
Another related criterion of good philosophical writing is precision. Contrary to the conventional wisdom prevalent among students, vague and verbose language is not a sign of profundity and astuteness but of confusion. Teachers of philosophy who are dedicated to the above criteria in effect issue a challenge to students: Write grammatically, clearly, and precisely. Since language is the expression of thought, clear language is the expression of clear thought. Writing style should facilitate the comprehension of philosophy. Style should enhance clarity.
If half of good philosophy is good grammar, then the other half is good thinking. Good thinking takes many forms. The form that we will concentrate on is often called analysis. The word analysis has many meanings in philosophy, one of which is a method of reasoning (discussed in chapter 5). Another meaning refers to a method or school of philosophy that reigned largely unchallenged for most of the last century. Many people think that this method is passé in our postanalytic era. I do not take a stand on that issue. I use “analysis” in a very broad sense that includes both analytic (in a narrower sense) and postanalytic philosophy. The goal of analytic philosophy, as it is understood here, is the truth, presented in a clear, orderly, well‐structured way. I take a strong stand in favor of clarity, order, and structure. The goal of analysis, in its broad sense, is to make philosophy less difficult than it otherwise would be. This is just a corollary of a more general principle: Anyone can make a subject difficult; it takes an accomplished thinker to make a subject simple.
Philosophical writing has taken many forms, including dialogue (Plato, Berkeley, and Hume), drama (Camus, Marcel, and Sartre), poetry (Lucretius), and fiction (Camus, George Eliot, and Sartre). I will discuss only the essay form. There are three reasons for this decision. First, it is the form in which you are most likely to be asked to write. Second, it is the easiest form to write in. Third, it is currently the standard form for professional philosophers. Although the dialogue form is attractive to many students, it is an extremely difficult one to execute well. It tempts one to cuteness, needless metaphor, and imprecision.
It is often advisable to preview a book. That advice holds here. Skim the entire book before reading it more carefully. Depending on your philosophical background, some parts will be more informative than others. Chapter 1 discusses the concepts of author and audience as they apply to a student’s philosophical prose. Both students and their professors are in an artificial literary situation. Unlike typical authors, students know less about their subject than their audience, although they are not supposed to let on that they do. Chapter 2 is a crash course on the basic concepts of logic. It contains background information required for understanding subsequent chapters. Those who are familiar with logic will breeze through it, while those with no familiarity with it will need to read slowly, carefully, and at least twice. Chapter 3 discusses the structure of a philosophical essay and forms the heart of the book. The well‐worn but sound advice that an essay should have a beginning, a middle, and an end applies to philosophical essays too. Chapter 4 deals with a number of matters related to composing drafts of an essay. Various techniques for composing are discussed. Anyone who knows how to outline, take notes, revise, do research, and so on might be able to skip this chapter. Chapter 5 explains several types of reasoning used by philosophers, such as dilemmas, counterexamples, and reductio ad absurdum arguments. Chapter 6 discusses some basic requirements that the content of an essay must satisfy. Chapter 7 discusses goals for the form of your writing: coherence, clarity, conciseness, and rigor. Chapter 8 discusses some standard problems students have with the first few pages of an essay. Chapter 9 makes suggestions about how to read a philosophical essay. Chapter 10, new to this edition, describes properties of the web or network of beliefs of human beings. Understanding these properties fleshes out the idea that an author needs to know their readers; similarly, readers need to have some idea of the beliefs the author had in order to understand what the author means. Also new to this edition is chapter 11 about many of the properties that good, not necessarily correct, interpretations have. Judging an interpretation to be good is not merely something felt. Numerous appendices cover such topics as research and how to study for a test.
Like essays, most books have conclusions that either summarize or tie together the main strands of the work. However, it would have been artificial to do so in this case, since the book as a whole does not develop one main argument but consists of a number of different topics that should be helpful to the student. Appendix A, “It’s Sunday Night and I Have an Essay Due Monday Morning,” is included for those who bought this book but never got around to reading much of it, and can serve as a conclusion. Several of my students who used one of the first three editions let me know that this was the first part of the book they read, on a Sunday night about six weeks into the semester.
In order to serve the needs of a wide range of students, the level of difficulty varies from elementary to moderately advanced. Even within individual chapters, the level of difficulty can vary significantly, although each section begins with the simplest material and progresses to the most difficult. Thus, a chapter on a new topic might revert from complex material in the previous chapter to a simple level. I believe that intelligent, hardworking students can move rather quickly from philosophical innocence to moderate sophistication.
At various points, I have presented fragments of essays to illustrate a stylistic point. The topics of these essay fragments are sometimes controversial and the argumentation provocative. These passages are meant to keep the reader’s interest and do not always represent my view. It would be a mistake to focus on the content of these essay fragments when it is their style that is important. Also, it is quite likely that the reader will disagree with a few or even many of the stylistic claims I make. If this leads readers to at least think about why they disagree and to discover what they prefer and why, then a large part of my goal will have been achieved.
Chapter 4 contains a section, “The Rhetoric of Philosophical Writing.” Going back as far as Socrates, rhetoric has often had a bad name in philosophy. No negative attitude toward rhetoric is implied in this book. “Rhetoric,” as I use it, contrasts with logic and refers to style, that is, to those elements of writing that facilitate communication. The right kind of rhetoric in writing is not antithetical to logic. Rather, the right rhetorical elements are important. After all, like any essay, a philosophical essay that fails to communicate fails in one of its central purposes.
Philosophical Writing is intended to be practical, to help you write better and thereby improve your ability to present your thoughts. Since almost any class may require you to write an essay that analyzes some concept or argument, the skills gained in learning to write about philosophical concepts may prove useful in writing other types of essays. When I described the structure of a philosophical argument to a friend and colleague, he said, “That’s the structure of a historical argument.”
A problem faced by English speakers who wanted to avoid language that favored male human beings is less severe now than it was 40 years ago because many clear‐headed writers have suggested various ways to avoid the problem. Here are four ways:
Delete the pronoun: “A professor should prepare [omit: his] lectures well before they are to be given.”
Change the pronoun to an article: “A professor should read the essays of the [instead of: his] students soon after they are submitted.”
Use plural nouns and pronouns: Instead of “A professor should prepare his lectures well before they are scheduled to be given,” write “Professors should prepare their lectures well before they are scheduled to be given.”
Paraphrase the pronoun away: Instead of “If a student does not study, he cannot expect to do well on the tests,” write “A student who does not study cannot expect to do well on the tests.”
Another suggestion is to use “they” with “anyone,” “someone,” and “no one.” That is, these sentences would be counted fully grammatical:
Anyone
who fails
their
exam will be permitted to take a make‐up exam.
If
someone
is tortured for a long time
they
will eventually suffer a breakdown.
Since
no one
studied hard,
those
who failed the test will not be permitted to take a make up exam.
The objection to this practice is that it is illogical. Since “anyone,” “someone,” and “no one” are singular, they should not be paired with a plural pronoun. This style of handling personal programs is widely enough used to make it acceptable. Also, excellent writers in past centuries have used plural pronouns in this way.
When for one reason or another, I have found it convenient to use generic pronouns that are grammatically male or female, I have used the following conventions. Male gender pronouns will be used for references to the professor. Female gender pronouns will be used for references to the student. Since this book is about students, I believe the female gender pronouns predominate. In any case, no hierarchical order is implied by these uses. Professors and students simply have different roles and responsibilities.
1Author and Audience
It may seem obvious who the author and audience of a student’s essay are. The student is the author, and the professor is the audience; that is true. However, a student is not a normal author, and a student’s professor is not a normal audience. I expand on these two points in this chapter. I begin with the conceptually simpler topic: the abnormality of the professor as the audience.
1.1 The Professor as Audience
It’s indispensable for an author to know who the audience is because different audiences require different ways of explaining. An author should not use the technical language of an electrical engineer to describe how electrons move through wires to electrical outlets. Section 1.3 says more about this matter, and chapter 10 discusses it in detail.
A student is not in the typical position of an author for several reasons. While an author usually chooses her intended audience, the student’s audience is imposed on her. The student’s predicament, however, is not unique. An audience usually chooses his author. But the student’s audience, her professor, does not choose his author; it is his student. Both the author and the audience should make the best of necessity. And necessity often is the motivator for innovation. (The science of soil management developed to meet increased demand for food. Radar was invented to defend against enemy aircraft.)
Unless the student is exceptional, she is not writing to inform or convince her audience of the truth of the position she takes in her essay. So her purpose is not persuasion. Further, unless the topic is exceptional or the professor is unusually ignorant, the student’s purpose is not straightforward exposition or explanation either. Presumably, the professor already understands the material that the student is struggling to present clearly and correctly. Nonetheless, the student should not presuppose that the professor is knowledgeable about the topic being discussed for this reason. In the professor’s role, he should not assume that the student understands the material about which she is writing. It’s her job to show her professor that she understands what the professor already knows. A student may find this paradoxical situation perverse. But this is the existential situation into which the student as author is thrown. (An important part of understanding human beings is understanding that much of a person’s life is not chosen but imposed on her. No one chooses their parents, even to be born.)
Notwithstanding the student’s unusual position, the structure and style of her essay should be the same as an essay of straightforward exposition and explanation. As just mentioned, the student’s goal is to show her professor that she knows some philosophical argument or position by giving an accurate rendering of it; that usually includes showing that she knows why the philosopher holds it. Doing so usually requires laying out the structure of the philosopher’s arguments, the meanings of his technical terms, and the reasons or evidence for his premises. (One difference between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas is that the former cares about the structure and cogency of the arguments.) These matters are explained in chapter 2. The student needs to assume (for the sake of adopting an appropriate authorial stance) that the audience is (1) intelligent but (2) uninformed. The student must state her thesis and then explain what she means. She must prove her thesis or at least provide good evidence for it.
All technical terms have to be explained as if the audience knew little or no philosophy. This means that the student ought to use ordinary words in their ordinary senses. If the meaning of a technical term is not introduced or explained by using ordinary words in their ordinary meanings, then there is no way for the audience to know what the author means. For example, consider this essay fragment:
The purpose of this essay is to prove that human beings never perceive material objects but rather semi‐ideators, by which I mean the interface of the phenomenal object and its conceptual content.
This passage should sound profound for less than a nanosecond. In theory, it is not objectionable to use a technical term to explain a new technical term, but this is acceptable only if the prior technical term has already been explained in ordinary language. The term semi‐ideator is a neologism and is unintelligible to the reader until its meaning is explained. In addition to neologisms, some ordinary words have technical meanings in philosophy, so their particular meaning may need to be made clear. Here are some examples:
ego
matter
pragmatic
realized
reflection
universal
If an author uses a word with an ordinary meaning in an unfamiliar technical sense, the word is ambiguous, and the audience will be misled or confused if that technical meaning is not explained in terms intelligible to the audience.
It is no good to protest that your professor should allow you to use technical terms without explanation on the grounds that the professor knows or ought to know their meaning. To repeat, it is not the professor’s knowledge that is at issue but the student’s. It is her responsibility to show that she knows the meaning of those terms. Do not think that the professor will think that you think that the professor does not understand a term if you define it. If you use a technical term, then it is your term and you are responsible for defining it. Further, a technical term is successfully introduced only if the explanation does not depend on the assumption that the audience already knows the meaning of the technical term! That is what the student has to show.
There is an exception. For advanced courses, a professor may allow the student to assume that the audience knows what a beginning student should know about philosophy, perhaps some logic, parts of Plato’s Republic, Descartes’s Meditations, or something similar. For graduate students, the professor may allow the student to assume a bit more logic, and quite a bit of the history of philosophy. It would be nice if the professor were to articulate exactly what a student is entitled to assume and what not, but he may forget to do this, and, even if he remembers, it is virtually impossible to specify all and only what may be assumed. There is just too much human knowledge and ignorance and not enough time to articulate it all. If you are in doubt about what you may assume, you should ask. Your professor will probably be happy to tell you. If he is not, then the fault is in him, certainly not in his stars, and you can find comfort in the knowledge that in asking, you did the right thing. That is the least that acting on principle gives us.
While I have talked about who your audience is and about how much or how little you should attribute to him, I have not said anything about the attitude you should take toward the audience. The attitude is respect. If you are writing for someone, then you should consider that person worthy of the truth, and if that person is worthy of the truth, then you should try to make that truth as intelligible and accessible to him as possible. Further, if you write for an audience, you are putting demands on that person’s time. You are expecting him to spend time and to expend effort to understand what you have written; if you have done a slipshod job, then you have wasted his time and treated him unfairly. A trivial or sloppy essay is an insult to the audience in addition to reflecting badly on you. If a professor is disgruntled when he returns a set of essays, it may well be because he feels slighted. A good essay is a sign of the author’s respect for the audience.
1.2 The Student as Author
The author should not intrude in her essay. This does not mean that she has to be invisible. Whether the author refers to herself or not should be determined by what is appropriate and idiomatic. Some decades ago, students were forbidden to use “I” in an essay. A phrase like “I will argue” was supposed to be replaced with a phrase like “My argument will be” (or “The argument of this paper” or “It will be argued”). Formal writing is more informal these days. “My argument will be” is verbose and stilted. “I will argue” is preferable for another reason. Although physical courage is widely admired and discussed in contemporary society, intellectual courage is not. Too few rational people have the courage of their convictions, yet convictions that are the result of investigation and reflection deserve the courage needed to defend them.
Ideas have consequences just as surely as physical actions do. Some are good, some are bad; some are wonderful, some are horrid. Own up to yours.
A person who writes, “It will be argued,” is passive; he is exhibiting intellectual courage obliquely at best. By whom will it be argued? If it is you, say so. A person who writes, “I will argue,” is active. She is committing herself to a line of reasoning and openly submitting that reasoning to rational scrutiny.
Philosophical writing is almost never autobiographical even when it contains autobiographical elements. (The Confessions of St. Augustine and those of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau are notable but rare exceptions.) It is very unlikely then that you should expose your personal life or feelings in your philosophical writing, at least in those terms. No reader should care how you feel about the existence of God, freedom, abortion, or anything else, presented merely as your feelings. Thus, the use of the phrase, I feel, is forbidden in essays because your feelings have no claim to universality and do not automatically transfer to your audience. You might feel that God exists, but that is no reason why anyone else should. The phrase, I argue, in contrast, does transfer. The phrase implies that the author has objective rather than merely subjective grounds for her position and thus that the audience ought to argue in the very same way.
Specific events in your life also have no place in your essay, considered as your events. Considered simply as events, they may have both relevance and force. Contrast the way the following two paragraphs make the same point.
When I was 14, I wanted a ten‐speed bike but needed $125 to buy one. The only way I could get the money legally was to work for it. I hired myself out at $4.00 an hour doing various jobs I hated, like cutting lawns, washing windows, and even baby‐sitting. It took three months, but I finally had enough money to buy the bicycle. What I came to realize, often as I was sweating during my labors, was that money is not just metal or paper, it is control over other human beings. The people who hired me were controlling my life. I came to realize something else: if I have money and also respect someone, I shouldn’t force him to do crummy jobs just so they can get my money.
Suppose a young person wants to buy something, say, a ten‐speed bicycle. She may hire out her services for money, perhaps at $4.00 an hour cutting lawns, washing windows, or baby‐sitting. By hiring herself out, she is putting herself within the control of the person paying her. Money, then, is not simply metal or paper; it is a means of controlling the behavior of other human beings. Further, if a person respects others, she will avoid hiring people for demeaning and alienating labor.
Although the first passage is livelier and more appropriate in nonphilosophical contexts, for example, a newspaper or magazine article, its philosophical point is made more obliquely than in the second, in which the author’s view of money is directly related to every human being and not just to the author. Thus, the second passage is preferable for a philosophical essay. The first passage is egocentric; the persona of the author is the student herself. In the second passage, the persona of the author is an objective observer of the human condition.
The notion of a persona is a technical one. The word persona comes from the Latin word for the mask that actors wore on the stage in theater productions. There were masks for comic and tragic characters, for gods and mortals. To have a persona is to play a role. An author plays a role and hence has a persona. The question is, What is that persona? or What should that persona be? because there are two possible roles an author can have in her essay.
An author inescapably has the role of creator, since she is responsible for the words of her essay. As the creator, the author has a transcendent perspective on her essay; she is outside it insofar as she is making it and is not made by it. If an author makes herself a character in one of her examples, then she takes on a second persona, that of a character who is in the example she is constructing. She is simultaneously the creator and the creature, an incoherent situation. The presence of two personas may confuse the reader. Consider the following passage:
Suppose that Smith and I have our brains interchanged. And I think that I am Smith and he thinks that he is I. However, I think I remain myself because I am identical with my body at any given time.
It is difficult to understand this passage because the reference of “I” shifts between the author as a creature in the scenario and the author as the creator of the scenario. Contrast the original with this revision in which references to the author as a character are replaced with references to a purely created character:
Suppose that Smith and Jones have their brains interchanged. Jones believes that he is Smith and Smith believes that he is Jones. Nonetheless, I argue that Jones remains Jones and Smith remains Smith, because a person is identical with his body at any given time.
Even this passage can be improved. There is something tendentious about saying “Jones remains Jones and Smith remains Smith” that was not obvious in the first passage. The following version is better:
Suppose that the bodies of Smith and Jones have their brains interchanged. The body that had Jones’s brain now has Smith’s brain, and vice versa. The body that originally had Smith’s brain now, with Jones’s brain, says that it is Jones. And the body that originally had Jones’s brain now, with Smith’s brain, says it is Smith. I shall argue that the identity of the person is determined by the brain it has and not by the identity of the rest of the body.
The point is that the more objective the author’s standpoint the better. (Recall that I am speaking about the style of the above passages not passing judgment on their cogency. Whether the duality of personas has philosophical consequences is a substantive issue; see Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.) There is never any need for an author to cast herself in her own examples: Smith and Jones, White, Black, Brown, and Green, and Lee and Kee are versatile philosophical character actors.
What the characters in scenarios believe and do are determined by the authors who create them. If their beliefs are mistaken or their actions objectionable, it is because the author has made them so. When an author says, “Suppose Smith and Jones have their brains interchanged,” Smith and Jones have their brains interchanged. And if an author says that a brain in a vat thinks that he is a scientist, the brain in the vat thinks that he is a scientist.
An author’s will in constructing an example cannot be thwarted as long as what she says is coherent and has no doubts about what she is supposing. She transcends the situation she describes. In this way, the author’s situation is inherently anti‐skeptical. A story is told about an eighth grader who was having trouble learning algebra. The teacher said, “Suppose that x equals 2.” The student became quite anxious because she thought the teacher might have been wrong or at least overlooking a possibility: “Teacher, suppose that x does not equal 2.” The student did not realize that when a person supposes something to be true for the sake of argument, then it is true within the context of that discussion. For all intents and purposes, an author is omnipotent and omniscient. (I am speaking only of philosophical authors. Some fiction tries to undermine the privileged position of an author through the use of an “unreliable narrator.”) However, the power of the author is limited by logical coherence. Be on guard against thinking that you have proven a point by constructing a logically contradictory scenario, as in this essay fragment:
Suppose that there is a four‐sided plane‐figure, of which each interior angle is 90°. Further suppose that each point of its perimeter is equidistant from a point inside of it. It follows that there is a round square.
This scenario is defective because its supposition is contradictory.
Unlike the author, the characters in a philosophical example are subject to error and deception. This is a perfectly acceptable scenario:
Suppose that Smith, who has known Jones for 20 years, sees someone who looks exactly like Jones walking across the plaza. Further suppose that Smith does not see Jones, but Jones’s long‐lost twin brother, although Jones himself is also walking across the plaza out of Smith’s sight….
So far in this chapter, I have tried to explain the sense in which a student’s audience, the professor, must be considered ignorant and the sense in which the student, a philosophical author, should maintain a transcendent perspective, from which she is omniscient and omnipotent. How is that for a Hegelian reversal?
1.3 Three Attitudes About Philosophical Method
A difficult issue for the student as an author is knowing what her professor thinks is a good way to tackle a philosophical problem. Some professors think that a person’s intuitions are the best starting point; others think that one must begin with a theory; and others think that a combination of the two is best. I will discuss each of these attitudes in this section.
Since the word “intuition” is used in various ways, I need to explain what I mean by it here.1 Intuitions are the pre‐theoretical judgments that a person makes about something. They are her ordinary beliefs. They can be contrasted with the judgments the person makes after having considered the issue extensively. Often these reflective judgments are the result of adopting some theory. A theory is an explanation or description of a large class of things, events, or phenomena. The theory must consist of some general propositions that apply to all or almost all of the phenomena.
Our intuitions include the beliefs that the sun goes around the earth, that human beings act freely without being necessitated to act the way they do, and that some things are inherently morally right and others wrong. It is a matter of theory that the earth goes around the sun, that every action is causally necessitated, and that nothing is inherently morally right or wrong. To say that something is a matter of theory is not to say that it is true; it may be true or false, depending upon whether the theory is true or false. Phlogiston was part of an eighteenth‐century theory of combustion, but statements about phlogiston were false. In philosophy, there are typically two or more incompatible theories for any topic; so not more than one of them can be true, but both can be false. (In chapter 4, contraries are defined as two things that cannot both be true but both may be false.)
Philosophers are split over the relationship between intuition and theory. Some (“intuitionists”) believe that intuition is privileged and that theories are constructed in order to justify and explain intuitions. Wittgenstein, who in the later part of his life wrote that everything is all right as it is, is a paradigmatic case of an intuitionist in the sense specified above.
Other philosophers (“theorists”) believe that the goal of philosophy is to develop a theory about a topic and that intuitions have little or no value. Bertrand Russell argued that sentences like “Socrates is wise” are actually not subject‐predicate in form but really complex existential assertions, meaning something like:
There exists an object x such that x philosophizes in fifth‐century BCE Athens and is named “Socrates,” and for all y, if y philosophizes in fifth‐century BCE Athens and is named “Socrates,” then y is identical with x, and x is wise.
Russell’s argument is grounded in a theory: his famous theory of definite descriptions.
Privileging only intuition or only theory is an extreme position. The middle ground promotes what may be called reflective equilibrium. This view holds that philosophy should begin with intuitions; that theorizing should begin by trying to explain those intuitions; and that when intuitions and theories conflict, there should be a compromise between them, such that intuitions sometimes are given up to accommodate theoretical statements and sometimes theoretical statements are given up (or modified) to accommodate intuitions. Roughly, intuitions should give way when there are theoretical statements that explain a very large number of intuitions, and some related but not the central intuition is inconsistent with them. And theoretical statements should give way when numerous and well‐attested experiences support an intuition.
It is not controversial that the intuition that the sun goes around the earth should give way to the consequences of the heliocentric theory. It is controversial that intuitions about the basic structure of a sentence like “Abraham Lincoln was a president” should give way to Russell’s theory of definite descriptions.
There is no way to predict whether your professor will prefer intuitions or theories, or reflective equilibrium. It is important that you figure out which he does by paying attention to how he introduces a philosophical problem, and when you cannot figure that out, ask him.
2Logic and Argument for Writing
A little logic is not a dangerous thing. It is crucial for understanding the substance of many philosophical essays. We will discuss a small part of formal logic in this chapter, a part of propositional logic, some categorical logic, and a little about modal logic.
In his Poetics, Aristotle remarks that a well‐constructed dramatic plot must reflect an action that is “whole and complete in itself and of some magnitude.” He goes on to define a whole action as “that which has a beginning, middle, and end.” Though Greek tragedy and philosophical prose may seem like quite disparate fields of literary endeavor, Aristotle’s advice applies to writing a philosophical essay. Just as the core of a dramatic work is its plot, the core of a philosophical essay is its argument in a broad sense of argument. Just as a good play will have a well‐demarcated beginning, middle, and end, so too will a good essay. The beginning of a philosophical essay introduces the argument; the middle elaborates it; the end summarizes it. Every competent speaker of English has some idea of an argument in logic. It is not a quarrel; it is not a verbal fight. It is something connected with reasoning. In theory, philosophers engage only in the latter. Although there are several ways of reasoning, we are interested in this chapter only in a small part of reasoning.
2.1 What Is a Good Argument?
At the simplest level, there are two kinds of arguments: good ones and bad ones. A good argument is one that does what it is supposed to do. A bad argument is one that does not. A good argument is one that shows a person a rational way to go from true premises to a true conclusion, as well as the subject allows (some subjects more easily or certainly show the way than others, say, mathematics more than a esthetics). As explained here, a good argument is relative to a person. What might legitimately lead one person to a conclusion might not lead another person to the same conclusion because so much depends upon the person’s background beliefs. (Chapter 10 says more about this.) What a contemporary philosopher or physicist would recognize as a good argument is often not what an ancient Greek, even Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, or Euclid, would recognize. Also, there may be good arguments that the ancient Greeks could recognize as good arguments that we cannot. For obvious reasons, I can’t give an example. (Exercise: Why can’t I give one? Can you?)
The notion of a “good argument” is an intuitive one. In this chapter, I want to make this intuitive notion progressively more precise by considering the following definitions:
Df(1)
An argument is a sequence of two or more propositions of which one is designated as the conclusion and all the others of which are premises.
Df(2)
A sound argument is an argument that is valid and that contains only true premises.
Df(3)
An argument is valid if and only if it is necessary that if all the premises are true, then the conclusion is true.
Df(4)
A cogent argument is a sound argument that is recognized to be such in virtue of the presentation of its structure and content.
Each of these definitions contains key technical terms and ideas that need to be explained, including proposition and valid. Let’s begin by looking at Df(1), the definition of argument. Notice that an argument is characterized as a sequence of propositions. Although proposition could be given a more technical formulation, for our purposes it is enough for us to understand this term as equivalent to “a sentence (or main clause) that has a truth‐value;” that is, it is a sentence (or main clause) that is either true or false. (There are only two truth‐values. Some systems of logic have a third value, but it is not a truth‐value; they will not be discussed.) Propositions are sometimes contrasted with questions and commands, which cannot be true or false. Proposition is often used interchangeably with statement and assertion even though the meanings of these words can be different in important ways.1
Returning to the definition of argument, we should notice that an argument is a sequence of propositions because the propositions are supposed to be related in some logically significant way. One of these propositions will be designated as the conclusion; that is, the proposition that is to be proven. Within the context of an essay as a whole, the conclusion is the thesis. Since subordinate propositions within the essay may have to be proved, these subordinate propositions may also be conclusions with their own sets of supporting premises. The premises are the propositions that lead to the conclusion. They provide the justification for the conclusion.
The above definition is abstract. Let’s make it a bit less so by considering an extremely spare argument:
The first two sentences are premises. The third is the conclusion, as indicated by the word therefore. Other words in ordinary language that indicate the conclusion are consequently, hence, it follows that, and thus.
Exercise
Give two other words or phrases from ordinary language that indicate a conclusion.
The premises are supposed to provide the rational grounds for accepting the conclusion. While the argument about Socrates is good in some sense, it is rhetorically lame because no one would seriously argue for such an obvious conclusion. It rarely happens that three simple sentences constitute a rationally forceful argument. A rationally forceful argument, what is called in this book a cogent argument, typically requires elaboration and embellishment. Yet, at the beginning of our study, it is wise to keep the matter as simple as possible.
The definition of argument
