Philosophical Writing

An Introduction

A. P. Martinich

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119010043
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, 4th Edition, features numerous updates and revisions to A. P. Martinich's best-selling text that instructs beginning philosophy students on how to craft a well-written philosophical essay.

• Features an entirely new chapter on how to read a philosophical essay, new sections on quantification and modality, and rhetoric in philosophical writing, as well as more updated essay examples
• Includes many new essay examples and an accompanying website with further topics and examples
• Traces the evolution of a good philosophical essay from draft stage to completion
• Emphasizes what a student should do in crafting an essay, rather than on what not to do
• Written with clarity and humor by a leading philosopher

1
Author and Audience

It might seem obvious who the author and audience of a student’s essay are. The student is the author and the professor is the audience. Of course that is true. But a student is not a normal author, and a student’s professor is not a normal audience. I want to expand on these two points in this chapter. I will begin with the conceptually simpler topic: the abnormality of a teacher as audience.

1 The Professor as Audience

It’s indispensable for an author to know who the audience is. Depending upon the audience, an author might take one or another tack in explaining her position. (See also section 3.)

A student is not in the typical position of an author for many 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. In contrast, the professor’s author is imposed on him: his students. Both should make the best of necessity.) Unless the student is exceptional, she is not writing to inform or convince her audience of the truth of the position she expostulates. So her purpose is not persuasion. Further, unless the topic is exceptional or the professor relatively ignorant, the student’s purpose is not straightforwardly expositive or explanatory either. Presumably, the professor already understands the material that the student is struggling to present clearly and correctly. Nonetheless, the student cannot presuppose that the professor is knowledgeable about the topic being discussed because the professor, in his role as judge, cannot assume that the student is knowledgeable. It is the student’s job to show her professor that she understands what the professor already knows. A student may find this not merely paradoxical but perverse. But this is the existential situation into which the student as author is thrown.

The structure and style of a student’s essay should be the same as an essay of straightforward exposition and explanation. As mentioned above, the student’s goal is to show the professor that she knows some philosophical doctrine by giving an accurate rendering of it; further, the student must show that she knows, not simply what propositions have been espoused by certain philosophers, but why they hold them. That is, the student must show that she knows the structure of the arguments used to prove a philosophical position, the meaning of the technical terms used and the evidence for the 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.) The student needs to assume (for the sake of adopting an appropriate authorial stance) that the audience is (a) intelligent but (b) 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 explain them by using 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 no more than a nano-second. In theory, there is nothing objectionable to introducing the term semi-ideator, but anyone with the gall to invent such a neologism owes the reader a better explanation of its meaning than “the interface of the phenomenal object and its conceptual content.” In addition to neologisms, words with ordinary meanings often have technical meanings in philosophy, e.g.:

• determined
• matter
• ego
• universal
• reflection
• pragmatic

When an author uses a word with an ordinary meaning in an unfamiliar technical sense, the word is rendered ambiguous, and the audience will be misled or confused if that technical meaning is not noted and explained in terms intelligible to the audience.

It is no good to protest that your professor should permit 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 the professor 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! For that is precisely what the student has to show.

There is an exception. For advanced courses, the professor may allow the student to assume that the audience knows what a beginning student might know about philosophy, perhaps some logic or parts of Plato’s Republic or 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 lies with him; and you can rest content with the knowledge that, in asking, you did the right thing. That is the least that acting on principle gives us; and sometimes, alack, the most.

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 what 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.

2 The Student as Author

Although you are the author of your essay, you must not be intrusive. This does not mean that you cannot refer to yourself in the first person. Whether you do or not is a matter of taste. 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 prefer “I will argue” for an additional reason. Although physical courage is widely admired and discussed in contemporary society, and, perhaps, unwittingly caricatured in macho men, intellectual courage is not. Too few people have the courage of their convictions; yet convictions on important issues 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 virtually never autobiography, 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 your personal life or personal feelings should be exposed in your philosophical writing, at least in those terms. No philosopher should care how you feel about the existence of God, freedom, abortion or anything else, presented merely as your feelings. Thus, use of the phrase, I feel, is with rare exception forbidden in essays. 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 incidents in your life also have no place in your essay, considered as your experiences. Considered simply as experiences, they may have both relevance and force. Contrast these two ways of making 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 $2.00 an hour doing various jobs I hated, like cutting lawns, washing windows, and even baby-sitting. It took three weeks, but I finally had enough money to buy the bicycle. What I discovered, often as I was sweating during my labors, was that money is not just paper or metal, it is control over other human beings. The people who hired me were controlling my life. I figured out 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. He may hire out his services for money, perhaps at $2.00 an hour cutting lawns, washing windows, or baby-sitting. By hiring himself out, he is putting himself within the control of the person who is paying him. 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, he will avoid hiring people for demeaning and alienating labor.

Although the first passage is livelier and more appropriate in non-philosophical contexts, for example, a newspaper or magazine article, its philosophical point is made more obliquely than in the second, where the author’s view of money is directly related to every human being and not just the author. Thus, the second passage is preferable for an explicitly 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 stage. There were masks for comic and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Note to the Fourth Edition
• Note to the Third Edition
• Note to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Author and Audience
• 2 Logic and Argument for Writing
• 3 The Structure of a Philosophical Essay
• 4 Composing
• 5 Tactics for Analytic Writing
• 6 Some Constraints on Content
• 7 Some Goals of Form
• 8 Problems with Introductions
• 9 How to Read a Philosophical Work
• 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: Philosophy Resources on the Internet
• Appendix E: On Grading
• Appendix F: Glossary of Philosophical Terms
• Index
• EULA