CJ Blunt

Using Literature (WritePhilosophy Guide)

How many sources should a philosophy paper use? How do you cite these works and avoid accusations of plagiarism? How do you present other philosophers’ ideas and arguments in your paper? Should you include quotations? These are very common questions which students face. Let’s look at the ways you should and should not use literature in your essays.

Fallacies (WritePhilosophy Guide)

A fallacy is a mistake or error in reasoning. Fallacies can be accidental errors, or can be deliberately crafted to be misleading. Many different types of fallacy have been described across many fields. Understanding fallacies is useful for philosophers to identify fallacious reasoning in arguments which we are criticising, and to avoid committing them in our own work.

Logical Equivalence (WritePhilosophy Guide)

What does it mean for two propositions to be logically equivalent? When can we swap out a proposition for another? Using the method of Truth Tables, we can formalise a way to discover whether two propositions are logically equivalent, and deploy this method to transform our claims into the most useful form to deploy them in arguments.

Banned Words (WritePhilosophy Guide)

You can improve your philosophical writing by removing certain words and phrases. Some phrases weaken your papers by introducing vagueness and ambiguity, by wasting words, or by acting as a crutch to prevent you saying what you really need to say. Here we’ve compiled a list of “banned” words and phrases. By banning yourself from using these, you can improve your philosophical style.