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.
Philosophers perform conceptual analysis to understanding the meaning of terms from ‘death’ to ‘love’, ‘good’ to ‘evil’ and ‘science’ to ‘art’. How do we evaluate conceptual analyses? What are necessary and sufficient conditions? What makes a conceptual analysis too strong or too weak?
Philosophers often draw distinctions, dividing things into categories. How do we evaluate distinctions? What is a ‘proper distinction’? What makes a distinction exhaustive or mutually exclusive? And what does this have to do with suckling pigs and mermaids?
Some of the most powerful philosophical criticisms provide a counterexample to a claim. But how do we formulate counterexamples? And if there is a counterexample to a claim you want to defend or an argument you want to make, how should you proceed? We’ll look at Gettier’s famous counterexamples to find out.
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.
Formalising arguments allows us to look at the underlying logical form of the premises and conclusions. We can use this tool to determine the validity of the argument. How do we find the logical form of a proposition? This guide introduces the basics of propositional logic.
Truth Tables are a useful tool for analysing propositions and arguments alike. They allow us to give precise definitions for our logical connectives. They also allow us to show systematically that a proposition is a tautology or contradiction, and to prove that an argument is valid or invalid. How do we create truth tables?
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.
How do we draft, edit and proofread philosophical papers to ensure that what we’re turning in is high-quality? What’s the difference between a Zero Draft, a First Draft and a Final Draft? This guide article gives you a range of tools, tests and techniques to improve your paper immeasurably through editing and proofreading.
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.
