How to write your philosophy essay

 

I. The basic idea

For the typical tutorial, you are asked to consider a question in light of some reading you have been set. The texts included in the reading will have been selected by your tutor on the grounds that they provide a helpful introduction to considerations and arguments bearing on the question, offer a compelling presentation of one particular answer to it and reasons for that answer, offer a seminal discussion of relevant matters, offer a new or interesting perspective on those matters, or some combination of these. But after you have read what you can in the time available, you will probably not feel very sure of the answer to the question, and you may have lots of ideas and thoughts and half-understood arguments swirling around in your mind.

Unless you try to pin some of these ideas and thoughts down by articulating and organising them into some sort of coherent picture—even if that picture expresses only limited familiarity with and understanding of relevant philosophical positions and arguments?it will be difficult to refine your understanding by considering and assessing objections to that picture and alternatives to it. Learning of the objections and alternative pictures will merely add to the confusing swirl of thoughts.

The tutorial essay is an attempt to pin ideas and thoughts down and organise them into a coherent picture—specifically, into an argument. That is, it is an attempt to give a particular answer to the question and some reasons for favouring that answer over other candidate answers. It isn’t supposed to be your final view on the question, or even something you’re especially confident in. It certainly need not be original, though it should be independent-minded, which means that it should represent your thinking rather than someone else's. (Your thinking can be that someone else has the right answer or has given a powerful reason, though: again, your answer and argument need not be original.)

Once you have an answer and an argument, you have something determinate to work with in the tutorial. You should expect the tutorial discussion and your tutor's feedback to reveal problems with your argument, objections you hadn’t considered, alternative possibilities, and so on. Don’t take it personally—that is what is supposed to happen. (If your arguments were already perfect there would be no point in your being here.) Pointed questions, objections, alternative views all help you to deepen your understanding, to improve upon the thought of which the essay was a snapshot.

The essay in this way gives you a determinate picture that you can update by means of discussion and debate, and with each update the picture becomes more accurate or at least more a reflection of what you really think. There is no substitute for making ideas determinate by articulating them in this way: unless you do it, then however much you read you will find yourself with a swirl of unclear thoughts. Once you articulate them, you can begin to improve them. You don’t want this to happen for the first time in the final exam!

That, then, is why the tutorial essay is so important.
 

II. Writing the essay

I strongly recommend that you do not treat reading and making notes for and writing the essay as separate stages in your preparation.

Instead, read with an eye to answering the essay question, and start drafting and refining your answer almost as soon as you start reading.

Here is how you might do that.

  1. First, pick a text from the reading list. Pick one that looks as if the author will argue in it for a direct answer to the essay question, or one that looks as if it tells you what the main contending positions are or what’s at stake in the debate, or just one that looks fun or easy to read.
  2. Next, read through the text. Skim it a bit first, trying to identify the parts that provide useful orientation and the parts that seem to give reasons for a particular answer to the essay question (including reasons why reasons for other answers are bad). Read those bits carefully. Sometimes reading them reveals that you need to read a bit you expected to skim more carefully, so you can go and do that. It’s normal to read a philosophical text in an order that’s not the one in which its parts are presented.
  3. Don’t take notes that are summaries of what you are reading as you read! Instead, start drafting parts of an answer to the question based on what you’re reading.
    • Suppose, for example, that you’re reading Philosopher X, who argues for an externalist view on the basis that only externalism can make sense of the correct verdict about Example E. You can write: “As Philosopher X argues, internalists can’t make sense of the correct verdict about the following example. [Present Example E.] Since it is a condition on any plausible view of the matter that it make sense of this verdict, we should accept externalism. Hence, the answer to our question is [insert externalist answer to the essay question here].”
    • Or suppose that you’re reading Philosopher Y’s introduction, which helpfully clarifies the prima facie stakes in the debate that your essay question concerns. Then you can write: “Some people defend the view that [one plausible-seeming answer to the essay question]. This view is intuitively plausible. However, if we accept this view, it seems that [insert seeming risk of accepting first answer to your question]. This might lead us to accept [different answer to the essay question]. But this view seems to have its own problems—notably, that [insert seeming risk of accepting second answer to the essay question].”
  4. Read what you have written. This represents your thinking on the essay question as it currently stands, at least for the purposes of bringing a determinate view and argument to the tutorial. Is it unclear in any respect, or does it raise any questions for you? (Perhaps Philosopher X’s example seems a bit unpersuasive to you, for example.) If so, revise what you’ve written so as to reflect your thinking better.
  5. Pick another text from the reading list. Again, skim it a bit first, this time trying to identify the parts that provide useful orientation, the parts that seem to give reasons for a particular answer to the essay question (including reasons why reasons for other answers are bad), and the parts that engage with what you’ve already written. Perhaps, for instance, the author of this text has a critique of Philosopher X’s appeal to the example, or perhaps she offers a different example that seems to support internalism (or whatever). Read those bits carefully.
  6. Now revise and add to the bit of writing you’ve already done. You can add or deepen arguments, objections, analysis, or scene-setting depending on what you’ve just read.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for as long as you have to work on the essay. Over time, the piece of writing that records the state of your thinking will get longer. Keep tinkering with it, reading and re-reading it, adjusting it for clarity and to include consideration of new arguments and positions as you read, and (just as importantly) to get rid of discussion that seems unimportant?e.g. of objections that seem much less interesting than others (and so not worth the precious word count they use up).
  8. When it’s time to submit the essay, write an introduction with the following elements:
    • A sentence that answers the question directly (just ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.&rsquo can be fine).
    • A sentence or two explaining what’s at stake?why the question presents an interesting puzzle. Often the puzzle is something like this: the most natural answer appears to generate some kind of incoherence, but the most attractive alternative has extremely counterintuitive implications. The fact that a question is controversial, that there are conflicting answers or that philosophers have debated about it for centuries, is not a good explanation of this sort.
    • A sentence or two explaining the main reasons you’re going to give for your answer to the question (it can be useful to connect this to the sentence about why the question is puzzling?e.g. “"However, I will argue that these counterintuitive implications do not in fact follow.").
    • A sentence or two explaining what you say in response to the main objections that you deal with.
  9. The conclusion of an essay should never introduce any new argument—by the time you get to the conclusion, the argument should be over. So, by way of conclusion, you can simply add: “In light of these arguments, I conclude that [repeat first sentence of essay].” at the end of the essay.

In this way, your reading and your essay-writing are the same process: a continuous development, through determinate articulation and revision, of your thought (a process that continues in the tutorial and afterwards). So you don’t waste time writing notes that consist of a bunch of paragraph-by-paragraph summaries of every text you read (notes that are harder to read than the originals and don’t help you take in the arguments much if at all); there is no moment where you are supposed to ‘synthesise’ in your mind all the reading you’ve done before you start writing the essay; and there is no essay crisis at the end of the reading. Your essay is just what you have (more or less) at the point when you have to stop reading.
 

III. What a tutorial essay should look like

The end result of the process above should have the following structure:

  • An introduction that briefly tells the reader what’'s at stake philosophically, gives the essay’s answer to the question and the main reasons for that answer and for thinking that competing answers are mistaken, explains any technical terms or assumptions that will be made in the course of the essay, and perhaps summarises the structure of what’s to come (e.g. “In what follows I begin by describing the puzzle that the question raises in more detail. Next, I explain why two widely accepted responses to the puzzle fail. Then I explain my answer and elaborate on the argument that only this answer makes sense of what I call the Prisoner Problem. After that I consider and reject three important objections to my argument. Finally, I highlight two implications of my answer for debates about responsibility before concluding.”).
  • Paragraphs doing the work that an introduction with the form just described calls for: elaborating more fully what’s at stake in the question, elaborating your answer more fully and explaining the reasons for it in more detail, setting out the main objections to this answer and those reasons and why you reject them, and setting out any important wider philosophical implications.
  • A paragraph that concludes. (It can be one short sentence—see above.)

Two important points

First, your essay should not read like a report on a debate between other people. It should read as an argument presented to the reader to persuade her to accept a particular answer to the essay question. Telling her that Philosopher 1 says one thing and Philosopher 2 responds in such-and-such a way doesn’t tell her which view to accept, because it doesn’t tell us how to assess Philosopher 1’s claim or Philosopher 2’s response. ‘He said, she said, then he said’ is not an argument: it is the report of an argument. Of course, you will want to draw on the arguments of others without presenting them as if you thought of them. But that means saying such things as “As Philosopher 1 argues,...” rather than “Philosopher 1 argues that...”; and “Philosopher 2’s responds that... This response is compelling: we should reject Philosopher 1’s argument” rather than only “Philosopher 1 responds that...”.

Second, don’t expect to include in your essay every interesting point or argument that you come across in your reading. There won’t be room—and it’s important to stick to the word count. (You can always cut far more than you think, getting rid of unnecessary circumlocution and repetition, even without cutting substance.) You want to include the most important arguments and objections; you can cut the less important ones. The most important arguments tend to bear not just on a particular philosophical position or claim but also on similar positions or claims, so that no position or claim of that sort is independent of the argument’s success. The least important arguments can typically be defeated by modifying a position or claim or objection in a way that doesn’t alter its fundamental point. Of course, this isn’t always obvious, and it’s a matter of judgment what is the fundamental point. Over time, your judgment about these things will improve: that’s part of the training that involves regularly articulating and discussing arguments.
 

IV. Grammar and style

Clarity is prized in philosophical writing. Try very hard to use words with precisely the meaning you intend, and avoid vagueness and generality where you can. For example, don’t write “This leads to” when you’re explaining the connection between one thing and another, because ‘leads to’ is rather vague: one thing might lead to another in the sense that the thought of the first tends to prompt the thought of the second, or one thing might lead to another in the sense that the second is an implication of the first, or one thing might lead to another in the sense that the second is a causal effect of the first, and so on. These different senses all have different argumentative importance. If some attractive-seeming claim implies some unacceptable claim, then that’s a fatal objection; if it merely tends to prompt many readers to think about the unacceptable claim, that’s not an objection. So precision matters.

At least minimally decent grammar matters too, because bad grammar makes things hard to read and renders it unclear what exactly is being argued. There are several common errors of grammar that tend to make students' essays hard to follow. Try to eliminate these as you draft your essay, rather than waiting for me to highlight them when I mark your essay. The excellent Grammar Bites distinguishes and provides helpful explanations of the errors in question. It also provides exercises that you can use to test and, if necessary, improve your grammar skills in advance of submitting your essays.

You may think that you're a fine writer, but the chances are that you're making at least some of the errors I have in mind even so! So please don't be complacent about this.

The common errors are listed below, with links to the relevant exercises at Grammar Bites.

Have a look also at the Grammar Bites word choice errors exercise and Mignon Fogarty's guide to gerunds and the possessive.
 

V. Referencing

It is not hard to conform to academic norms concerning references, but it is important. The basic idea is as follows:

  1. you should credit the sources of any ideas, arguments, or quotations that you use in your essay (not to do so is to plagiarise);
  2. you should make it as easy as possible for your reader to look up those sources.

Making it easy to look up the sources simply involves giving the most specific details of the sources that you can. Your reader should not have to do any detective work in order to find precisely the parts of the sources you're referring to.

To illustrate: if you quote someone in your essay, then the quote will be normally on specifiable pages of an article or book. So you should cite the page numbers, not just the book. Someone's argument might also be elaborated over specifiable pages of an article or book, or it might instead take up the whole of the article or book. In the former case, you should cite the page numbers; in the latter, you need not.

There are standardised formats for listing the sources that you credit. You alert the reader in the course of your essay by means of a footnote, like this.1 (The footnote reference marker normally goes after the punctuation mark that terminates the clause in which the claim is made for which you're providing a reference.) Or you do it by means of an 'in-text reference', like this (Smart 1979, p. 60).

In the version of the footnote system most commonly used in philosophy, you give the full bibliographic details (author, title, journal or collection, editor, publisher—no need for editor or publisher for journal articles, though—date, pages) in the footnote, as I've done below. In the in-text systems, you give them in a list of sources, which you place at the end of your essay, as I've also done below. It lists all the texts that you cited. (In the in-text system most used in philosophy, this is done in alphabetical order by author's surname.) Don't list anything you didn't cite—the reference list is not a reading list! And don't combine two or more systems in the same essay.

Note, too that it's important to format your references correctly. It's a part of each referencing system's specification that book titles will be formatted in one way (e.g. in italics) and article or chapter titles in another way (e.g. in inverted commas), for instance. Similarly, each will specify in what order to list a source's bibliographic details, and what punctuation to use. Pay attention to this stuff. Since academic readers are familiar with the systems' specifications, it is unhelpfully confusing to adopt a system but fail to comply with its formatting specifications.

For more details of the footnote and in-text systems, look online (e.g. here or here). You can find out, for instance, how to cite webpages. The journal Philosophy & Public Affairs uses the footnote system, so you can look at any article in Philosophy & Public Affairs for examples of that system. The journal Philosophy & Phenomenological Research uses the in-text system, so you can look there for examples of that.

One last thing on referencing: ‘pp.’ is the abbreviation for ‘pages’ (i.e. the plural). If you're citing only one page, (as in footnote 1 below), use ‘p.’, not ‘pp.’

References

Smart, John (1979). What A Good Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 Jane Clever, ‘A Clever Argument’, Nifty Studies vol. 3, no. 5 (2003): 537–552, at p. 541.
 

VI. Other guides

If you're still not sure what to do, drop me a line, or try one of the following guides to writing philosophy essays instead: