Contemporary Epistemology and Metaphysics                 First Position Paper Assignment    

Due: Monday, October 24 by 10AM

Basic assignment: Write a 5-7 page (typed, double-spaced) paper explaining and supporting your position on some issue raised by one or more of the writers we have read (or will have read) in the first half of this course.

Some guidelines:

1. Your paper should contain your thoughts and opinions, not just a summary of Haslanger or Heidegger (or whoever).  Tell me what you think, not just what other people have said.
2. Do, however, address the position and the arguments of at least one of the philosophers we have studied.  Give references to the texts to support your interpretation of their views.
3. Be sure that the question or issue your paper is addressing is clear and well focused.
4. Be sure that you have provided a clear statement of your position on that issue (or your answer to that question).
5. In addition to explaining what you think, your paper should contain reasons why you take the position you do.  Your main job is to explain why a reasonable person should agree with the opinion or position you are expressing.
6. Include in your paper at least one statement of an objection to your view and a reply to that objection.  How might someone who disagreed with you criticize your argument?  And how can you respond to that criticism?
7. You are not required (or encouraged) to consult any other sources besides those already assigned for class reading.  If you do use any other sources, give them credit for whatever you take from them: list them in a bibliography at the end of your paper and give specific references for any ideas you have borrowed. 

Some possible topics (if you want to develop a different topic, check it out with me before you write your paper):

1. General formula for a topic: Choose one of the course readings.  Analyze and assess an argument (or, at least, a claim) made in that text.  (This is probably easier to do if you disagree with the claim or argument.  But it can also work to defend that claim or argument against objections that you think are misguided.)  Since the first half of this class is about metaphysics, the argument or claim that you choose should have something to do with metaphysics, broadly construed. 
2. Compare and contrast the approaches to metaphysics represented by two or more of the writers we have studied.
3. Compare and contrast the accounts of human experience in the mid-20th century existential phenomenologists (or one of them) with the accounts given by one or more of the feminist or race-focused writers we studied.
4. Discuss whether and how a phenomenological account of human experience can count as metaphysics (as opposed to psychology or autobiography or…).
5. Discuss some particular aspect of the account of human experience given by one ofthe writers we read -- Douglas and Wilderson's claim that blackness is metaphysically different from other racial categories, for example; or Marilyn Frye's claim that phallocentic metaphysics makes lesbians impossible.
6. If you are at all familiar with the philosophy of Rene Descartes, you could discuss the ways that one or more of the writers we studied has criticized the Cartesian philosophy.
7.  Can metaphysics be anything more than an account of the ways that some people think?  Can it be a study of basic features of Reality Itself?