Contemporary Epistemology and Metaphysics                 Second Position Paper Assignment 

 

Due: Wednesday, December 7 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 second half of this course.  Please save your finished paper as a Word doc and upload it to the appropriate assignment folder in the class D2L site.

Some guidelines:

  1. Your paper should contain your thoughts and opinions, not just a summary of Foucault or Charles Mills (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 second half of this class is about epistemology, the argument or claim that you choose should have something to do with epistemology, broadly construed. 
  2. Compare and contrast the approaches to epistemology represented by two or more of the writers we have studied.
  3. A ‘big picture’ question: We began our study of epistemology with a couple of weeks on ‘mainstream analytic epistemology,’ which pursued some fairly abstract questions about knowledge in a de-contextualized, ahistorical, non-political way. Then we turned to a variety of writers who changed the subject (so to speak) to an inquiry in which social positions, identities and historical time periods are crucial and for which the connection between knowledge and power is central. Try to make a good case for the claim that one of these approaches to epistemology is preferrable to the other.
  4. Discuss whether and how a phenomenological account of human experience can count as epistemology (as opposed to psychology or autobiography or…).
  5. Does Linda Alcoff’s interpretation of Foucault’s epistemology make him into a contextualist of the Michael Williams type?
  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 approach to epistemology.
  7.  Charles Mills thinks that the concept of ‘ideology’ (in the critical, Marxist sense) can be helpful in thinking about epistemology.  Foucault says it is “difficult to make use of.”  Who is right?
  8. Is Shelley Tremain right to suggest that the concept of epistemological ignorance is an ‘ableist’ metaphor?  (Note: she mentions this idea briefly at the beginning of her essay and then goes on to pursue other topics.  So, you will need to develop her suggestion yourself in order to answer this question.)