Writing the History Paper
Composing a paper on a topic in the history of philosophy is a matter of good planning, patience, and grace with yourself. In this way, it is not different from any other writing: All you need to do is understand the task, plan your paper, and write it. A good paper uses our philosophers’ tools to write about a topic: Making a claim, supporting the claim with convincing arguments, and adducing good evidence for the premises in the argument. Here are some more detailed step-by-step instructions.
Step 1: Where Do I Start?
Understand the task at hand.
A paper in the history of philosophy defends an interpretation of a philosophical claim made in the past.
What counts as an ‘interpretation of a philosophical claim made in the past’? There are simple ways to decide this. If a claim was articulated before the turn of the century (1900), chances are, their positions are no longer commonly held. But a more reliable way to think about this is to look at the claim itself, and see if it is in tune with our current conventions, and commonly held beliefs. If the claim is somehow not straightforward, or it is not straightforward why someone could have defended such a position, there is an opportunity for the historian to give a lucid account of the view that is comprehensible to contemporary philosophers who do not have specialized knowledge of this claim. Historians make comprehensible past philosophical positions. They enable current philosophers to take these positions into account in an informed way.
Undergraduates are assigned to write such papers in various ways. Assignments often look like this:
Why does Xenophanes believe that there is a difference between belief and knowledge?
Sextus Empiricus reports that Xenophanes held, “No man has seen nor will anyone know the truth about the gods and all the things I speak of. For even if a person should in fact say what is absolutely the case, nevertheless he himself does not know but belief is fashioned over all things.” Discuss.
Design your own paper topic on Xenophanes' epistemology.
Answering a Direct Question
The first task asks you to give reasons for a specific thesis. The thesis in question is “Xenophanes believes that there is a difference between belief and knowledge.” Your task is to defend the claim by giving good reasons why Xenophanes held this belief.
This does not typically mean that you are asked to defend why there is a difference between belief and knowledge, but to explain why this is the correct interpretation of Xenophanes’ view on knowledge. You make arguments which support this claim and are in turn backed by evidence. Then, you anticipate possible counterarguments against the interpretation and counterevidence.
Advanced students have to expect that part of their task is to contrast this view with a common or popular way to distinguish between belief and knowledge to bring out more clearly what is distinct about Xenophanes’ view.
Discussing a Passage
The second task asks you to discuss some quote. In contrast to the first, slightly easier, assignment, you are not asked to defend a specific claim. You are asked to assess the quote and come up with a claim about what this tells us about Xenophanes’ philosophy. So you claim that you can give a correct interpretation of the text passage. Whatever your interpretation is, you are supposed to defend it.
It is always a good idea to keep your claim simple and minimal. Something like this will do
“I claim that Xenophanes argues that human knowledge is limited.”
Even a simple thesis like this, if well-supported, is the end-result of your research and writing. Start with collecting all possible evidence that could explain to us what Xenophanes was concerned with in the passage. Do not articulate a view and try to make the evidence fit it. It is tempting, but you better not bother with history in this case and just write a paper on belief and knowledge yourself. In the course of this, you will probably start articulating a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis by trying to substantiate it with the quote itself, and surrounding texts by Xenophanes (or ascribed to him) that give further reasons why Xenophanes would endorse this position and - if necessary - from the general philosophical and historical context in which he wrote. If you find that your hypothesis does not work, change it.
The strongest arguments are those that are supported by direct textual evidence, i.e. passages where Xenophanes straightforwardly writes “human knowledge is limited” or any equivalent statement. Strong arguments can also be supported by showing that this position ties back to some very foundational element of his philosophy. If you can easily show that, without having to defend the view laboriously, then you are on a good path.
Advanced students are also supposed to discuss possible alternative readings in a way that portrays them as charitably as possible, but which show that you have good reason to prefer your reading over the alternatives.
Designing Your Own Essay
This presupposes that you know what a good philosophy paper looks like, so let me come back to that later.
Step 2: Plan Your Work
Estimate what tasks you have to complete to finish the paper and how much time you will spend on each task. Adjust your estimations when things take longer and try to save time on inessential tasks if you are running out of time. This will make it easier for you to complete the paper.
Review the material. I would think allotting 25% of your time is good for initial review. Students should not have to learn positions by heart. They should have understood the gist of a text in their first round of careful reading.
Draft an outline. This should take up about 5% of your time. You should come back to the outline as you write, this can help you track what else needs to be adjusted when your understanding has improved. This step is to ensure that the claim you picked can actually be defended in the allotted amount of space.
Write the main text. This should take about 35% of your time. As soon as you have collected your evidence and your arguments, you should be in a good position to write your text. This step may take a little longer than anticipated, because this is often where we understand that we did not get the point of the text, that our arguments do not actually support the claim and that the evidence does not support the arguments. But a rough draft should be written during this stage.
Revise. This is laborious and should take up a whopping 35% of your time. Your first draft is almost certainly riddled with jumps in argumentation, has hasty and clumsy formulations and some superfluous or underdeveloped arguments. You also need time away from the text. Work on something else, another class or a hobby, then come back and revise the text. Two revisions are enough for most class assignments. Revisions, not genius, make the difference between some interesting claims and excellent philosophy.
Step 3: Review the Material
Note which passages are important for answering your question
Read the passages again
Take notes in light of what you have learned and what was revealed to you in discussion
Based on your marginal notes, you can now easily write up and compile
a summary of the main claim
all arguments given in support of this claim
all evidence given in support of the arguments and
possible counterarguments and counterevidence.
Step 4: Draft an Outline
Now make a rough outline on how you intend to approach the question. Your outline should be minimalistic. It should contain your main claim and all your arguments. This structure is supposed to be a guideline but can and often does change as you start writing the paper. This is part of writing philosophy, not an indication of being bad at writing philosophy.
Example of an outline:
claim: Xenophanes argues that humans can never achieve absolute knowledge.
argument in support: since humans model their gods on their own likeness, human beliefs are modeled on their own experience, so human beliefs are based on their experiences
evidence: text passage 1
evidence: text passage 2
argument in support: experiences are not absolute knowledge, since they are gathered by induction, and induction can never give absolute knowledge
evidence: text passage 3
evidence: text passage 4
counterargument: Xenophanes never makes explicit what he means by absolute knowledge, except for that it is not equal to human experiences. Therefore we cannot know with certainty that Xenophanes rules out that humans can have absolute knowledge...
Step 5: Start Writing
You can either write a very rough text and revise it many times before you have a first draft or carefully write a first draft. Just write, and write continuously. Do not take extensive reading and research breaks unless you cannot move on in your argument because it depends on a certain claim you want to make. Many people have more specific things to say about the writing process itself. If this does not work for you, try something else. Just keep trying.
Core Elements of a History Paper
Your Textual Analysis
The core of your paper will be an accurate textual analysis. You should summarize the position clearly, and clarify any ambiguities from a quote, if that is your main object of analysis.
If the claim the author makes is supported by an argument, then you need to be analyzing the structure of the argument and the way it supports the claim. This involves giving a charitable reading of the claim, but also pointing out whether it is successful, that is whether it is sound in case of a deductive argument and strong in case of an inductive argument
Your Claim
Your text should contain a claim that you are defending with arguments and your arguments should be supported by evidence. Your claim should be of the following form “In this passage, Anaximander expresses the belief that cats are dogs, because he believes all animals are of one species.” (Obviously this is not right, but you get the idea.)
This is a claim. It is a claim about what the correct interpretation of Anaximander’s view of animals.
Your Argument
There are many many sources in the field that tell you what an argument is and why you need to make it.
Roughly, an argument consists of statements that support a conclusion. In writing about historical arguments and positions, you are asked to make arguments yourself. Your task is not solely to give an analysis of the text, it is to give a convincing argument why your analysis is the correct interpretation of the text. Historians of philosophy may be historians, but their method is philosophical argumentation.
Your Evidence
In almost all cases evidence for your arguments is textual evidence.
Direct textual evidence can be given when you find a piece of writing directly stating the view you ascribe to an author. This is the strongest kind of evidence supporting your arguments.
Indirect textual evidence supports your claim but not straightforwardly. Here are two kinds of indirect evidence:
Text passages where the author claims something similar.
Text passages where the author is critical of the opposite claim.
N.B.: Direct evidence is the stronger evidence, but if the context of your quote is an auxiliary passage where something different is discussed, it may not be as strong as good indirect evidence from the core of the argument. Context matters.
Step 6: Revise, Revise, Revise
When revising, ask yourself:
Is your structure clear? Do the arguments support the claim? Does the evidence support the arguments?
Is the issue discussed with enough complexity, did you take another viewpoint into account?
Is your grammar correct and your writing clear?
Is the format correct? Are there page numbers? Are the citations correctly done?
Once Again: Designing Your Own Essay
Now that we know how to write an essay on a particular claim or a text passage, we can infer how to write a paper of your own design. You should approach it as if you were giving yourself an assignment. You can either make a claim to defend or pick a passage to interpret. Your claim should be simple and modest but not immediately obvious. Your main philosophical work consists in convincing the reader of an interpretation. If your interpretation is so obvious that nobody needs much convincing, then you are depriving yourself of writing an excellent essay. Your chosen passage should be interesting and ambiguous enough to really puzzle someone. Or it should stand in stark contrast to a prominently held differing position by the same author. If you have ever asked yourself how could she write x, when she has claimed y in another passage? then you might have a good paper topic. Your claim could then be "The author claimed that x, while y, because z allows her to claim this without contradiction."
Now you can start planning, writing and revising.
Two more notes on things that get more difficult when you write your own paper:
It is important for you to spend more time on drafting the outline since you need to estimate whether or not your claim has too broad of a scope to be defended within the space of your paper. It usually is too broad. You can sift through some academic papers that were published during the last years on your author, period, or strand of thought (e.g. Skepticism) and see how actually narrow the topics usually are.
Beware the rabbit hole. Once you think about Aristotle’s De Anima, you may be tempted to find more information on how his epistemology works in his Physics. Try to hierarchize the texts you need to consult. More on this here.