Methodical recommendations for reading philosophical texts

As far as preparing to write a philosophy essay goes, the most important single piece of advice that can be given is: read. Reading these writings will put you in touch with the issues, and it will also acquaint you with the formal aspects of writing philosophy: it will supply you with stylish and grammatically accomplished models of philosophical writing. Active reading of philosophical texts is itself a skill which you should seek to acquire, and one that you will find has wide application beyond the dissection of purely philosophical texts.

How does one read philosophy actively? One well-tried technique is to begin by reading through a text (a difficult article, say) fairly quickly, to get the general idea, and without taking notes. That can be useful if it helps to know where the author is going and what the conclusion being aimed at is; and it very often does help to know that.

When you have finished a cursory reading of the text, you should re-read the same text carefully, taking notes, and trying to understand as much as you can, before moving on to other relevant texts.

If the subject matter you are investigating is a modern topic with no significant distinction between primary and secondary literature, the above guidelines will serve you well just as they stand. But it will often be the case that you are working on a topic where you expected to be familiar with two kinds of material: primary texts (classic statements of a position by one of the great figures in the history of the subject), and secondary texts (modern commentaries on or discussions of these classic positions). In these cases you must read the classic texts first, so that you approach them with an unprejudiced eye (or at least an eye unprejudiced by modern commentary), perhaps in the rapid, surveying manner suggested above, before looking at secondary material.

When you have looked at a reasonable amount of secondary material you should then-if your reading of that material has not already forced you to do so-go back to the primary texts and read them carefully. If you are working with a textbook, which provides only extracts from the great philosophers of the past (and present), it may be necessary to go beyond what the textbook provides and read whole texts or at least larger extracts than your textbook provides.

When you are writing an essay, for instance, you should certainly try to read more widely in relevant primary sources than just the extracts.

 

Methodical recommendations for writing of philosophical essay

Making a Point

Start moving towards the idea of a journal article. The point of a journal article is to convince people of a point; it is not to cover the ground. So take your question, and argue for a particular answer to it. Reading and understanding is necessary for the answer to be mature and not half-baked, but don't try to summarize the reading.

Style

The general stylistic principle is: don't hide! Here are some particular applications of that principle:

• Don't fill up the pages with irrelevant stuff (history, biography, overlong quotation), trying to avoid facing the issue: work out what's difficult about an issue, and try to deal with it.
• Don't try to skate quickly over an argument, in the hope that nobody will notice that it's no good: lay out the steps as clearly as you can, so that it will be obvious if it is no good-and then make sure it's not no good.
• Don't use words you don't really understand, in the hope that you'll get some ill-understood credit from them: work out what you think, in your own terms.
• Don't get autobiographical (“Personally, I feel...”), in the hope that at least nobody will deny that this is what you feel: try to produce arguments which will convince anyone (or anyone reasonable).

In short: make sure your argument is good enough to stand, without concealment or adornment.

Two things about level and who to be writing for:

• Don't write just for the person you expect to mark the essay.
• Write as if for one of your peers who just happen not to have dealt with this topic.