Essay Due Date: May 5 @ 1p (before class starts)
You are to write a 2000+ word essay (roughly 6-8 pages) where you develop your own critical position on a particular issue, question, conceptualization or arena relevant to any of our course themes, approaches or ontologies. That is, while we have and will cover a number of issues, many outstanding questions, arguments, ideas, and alternatives will go unexplored. You must then engage with something specific by extending, going in-depth or addressing what we are (and/or are not) covering from your own critical position. In short, you must claim something and provide evidence from the text for that claim.
In the essay, be sure to carefully and thoroughly follow the following guidelines (if not in letter, closely in spirit):
1. State your position: Within the beginning paragraph of the essay, briefly state the issue that you are considering and clearly articulate your own intellectual position on that issue. That is, be sure that the reader knows exactly what you think about the issue you are considering. Since this paper is ultimately about your own position – but it is articulated in terms of the issues framed by our authors – you need to explicitly state your position.Your paper should be: around 2,000 words typed with full citations. Write your name, date, and title at the top left portion of the paper just before the introductory paragraph (no coversheets please). With regard to sources, you are not required to use outside texts for writing your paper. If you do, be sure to fully cite your sources, either in footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetically (you can use either MLA or APA style). If you choose to cite parenthetically, be sure to provide a full reference list at the end of your essay.
2. Explain your approach: Starting in the second paragraph, briefly explain what the issue is that you have just told the reader what you think about. While the reader may get a general sense of the topic and issue from the introductory paragraph, you now need to concisely and specifically explain why this is an issue at all and thereby motivate why your position is one we should take seriously.
3. Provide reasons to support your position: Make it clear, in a direct manner, why the reader should agree with your position. That is, you have stated your position at the outset and explained the issue at hand, but now you need to articulate reasons why one should judge and evaluate the issue as you do.
4. Conclude: Once you have defended your position through providing reasons to defend your position, decisively end the paper. In a brief sentence or two state what you've defended and why, providing a closing to the paper.
Note: You will notice very little in the way of 'don'ts' within the above guidelines. Those are many, and can be more explicitly understood through helpful sites on 'how to write philosophical papers' (see our Angel course homepage for “Useful Links” to such sites). Here we have provided what you should do within your paper, so make that your central focus.
Topic Options
Here are a list of possible questions, issues, conceptualizations or arenas you can write on. You are to choose only one of the options below.
1. Do we have an adequate, if not a robust, account of responsibility emerging within this course? Is there an "ethics of responsibility" emerging within our explorations of how we ought to relate to one another? Fully explain at least two senses of responsibility and why they are (or are not) senses of responsibility we should take seriously.
2. Engage in your own critique of reason: Are there unexplored ways that our capacity to reason fails draw us towards knowledge and understanding? How does a scientific approach to questions evade or elude disclosures of truth? Does a historical approach elide the ability to reason about metaphysics and ontology (i.e. must we remain silent?)?
3. Are there reasons that we ought to retain a traditional orientation towards concepts and truth that one or more of these philosophers is missing, jettisoning or contradicting? One way the notion of a non-historical, universal sense of truth is being rejected is through problematizing the very act of conceptualizing phenomena - e.g. it reduces the ontological to the ontic, it reifies social relations and social complexities where dynamic forms of autonomous thinking and relating exists, it instantiates binary oppositions of relating to the self where dialectical interplay and mutual recognition exists, it negates the possibilities of ceaseless performativities of identities, etc. As such, are these new ways adequately pointing to a fresh understanding of truth beyond what Foucault calls the "will to truth"?
4. What is your sense of the "I" in light of how we've studied conceptions of being, the subject, the infinite Other, the unessential consciousness, or the dissolution of the "I"?
5. We have many competing conceptions of the relationship between power and identity in this course. Choose at least two philosophical positions and provide us a full account of how you would enter into the discourse between these two positions.
6. Choose your own topic and clear that topic with me in writing at least two weeks prior to the paper due date (i.e. by April 21st).
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