Doing Philosophy - Softcover

Feinberg, Joel

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23 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1285055012 ISBN 13: 9781285055015

Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2013

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Clear and concise, this brief guide will help you write a successful paper-even if you have no previous formal background in writing philosophy papers. Contents include topic selection, outlines, drafts, proper and improper quotation, argument development and evaluation, principles of good writing, style, criteria for grading student papers, and a review of common grammatical and dictional errors. In addition, the book devotes several chapters to basic concepts in logic, which have proven invaluable for philosophy students like you in the course of critically considering and writing about the ideas and arguments they encounter.

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About the Author:

Joel Feinberg (Professor Emeritus, late of University of Arizona) was widely recognized as one of America's leading political and social philosophers. Acclaimed both for his ground-breaking scholarship and his exemplary teaching skills, Feinberg published widely on topics such as individual rights, legal theory, capital punishment, the treatment of the mentally ill, civil disobedience, and environmental ethics. Before joining the University of Arizona faculty, he taught at Brown, Princeton, and Rockefeller universities. Feinberg was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1987-88 to work in Japan and served as chairman of the National Board of Officers in the American Philosophical Association in the mid-1980s. Some of the royalties from Reason and Responsibility have been used to establish the Regents Professor Joel Feinberg Dissertation Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Arizona.

Review:

1. METHODS OF PROCEEDING Introductory, Selecting a topic, The irrelevance of most library research, Resolving controversies, Appreciating philosophers of an earlier period, The outline, Preparation of the 'nal draft, Writing blocks. 2. RULES OF THE GAME Plagiarism as a legal wrong (violation of another person's property right), Plagiarism as a moral wrong (cheating and lying), Quotation, attribution, and acknowledgement, Alternative formats for notes, Acceptable abbreviations in notes . 3. CRITERIA FOR GRADING STUDENT PAPERS Clarity, Presence of argument, Cogency of argument, Originality, subtlety, imaginativeness, Degree of difficulty, Ordering the criteria . 4. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF GOOD WRITING Clarity again, Simplicity, Economy, Padding, Repetitiveness, Redundancy, Misplaced emphasis, Pretentiousness and fancy words, A miscellany of further judgments. 5. MISTAKES OF GRAMMAR Grammatical and nongrammatical writing errors, Criteria of correct grammar, A sampler of grammatical rules and their problems, Summary 6. SOME COMMON MISTAKES IN DICTION Diction and grammar, Linguistic correctness and controversy, Constantly changing usage, Linguistic liberals and conservatives, Sample mistakes of diction . 7. STYLISTIC INFELICITIES The concept of style, Prose writing as a source of pleasure, The paragraph, Motion metaphors, Smoothing the 'ow, Conspicuous over-use of favorite words, Forget adornment and eloquence, Types of poor writing styles. 8. LANGUAGE AND LOGIC Correct and incorrect reasoning, Deductive and inductive reasoning, Sentences and propositions, Arguments, Premises as unproved assumptions, Logical necessity versus psychological certainty, Necessity and contingency, Three types of impossibility. 9. BASIC DEDUCTIVE LOGIC Possible truth value combinations, Validity and soundness, definition of truth-functional connectives, Necessary and sufficient conditions, Valid deductive argument forms: a sampler. 10. LOGIC WITHOUT NECESSITY Informal fallacies, Some inductive inferences, good and bad, Begging the question, Analogical reasoning, A sampler of fallacies 11. VARIETIES OF PHILOSOPHY PAPERS Rules of strategy, Manageable philosophical tasks, Modest partial reasons, Interpretation, Generalization and counterexample, definition, Other categories of philosophical papers. 12. PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET. APPENDIX: A CHECKLIST FOR PHILOSOPHY PAPERS.

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