Philosophy! Help!

[Sah123]

I am currently studying philosophy and I am quite intimidated by the complexity of the readings and the in depth analysis required to gauge philosophical arguments. My first assessment is approaching and I was hoping someone with experience could give me some tips! I have to write a mini essay (300 words) and explain the philosopher's argument, for example, G.E Moore's Proof of the External world.

It has to be a "concise, accurate, analytic summary of philosophical arguments; explaining the philosophical significance of arguments."


Where do I even begin? If anyone has a great example of a high level essay I would really appreciate it!

[Eriny]

You should be able to do that. Are you doing yours on GE Moore or someone else?

In any case, you only need to work on one book or article. You pick out the main points (if it's very dense you could use an encyclopaedia of philosophy), you summarise them. The trickiest bit is describing the significance of the argument, but you could basically talk about how it is a departure from earlier arguments or how it helped give a mode of thinking to help get over a previous problem (so for instance, the significance of GE Moore was that he at least gave a view that would attempt to get over Descartes' problem of not being able to know anything external from one's own mind, although I don't think it was very successful, but that's not really the point of the exercise).

[Sah123]

I have a variety of different texts I can choose from to write my mini essay, but I am starting with G.E Moore's Proof of the External World as a practice.

I think I'm just intimidated by it all, I just read a large work about Contextualism and am beginning to feel philosophy is beyond my reach. So, I should split the piece into main arguments, analyse those and then finish with a summation of the significance of his argument, but not an evaluation?

[Eriny]

What's the exact wording of the assignment? It seems to me from your post that it is a summary of the main points rather than putting forward and evaluation, but what do you think?

Getting used to philosophy is just getting used to a new way of thinking. If you stick with it, you'll get it soon enough and you'll start to think in the way they want you to. For now, this assignment is very short (300 words is about 3 paragraphs!) and I imagine it probably isn't worth very much of your final mark and nobody expects you to be a complete genius at it straight away.

Anyway, yes, it's probably most useful to you to think about what are the the most critical take-home point(s) of the philosopher, I would say you'd probably describe between 1-3 points, depending on what you consider to be very important, summarise them, then put the work into the context of philosophy, why they are important to the discipline.

[Sah123]

The exact wording is to explain the philosopher's argument and the criteria I wrote at the beginning also applies.

It's only worth 7.5%, I would just really like to do well, or at least write a fairly good mini essay. Thank you for those tips, and just another question, referring to your last point, could you give me an example of putting it into the context of philosophy/ why its important to the discipline?

[Eriny]

Well, just what I said before, how the argument might be different to anything seen before by philosophers, or how it might address a particular philosophical problem.