Philosophy Analytical and argumentative paper

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  • Write a 6-8 page argumentative and analytical philosophy paper
  • Remember all papers must be organized around an explicitly stated and well-defined thesis, which you should be able to phrase with “I will argue that….”
  • ·  All papers must be fully documented and proofread so as to insure that they do not violate the University’s policy on plagiarism and well-recognized principles of good writing, e.g. no spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors, each paragraph structured around a topic sentence, good transitions between paragraphs, etc.
  • ·  All papers must be proofread so as to insure that they do not commit one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Argumentative Writing 
  • ·  Make sure that your paper draft is organized around a narrowly defined philosophical issue addressed by one of the philosophers studied in the course. The body of the draft must include a detailed, textually supported and cited, and charitable reconstruction of the philosopher’s argument concerning this issue.
  • ·  Note that the only sources you must use in your paper are the philosophical texts you’re analyzing. In other words, this is not a research paper. I recommend against researching other analyses of these texts (i.e., secondary sources) because what I’m looking for is not what everyone else thinks about the text, but what you think about it. However, if in your analysis of the argument you make claims that require evidence that can only come from additional sources, then you must include them to make your argument. For instance, if you want to argue #5 – that Plato’s diagnosis of a disordered community is supported by empirical data – then you must present that empirical data. If you want to argue that Aquinas’ arguments for God’s existence don’t work given our modern understanding of quantum mechanics, then you will need to provide the particular laws or theorems that conflict.
  • Finally, remember that the paper must be tightly organized around one guiding thesis that states your position on the issue. The thesis statement should not only state your position, but also relate the position to the position(s) defended by one of the philosophers studied in the course. The body of the paper should then read as a sustained and coherent development of that thesis.
  • Please remember to cite any source you use. Even if you are paraphrasing, you must cite the source!
  • Please keep the source limited to the files I have below. If its necessary to choose outside sources, choose only 1 or 2.

There are 2 topics you can choose to write on. Frankfurt’s lies and BS or Martin Luther King’s Birmingham letter. Both excerpts are available in the attachments. The birmingham letter can be found here 
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html