Some Tips for your Next Essays. And referencing

Here is some tips for your next essays.


- First, Jim Pryor has an excellent website, where you can find some Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper. They are very useful!

- Second, make clear the structure of your paper right at the beginning.
State the goal of your paper: What is your aim? What are you going to do?
Give a brief outline of how you are going to proceed to make your point: What are you going to do first?; What are you gonna do then? How are all the steps in your argument related?

- Third, try to "delimit your own territory".
Focus! Make small points; be "modest" in your claims. Don't be afraid of using such expressions as "it seems", "it may be the case", "it might be".
Always give reasons! Motivate your claims -

- Forth, polish, polish, polish!
Use short sentences, with very few adjectives, and connect the sentences logically with the right conjunctions.

- Fifth, use relevant references and the right referencing.

Here is some examples for referencing:

For a book:
Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York: Free Press.

For a joural article:
Thaler, R. H. (1988) "Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2, pp. 195–206.

For an article reprinted in a volume:
Cartwright, N. (1983) "Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts?", in Curd, M. & Cover, J. A. eds. (1998) Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. London: W. W. Norton and Company, pp. 865-877.

For an online article:
Beyer, C. (2007). “Edmund Husserl”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/husserl/.

For an "old" classic - there are a few ways:
Anselm, St., Proslogion, in St. Anselm's Proslogion, M. Charlesworth (ed.), Oxford: OUP, 1965

or

Kant, I., 1781, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781, vols. 3 and 4 of Gesammelte Schriften, de Gruyter & Co., 1969; page references are to the English translation, Critique of Pure Reason,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

or

Kant, I., 1780 (1965), The Metaphysical Elements of Justice: Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals, J. Ladd, Trans., Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co.

- Finally, here is an example for brief quotations in the body of your essay:
"… thus we come to see that ‘”meanings” just ain’t in the head!" (Putnam 1977, p. 704).