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“The first question is: what is the question?” That’s the first in a set of “rules for writing” which Peter Adamson (LMU, KCL) developed for his students over the years, and which he is currently sharing in a series of posts this month at the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps blog. He writes: “The first question is, what is the question?” I’ve said this to students countless times when they are in the first stages of working on a piece of writing. The point of the slogan is that people usually think they are looking for a topic or theme. That makes sense as a first initial framework to have in mind, but only insofar as it gives you a guide to what primary and secondary literature to read as you are thinking about your writing project. It is not the right idea when you are close to producing the piece of writing, still less when you are actually writing it. To imagine yourself addressing a mere topic can lead to writing that merely rehearses what the philosopher is saying about that topic in the primary text. But writing a book report is not doing philosophy! Rather, you are looking for a question to answer in the piece. This question needs to be neither too difficult nor too easy to answer, or as I sometimes tell students, the issue needs to be resolvable but not obvious. This may itself seem obvious, but it is a surprisingly difficult balance to get right. On the one hand, you need a question such that there are resources in the text to address it; on the other hand, the text can’t address it so squarely that the answer is right there in what the author says. Often, a good way to find a question like this is to pay attention to what you yourself find puzzling when you are reading; when you are confused, that’s a good sign! Because it means there is something unclear that you could then work on clarifying for others. When you actually start writing, at the outset you should try to get the reader to feel that same tension or puzzlement, so they get that your question is a good and pressing one. He’s.. The post Adamson’s “Rules” for Writing Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.

Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That's a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy a...