Philosophy involves a lot of reading. Your main assessments will come from written essays, so you must cultivate good writing. Discussion is also part of some grading criteria and you will be graded on participation and how you interact with the discussion (especially in upper year courses).

Reading Philosophy

Philosophy texts are extremely diverse in nature, depending on which subject in philosophy (ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, etc…) and which time period the text is from (ancient, early modern, continental, analytic, etc…) At the beginning of your degree, you will mainly be exposed to ancient Greek texts and a little bit in the analytic tradition. In general, these texts will be clear in their aims and the reasons for the arguments they provide which makes your job of explaining their arguments and evaluating them much easier.

Later on however, texts will become much more diverse, dealing with different ideas that can’t be stated as neatly, and the form of the text can reflect such complexities (see the differences in a text from Sartre compared to Aristotle). Reading philosophy is an art in and of itself that develops as you read more philosophy. There is no one set procedure for how to read a philosophy text, but in general it isn’t the same as reading a novel.

It is helpful to assume that every sentence in a philosophy text is an important piece of their argument, and so special attention to detail is important. Some general advice however is to read the text the first time before your lecture, highlighting what sticks out and identifying as many of the main points as possible. Do not be afraid to write down any questions you have while reading the text! This can serve as a start for a thesis statement (see writing philosophy).

After you have read the text once, it is useful to then go to the lecture in which that text will be talked about. This will give you a solid grasp on key points and clear up most things you may have missed. We are not done though.

Now that you have read it once and had an expert explain what’s going on, it is highly recommended you go back and read it again. This is a crucial step for researching the more granular points for your essays, but also develops your reading comprehension with these texts so that you’ll be able to catch more the next time around. Philosophy texts are sometimes extremely long and extremely dense however, and so what is important is to know how best to tackle your reading load in a manner that you can handle. 

As for methods for reading philosophy, here’s my personal method. You can take your time with each paragraph, summing it up in one or two sentences. Go through each paragraph doing this, and that way you will have the “gist” of what’s going on before moving forward. Then, you collect all these sentences and add them together to make your notes for the text. This way, you understand each paragraph, and make your personal notes. It kills two birds with one stone. 

While you do this, you can also highlight specific passages or words that stick out or that you don’t understand. You can write comments or notes as well. Just make sure to label which ideas are yours and which ones are the author’s. It can also be important to note the page at which certain ideas or passages are found. Breaking down arguments into simple terms also helps a lot.

There’s also a neat blog that describes seven different ways of reading philosophy that can be helpful in the art of reading. For instance, they encourage one to read ahead, even if they don’t understand what they’re reading at the moment (don’t sit around using your time pondering what you’re reading in the current sentence). The information in the following sentences or paragraphs might be useful in helping your understanding. This one has particularly helped me to become “unstuck” or feel more comfortable with moving ahead even if I don’t understand.  

Writing Philosophy

Writing philosophy, contrary to what some people might think, is not just writing any deep or reflective opinion. Philosophy is a lot more structured under the surface than most realize. I think that some students come and take a philosophy course for an easy A and get graded bad on their essays or tests and get confused and/or write off philosophy.

Philosophy writing is not about writing your opinion, although it is a part of it. 

Philosophy focuses on writing clear, reasoned arguments or essays. There’s a focus on understanding other author’s arguments and concepts and re-hashing them clearly and correctly. Often, the author’s arguments are not explicitly written out, and you need to dig into the text to understand the basic argument. (Philosophy 210 and 214 helps immensely with this skill).  

Philosophy is in fact very specific writing. Philosophers choose every word on the page very carefully, and often with specific intent. Some words or terms have specific meaning and if you use them out of context, then you will lose marks for not understanding the author. Using words in more than one meaning is called equivocation and is a logical fallacy. (You will learn about fallacies in PHIL-210 or PHIL-214) 

Even more confusing is that the terms can differ between philosophers. For instance, “the good” for philosopher A might mean a sort of “happiness commodity”. And “the good” for philosopher B could mean “what is right”. Pay attention to key terms!  

In essay writing, you could write an essay on what the term “will” means in a specific passage. Why do they use it? How do they use it? What does it mean? How does it relate to their overall argument and philosophy? 

Structure

Although writing philosophy is an art, it follows a general structure. Experienced philosophy students begin to get a sense for the general structure and can basically template out any essay in rough in about an hour. There’s more than one way to go about writing a philosophy paper in terms of overall structure, but this is beyond the scope of this guide. I will give an overall sense of a common philosophy paper.

First, you introduce your topic, your research question, and then state your thesis. The thesis is basically the answer to your research question. Then, you will define specific terms, if needed. Then you give an exegesis of the passage or text you’re looking at and/or set up your argument. You need to provide all relevant background info and only that background info. Be concise and cut out any text that doesn’t support your thesis. At this point you write only what the author wrote and mean, you leave out your opinion as much as possible. You present the text accurately and concisely. 

Then, once you’ve given all the info to the reader for context, you can now argue your point or opinion. You take what has already been written in your setup, and then expand on it or make connections between it. You infer or deduce more out of what you already presented to the reader. This should be something original and coming from your thoughts alone, or it can be supplemented by other authors. The main part here is the originality of thought and creativeness of using your reason to come to some original point. 

Then, you conclude. You don’t just re-write what you wrote but say it in another way generally. You remind the reader of the main points of your essay and your thesis. You could say your argument in a few sentences. Then you leave the reader with something more to think about. E.g., “Now that I’ve said X, we could further research into whether this means y or Z” or “If I am correct in asserting X, then would this imply Y for Z?”

Basic Essay Structure

  1. Introduce topic, research question, and thesis
  2. Define key terms and give relevant background info
  3. Give an exegesis of the passage or text and set up your argument
  4. Argue for your thesis and opinion
  5. Conclude

Note that this is very basic and there’s many more details for each part of the essay. This is not a static writing law, either. These can be ordered slightly differently (for instance, thesis might go at the end but this is uncommon). You might also not be doing an exegesis because you’re not using a specific text.

Taking courses like ENGL-212 or 213 can help with learning how to structure essays. However, do note that philosophy is a bit more specific than a general structure. The best way to learn is to read philosophy articles and note how they structure the essay.

The main important point is to take a stance and argue it well.

Useful Writing Guides

There are many guides out there on how to write philosophy. We have appended resources at the end of this guide page.

The Student Success Center also provides writing assistance to students. 

A book I highly recommend for learning how to write philosophy is The Philosophy Student Writer’s Manual by Graybosch, Scott, and Garrison. We have a few copies in the SoPhiA library. It’s a bit dated and some parts can be skipped, but writing is writing, and it offers some good guidelines. Another book which discusses both reading and writing philosophical texts is Writing Philosophy: A Guide for Canadian Students by Vaugh and McIntosh (2013). 

Conversing / Discussing Philosophy

A lot of philosophy is a solitary act; reading texts, thinking and developing your ideas, and writing essays. As such, it is a privilege when we are able to discuss these rich texts with others who are also interested. The contexts for discussion can also differ however, and different rules of etiquette can apply.

The most common form of discussion you will find at first is discussions in conferences and in-class discussions. These are the most structured and have very clear leading questions to have you think about the material. As stated previously however, talking, just like writing, is not so much about your opinion, but rather your reasons for your stance. To get the most out of these discussions, it is important to listen attentively, ask questions, and avoid stating an opinion or the worst sin of all, talking about a text you didn’t read.

This is also a great opportunity to learn from others who will offer different interpretations and lines of reasoning, which can either create great counter-arguments for you to argue against, or make you realize your position is not as solid as you thought. So long as you come to these philosophical discussions willing to listen and be charitable, these are great ways of developing and fleshing out ideas about your texts.

Discussing with other can also provide “fillers” or different perspectives and round out your view and understanding of a concept. They say that “the sum is greater than its parts” and “two minds are greater than one”. While these are cliches, some of the best ideas you might formulate may come through discussion and not just reading.  

An important thing to note however is that some people are coming into philosophy courses with way more experience than others, and it can create a lot of anxiety when it feels like you haven’t read enough. This is completely normal at first and something that every philosophy student encounters.

The trick to get over this feeling is two-fold. The first is that any names or concepts that are mentioned in conversations that you don’t know can be a great new resource to go learn about either on your own or with those discussion partners. In that way, it becomes a great way of preparing you for a later philosophical discussion. On the flipside, however, many times the goal is to evaluate a text on its own merits, and so long as you truly understand the text, you will be able to hold your own and make a genuine contribution to the discussion. 

A final note is to be charitable and intellectual humble, both to the texts you’ve read and with your discussion partner(s). Being charitable is to not misrepresent an another’s ideas and represent them as forthcoming as possible. Intellectual humility is a skill which understands the limits of your own knowledge, and the knowledge of others. It cultivates intellectual virtues. It’s knowing that you and your interlocutor both have private and public knowledges. If you’d like to learn intellectual humility, Coursera offers several 4-week courses (theory, practice, and science of intellectual humility) on this topic.

Your first 200-level courses will have conferences, which are a great place to practice discussing philosophy and get warmed up to what it’s like. We highly recommend you attend them.

Thinking / Reasoning in Philosophy

Throughout this document, we have spoken a lot about having reasons rather than opinions in philosophy. This of course raises the question of how to think and reason properly in the first place. Thinking like a philosopher depends a lot on what the ideas to develop are, but in general consist in working any idea to its limits. This involves testing the idea out through all its implications, seeing if there are counter examples (more on this in a minute), if the idea is intuitive, and are the minor details of the argument consistent with the overall argument. 

Looking at this a bit closer, a lot of these types of thinking are related to types of reasoning common to all arguments. The main two you will see are deductive and inductive reasoning.

Deductive Reasoning

Deductive reasoning is the backbone for philosophical rigor in that the definition states that if the premises are all true, the conclusion must be true. You will see in PHIL 210 or 214 what some of these terms mean, but in broad strokes, the conclusion logically follows the premises such that the conclusion can’t be anything else. One way to attack an argument is to follow its line of logic and see whether each statement is indeed true, or whether some other condition can be the case. Consider the argument;

P.1 If it is raining, then I will stay home. 

P.2 It is raining.

C. Therefore, I will stay home. 

Now consider this; 

P.1 If it is raining, then I will stay home. 

P.2 I stay home.

C. Therefore, it is raining.

In the second case, the conclusion does not follow as there can be many reasons as to why I stay home (maybe I’m sick, I don’t want to go out, etc…).

For deductive arguments, the easiest way to analyze them is first by their form, then by the truth or falsity of the premises. If the form is invalid, then it doesn’t matter what the premises are because they won’t necessarily lead to a true conclusion anyway. If the form is valid, then we can analyze the premises. An argument with all true premises is sound, meaning that it’s necessarily true. An argument with at least one false essential premise is not sound, and the conclusion isn’t true. Valid arguments with all true premises are sound and necessarily true.

Inductive Reasoning

The second line of reasoning is inductive reasoning. Here, the arguments are generally based on empirical generalizations, such as the sun always has risen every morning, therefore it is likely to rise tomorrow. The key difference here is that you can be wrong in your inference as observations are limited unlike the truth content of a deductively valid argument. The easiest way to discount an inductive argument is simply to find a case where the observation does not hold. 

Abductive Reasoning

Abduction is another type of reasoning that is contrasted to deduction. While deductive arguments can be necessarily true, abductive arguments are never necessarily true; however, abduction can be highly plausible and even correct. The main difference is that in abduction, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, it is only highly likely. There’s a “leap” from the premises to the conclusion.

Abduction is commonly used in mystery cases. In abduction, we compile the evidence and find the most likely conclusion. Abduction is also common in everyday life, because solid deductive arguments are difficult to craft on the fly, or in the messy social conditions of the world.

For instance, let’s imagine we have the following evidence:

  • Jim is known for being emotionally unstable
  • Jim left the home at 8pm on Wednesday
  • Billy was assaulted by an unknown figure in the park at 8:30pm
  • Jim lives nearby to this same park
  • Jim returns home at 9pm and his family reports he was visibly shaken up
  • Jim is 5′ tall
  • Jim is brought in for questioning and confesses

Now we might think this is an airtight case. All evidence points to Jim. But consider that a witness comes forward:

  • The witness states the perpetrator is at least 6′ tall

Now, the argument that Jim committed the assault is much less likely. Notice that in the first case it seemed 100% certain it was Jim, but then new evidence came into play and destroyed that possibility. Jim might have been (or felt) coerced or felt scared and confessed. This just goes to show how abduction is never certain and new evidence can change how likely a conclusion is.

Creative Thinking

A lot of philosophy involves creative thinking. One must “think outside the box”. It’s looking at a particular issue from all directions. This is when we consider outlying and external factors and how they influence the issue, instead of going by our first intuitions and “gut feelings”. Many human cognitive processes are liable to bias, and one must pay attention to what these are in order to avoid falling into a mental trap. We are really bad at many probability games (consider the Monty Hall Problem). Surprisingly, philosophy degree holders are particularly good at standardized tests and do better than all other degrees because of the fact we can reason so effectively.

Let’s consider essay writing. A good essay thesis will be original, at least slightly contentious (can be argued for or against), and can be supported by evidence. A thesis can compare two issues, concepts, authors, methodologies, and more. There are many ways to compare two issues and you must choose a specific way to analyze them.

For instance, let’s compare Sartre and Heidegger on their idea of “Being”. Will you compare them on their literal definitions? Their genesis of the concept? How it fits into their philosophical framework? The historical context in which it is used? Why they chose to frame the concept as they do?

A final note on creative thinking: An experienced philosopher can create an argument for any issue and argue for any side!

While the line of reasoning is very important to any philosophical argument, the evidence provided is also crucial and will depend on what point you are trying to communicate. This evidence can come in many forms and can even be distinct methodologies, such as phenomenology, the empirical sciences or processes like deconstruction.  

More Resources

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