Choose one of the passages below, and write a brief exposition of the philosophical argument it’s presenting. Aim for 200–400 words (a bit shorter or a bit longer can be OK).
These will be graded, to introduce you to our rubric for evaluating written work, but the grades won’t count towards your final course grade. So you shouldn’t stress about the grades. These papers are a practice exercise, to help develop your writing and reading skills. The grades are only to give you feedback, and help familiarize you with how we’ll be evaluating your later assignments. When you read our grading rubric, for this assignment we’ll be applying categories M, Q, and W. Categories A and I don’t apply this time. Also, for this exercise there are only 5 additional points for “following directions about how to submit.”
Although grades for this exercise don’t factor into your final course grades, everyone is required to submit the exercise, and to do so on time, unless their TA has approved an extension in advance. Emergencies aside, “in advance” means before Sat Feb 17 at noon. If you don’t submit a serious attempt at the exercise by the announced deadline (or your arranged extension), this will count heavily against the “participation/engagement with the course” part of your final grade.
We say in the syllabus that it’s OK to use ChatGPT and other AI tools in some ways for this course, but that’s not true for this assignment. If you turn in a submission that appears to be AI-generated (this stands out to us much more than many students appreciate, also several of you will likely do this and your submissions will look like each other’s), this is what happens next:
Submit your exercise in Canvas by the end of the day (11:59 pm) on Mon Feb 19.
Every paper should be submitted in PDF format. If this is a problem, discuss with us.
The paper’s filename should contain your PID number and your TA’s name.
The file’s contents should also state your PID at the top and should not have your name inside it. This prepares it for anonymous grading.
In addition to having your PID at the top, your paper should also have the following information at the top:
I certify that no unauthorized assistance has been received or given in the completion of this work.
If you manage to follow these instructions, you’ll get full points for doing so in the grades we give you. If not, not.
All of the passages are taken from a text you’ve been assigned to read for class, but the aim is not for you to tell us about the whole larger text or the author. Here’s what you should be aiming for instead:
You should be explaining the argument in the passage to someone who hasn’t read these passages (or the text they’re taken from). You should say enough that they could understand and discuss the argument, based just on your summary of it. Don’t provide more detail than is needed to do that.
Don’t try to list or give a sentence-by-sentence copy of the author’s text, with some words and phrases switched around. Instead, reconstruct the argument in your passage, in your own words and in a careful way that makes its organization clear. You may want to say things in different order than the original does.
We don’t want these exercises to criticize or defend the arguments you summarize. There will be opportunities for that later in our course. For now, just explain the arguments, as best as you can. Learning how to do this well is an extremely important philosophical skill, and it’s harder than you might expect.
When we’ve assigned this kind of exercise in the past, generally students do pretty well with the first two of those points. (They do better with point 2 than point 1, but that’s OK because point 1 is a hard skill to master.) But many students go off-track with respect to point 3. Some of them don’t manage to summarize the argument in their passage at all, but only give a critical response to it. Others say in one or two sentences what happened in the passage, but then the rest of their submission amounts to a response or evaluation of the passage. So be warned in advance! That isn’t what this exercise is about. Pay attention to these instructions, including especially point 3.
Some further tips:
It’s a good idea for your submissions to include explicit signposting words like “first,” “second,” “next,” “then,” “so,” “therefore,” and so on. This will help guide the reader through the structure of the argument you’re explaining.
You may find more helpful advice in our guidelines about philosophical reading or writing. Note that the latter page focuses on argumentative writing, which is not what you’re aiming to do in this exercise. Still some of the advice there applies here too.
Many students have problems with van Inwagen’s name. You don’t need to refer to him by name; you can just say “the author…” and so on. But if you are going to refer to him by name, you need to do it correctly. Some people’s surnames/family names are made up of more than one word. For example, when you refer to the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, you don’t say “Márquez said so-and-so.” You refer to him as “García Márquez.” There are various and sometimes complicated histories of how people get compound surnames like this. Sometimes it’s the result of taking a compound name upon marriage (Kim Kardashian West). Sometimes it’s the result of the person’s parents having different surnames. Sometimes the explanation lies several generations back (Helena Bonham Carter). In European-derived names, a common pattern is for surnames to begin with “von” (German) or “van” (Dutch) or variations on “de” (several Romance languages). These initial words are part of the surname. You don’t talk about the painters Gogh or Vinci, or the actors Niro or Sydow or Damme, or the director Palma. You talk about van Gogh, da Vinci, De Niro, von Sydow, Van Damme, and de Palma. Sometimes the person (or their parents or more distant ancestors) chose to capitalize the initial “De” or “Van,” other times not. In van Inwagen’s case, the “van” is not capitalized. (You can capitalize it at the start of a sentence.) If you’re going to refer to him, you should use his full name “Peter van Inwagen” or his surname, which is “van Inwagen.” Not “Inwagen” or “Vaninwagen.”
The two-paragraph passage that starts with “Has the dualist any way to respond to this counter-argument?” on pp. 237-8 of the van Inwagen reading.
I will give some examples of how to do this passage below, so choose one of the other four options for your own assignment.
The three paragraph passage that starts with “Since this argument starts from true premises and yet has a false conclusion,” on pp. 232-3 of the van Inwagen reading.
The paragraph that starts with “We might think of the dot as changing color, I suppose,” on pp. 236-7 of the van Inwagen reading.
Hint: Even more than the other passages, this one will benefit from you explaining the surrounding context: that is, where we are in the larger discussion.
The three-paragraph passage that starts with “We now turn to a third argument,” on pp. 240-1 of the van Inwagen reading.
Hint: Some students read this passage as saying that (the dualist) Moore commits to everyone being located inside their heads, and van Inwagen as complaining that Helen Keller would be located closer to her hands than her eyes. This reading doesn’t seem right. Moore and other dualists don’t have to be making claims about everyone, and van Inwagen doesn’t seem to be understanding them to make such claims, either. van Inwagen seems to be discussing not where Helen Keller really is located, but rather, what significance we should attach to where she feels like she’s located. This should be among the things your exposition of the passage tries to explain.
The passage that starts on p. 241 with “Our fourth argument for the conclusion that we are not physical things,” and extends until the end of that chapter at p. 245. But skip the discussion of “token-token physicalism.” More specifically, include up to “Type-type physicalism is a very strong thesis…” at the bottom of p. 242, then skip ahead and resume on p. 244 with “The second reply is an argument for the conclusion that even type-type physicalism is consistent with the possibility of thinking, feeling beings radically different from us in anatomy and physiology…” (You’ll still have to read and think about the parts skipped, for example to understand van Inwagen’s reference to the “radio analogy.” But we don’t want you to get tangled up trying to explain the token-token view, or how it’s supposed to differ from the type-type view.)
Here’s how I would have approached the task of summarizing Passage 0. I’d have said something with this kind of structure:
A dualist is someone who holds __1__. Their physicalist opponents on the other hand hold __2__. The passage we’re looking at considers the question whether __3__. The author of the passage van Inwagen, though you don’t have to identify him by name argues that if all the dualist can tell us about souls is that they are non-physical, then the dualist cannot claim to do better than the physicalist at __3__. Also the dualist may take on special disadvantages that the physicalist doesn’t also have, such as __4__. To avoid these complaints, the dualist would have to tell us more about “the positive nature” of souls, that is, tell us more about their nature than just that they are non-physical. The passage explains and illustrates these complaints with an analogy about magnetism, like this: __5__.
That gives the skeleton of a summary. Then I’d have to fill in the numbered blanks. Filling in blanks 1 and 2 requires background understanding of the debate beyond what’s in the passage, and filling in (the two copies of) blank 3 requires contextualizing this passage somewhat, by looking at the paragraphs that precede it in the reading.
Here’s an example from a past student that organized this differently, but also gave a pretty good summary:
First and foremost, this is a response to the materialist counter argument that although the mechanics of thought cannot be viewed or even properly explained physically, the same is true for nonphysical thought. Since dualists often simply state that the process of thought is nonphysical, and therefore by nature cannot be viewed or explained, unless they can come up with the specifics, they are in no better shape than a materialist.
In fact, as van Inwagen offers, the dualist runs in to the extra problem of having to explain the connection or relationship between the physical and this proposed nonphysical force. In his example, an imaginary 17th century scientist doesn’t believe magnetism is a completely physical process, because it consists of unobservable forces that seem to go through objects. If a rival of his used an unexplainable physical force to represent magnetism, they would both lack the same evidence. So, bringing this back to our dualist vs. materialist argument, both views argue that some mysterious force explains how thoughts work, and neither of them provide an explanation into the specifics. Dualism has the extra work of needing to provide for an explanation for the interaction between the physical and nonphysical, and how that is proposed to work.
Because both dualists and materialists are stumped at this argument, it doesn’t come to any conclusion.
Here’s another good summary, with a different organization. This one focuses more on the magnet analogy, and then only at the end says how it illustrates how the passage represents the debate between the dualist and the physicalist:
Think of the process of a magnet sticking to a refrigerator (magnetism). Person A may believe that this may only occur from non-physical interactions, which are not seen and unknown. They believe non-physical interaction between the two physical objects (magnet and refrigerator) are what cause magnetism. They assume that physical interaction occurs from contact between only physical things that are seen. In the example of a magnet sticking to the fridge, this would be the pushes and bumps of the magnet towards the refrigerator. Therefore, they would believe that magnetism cannot be just physical. They would explain that certain observations (the magnet moving towards the refrigerator and sticking to it) can be explained as non-physical because if it were examined in detail there would be no evidence of any physical interaction occurring. Person A is showing the ideas of a dualist.
The opposite view point would be Person B who believes that a certain observation, in this case magnetism, is caused by known and unknown physical interactions that cannot be explained. They are unable to show how the unknown physical interaction causes what is being observed. They believe that physical interaction between the two physical things (magnet and refrigerator) cause the observation. Person B is showing the ideas of a physicalist. Both sides state that a certain observation, the magnet sticking to the fridge, is caused by something unknown yet they cannot explain how the unknown thing causes what is being observed.
Therefore, the argument is that a dualist (Person A) does not have more of an advantage in their argument if they cannot explain more about non-physical interactions and how they work with physical things. Their argument isn’t better than physicalists (Person B) who believe in other unknown physical interactions but are unable to explain what those unknown physical interactions are. The dualist must be able to explain what about non-physical interactions between physical objects, cause observations, such as the magnet sticking to the refrigerator, to occur instead of other unknown physical interactions causing the objects to move towards one another.
Neither of those summaries are perfect: they could be improved in several ways. Probably my (skeletal) summary could be improved too. But these all show some reasonable strategies for explaining or summarizing a particular text or argument. In your full-blown philosophical writing, you’ll need to be able to do this, before you can effectively respond to the text or argument.