Your essays should be written for an audience that has not read the material, attended the lectures, nor seen the prompt. Imagine you’re teaching the material to someone completely unfamiliar with the material, prompt, or lectures. This will lead you to explain things clearly and thoroughly. For example, you will need to repeatedly mention the name of the philosopher throughout the essay and should not immediately respond to the questions in the prompt without posing these questions in your essays.
6. You may NOT use secondary sources of any kind for this assignment. Your essays should be based entirely on class lectures and the assigned readings. This includes dictionaries and internet sources.
7. Quotations must follow proper MLA format and should be used sparingly. The majority of your essays should be in your own words. If you quote me you must mention me by last name before the quotation, use quotation marks, and cite the day this was said, or the lecture and page number. Likewise with the philosophers you’re writing about.
8. Your essays must contain a proper thesis statement telling your reader what you will discuss.
9. Your essays must address the questions in the prompt in the order they are presented in the prompt. You must address all parts of prompt.
10. Your essay must be well organized, free of awkward sentences, and must use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Your essay should be broken into paragraphs addressing specific points. Your essay should be free of slang and abbreviations.
11. Your essays should not contain any numbered or bullet points, but should be written in the form of an essay with distinct paragraphs addressing distinct points.
12. Paragraphs should be spaced exactly as the rest of your essay (e.g., there should NOT be four spaces between paragraphs, only two). You will need to adjust your word processing program to avoid this problem.
13. Your thesis statement should NOT be a “grabber” like “Since the beginning of time, mankind has wondered…” Stick to the topic the prompt asks. A good thesis statement has the following structure: “In this essay I will discuss Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world and how tools take on the meaning and significance they have.” It tells your reader exactly what you will discuss.
Your essays should focus solely on what the prompts asks and should not discuss irrelevant things such as the biography of the philosopher.
16. When using key terms, they should be defined exactly as they are in lecture or using an accurate paraphrase that does not change the meaning of those terms. The safest way to do this is by simply quoting the definitions as presented in lectures.
17. Your essay should NOT use the word “ideology” when describing the positions of the philosopher you are writing about. Ideology refers to a person’s political orientation (democrat, republican, conservative, socialist, etc), or distorted beliefs about society and how society works that benefit the ruling group.
PROMPT YOU ARE WRITING
Write an essay teaching Pascal’s Wager to someone completely unfamiliar with the material. Your essay should address the following: 1) It should clearly explain the difference between attempting to prove the existence of God and attempting to show that it is rational to believe that God exists even if God’s existence cannot be proven, 2) what Pascal thinks is the downside of being an atheist or choosing not to believe that God exists if, in fact, it turns out God exists, 3) what Pascal thinks is the upside of believing God exists even if it turns out God does not exist and what Pascal thinks the believer gains if God does turn out to exist, and 4) what are some potential weakness or shortcomings of Pascal’s argument and how he might address them or respond to them. Remember, an argument is a relationship between premises and a conclusion in which the premises provide evidence to show that the conclusion is true. In this case, the conclusion of Pascal’s argument is “it is rational to believe that God exists even if we cannot prove the existence of God”, and the premises are the consequences of what happens if we choose to believe and choose not to believe. When evaluating an argument, you are NOT evaluating whether you “like” the conclusion, but with 1) whether or not the premises support the conclusion, and 2) whether or not the premises are themselves true or can be demonstrated. A premise that cannot be proven or that is shaky is not a good supporting reason for a conclusion. To prepare for this essay you will need to read Lecture 7
