Your essay should be an answer to one of the following questions:
Q1. Hill argues that if life has meaning its meaning is to glorify God. Explain his argument in your own words. Is it a good argument? Why, or why not?
Q2. Epicurus argued that death isn’t bad for the person who is dead. Fischer objects to this argument: He says that it depends on a false “experience requirement”–either ER I or ER II, depending on which version of the argument we’re considering. Why does Fischer reject both ER I and ER II? Do you think he’s right to reject both of those principles? Why, or why not?
The instructions and advice are the same as before (so you may want to review the earlier announcement about the short essay). But the length is different: 1500 words.
This is not a ‘formal’ essay: It’s fine to write in the first person. (“I think”, “I don’t agree”, etc.) No particular style or format is required. No formal introduction or conclusion is required. But please use proper spelling and grammar. (The main reason for this is simply that, if the spelling or grammar is poor, I may have trouble knowing what you mean! But in addition, I’m required to grade you partly on the quality of your writing.) And please use paragraphs! A “wall of text” is hard on my eyes and brain.
This is not a ‘research’ essay. Please don’t use any sources other than the relevant course reading–that is, the reading mentioned in the essay question. You don’t need to tell me about what great philosophers in the past thought about your topic, or what various philosophy professors today are saying about it. All you need to do is read (carefully) the relevant parts of the reading mentioned in the essay question, think about it for yourself, and answer the question as clearly and logically as you can. To get a high mark, you need to show evidence of thinking for yourself–critically, rationally. That doesn’t mean that you need to say something that no one else has ever said. But it does mean that you should be deciding for yourself whether the relevant arguments are good, or how good they are, and thinking about what makes them good, or not so good. (For example: Does the argument have premises that are all true, or reasonable to believe? Or are there some premises that seem open to reasonable doubt? Do the premises jointly support the conclusion? Or could it be that, even if the premises were all true, they still wouldn’t make the conclusion particularly plausible?)
Remember that when (in philosophy) you’re asked “why” you think something your answer should not be psychological. You’re not being asked what it is about your feelings or upbringing or firm beliefs that causes you to agree or disagree with some claim, to accept or reject some argument. You’re being asked what makes it rational for you to think whatever it may be that you think. (For example: This is a purely psychological statement: “I agree that God exists because I was raised to believe in God”. It may be true, and it may tell us something about the speaker’s psychology. But it doesn’t give us any reason for thinking that what the speaker believes is true, or reasonable to believe.) You should be answering these “why” questions with good reasons for your claims–not just an explanation of what causes you to make those claims.
Whenever you quote someone else (either directly or indirectly) you need to give credit to that other person. In this essay there are only two people you might quote: the author of the course reading or me. (Some people refer to things I said in class, which is fine but certainly not necessary or even expected.) So you need to use scholarly citations of some kind. Any style is fine: footnotes, endnotes, parenthetical citations. Make sure that you use quotation marks whenever you’re directly quoting.
