(attatched below the instructions are the articles you can choose from or as a pdf) Pick One of the options
Find a text that you’d like to spend more time working through and come up with a question that you’d like to think about. This question could stem from an apparent contradiction between two parts of the text, a passage that’s particularly interesting, a novel idea that stood out to you, or by tracing the implications of a view (find what you think is a philosophical problem). You should then use the text to build up an answer to your question, which will be your central argument, and reflect on the position you take (perhaps through considering objections and replies, alternatives to your view, or drawing out consequences of the position).
Some potential questions/topics: I’ve been curious about the idea in Cavendish that all the parts of nature must be essentially self-moving and yet must also contain inanimate matter, which essentially lacks self-motion. Another idea I’d consider working through is Conway’s analysis of free will given that she thinks there’s only one way of acting virtuously in a given situation (where deviation from this is sin) and that this applies even to God (so that God is supposed to act both necessarily and freely). For Newton, you could think more about this idea of studying nature mathematically and without looking for the physical causes of phenomena (and whether this leads to genuine understanding of the world). With Du Chatelet, we’ll see that she tries to find a place for both experiment and reason in natural philosophy, but it’s not clear what’s supposed to happen when these two methods are in conflict with each other.
(When selecting a question, keep in mind the 5-8 page range and try to come up with something that isn’t too big or too small for the space you’ll have.)
The first step for this assignment will be to develop a substantial outline.
Try to do the following: (i) Identify the key passages that you’ll use to talk about your question. You should also add notes on what you think the passages are saying and how they relate to your question/argument. (ii) Map out the steps in your argument. This can involve figuring out what order to talk about certain passages, how much space you’ll devote to each part, what points you want to draw out from them, what objections you’ll talk about, etc. (iii) Plan out the way in which you’ll reflect on this argument (again, think objections/replies, alternative positions, consequences of the view, etc.).
If you’ve done your outline well, you should have a sense of what the paper will look like. In the best of cases, writing the paper then becomes a matter of filling in the outline with complete sentences and assembling paragraphs. Exactly how detailed your outline is I’ll leave up to you. (The more detailed it is, the easier writing will be.) But a good way of going about this is to think of a “substantial outline” as a rough draft of the paper in bullet point form. You don’t have to worry about style, working in smooth transitions, or crafting nice sentences. Instead, think about what ideas you’ll need to hit on, how they’re related to each other, which parts of the text you’ll be using and how (along with brief explanations of what’s going on in those passages), the way you’ll use these ideas and passages to build an argument, and how you’ll be reflecting on the argument.
Du Chatelet, Foundations of Physics: Preface (p. 116-138) [in Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings]
Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (p. 35-68) [in Philosophical Essays]
