philosophy

PHIL 100: Final Project Stage 2: Organizing the Claims and Counterclaims to your Philosophical question (9% of overall grade)

For the second stage of your Final Project in Philosophy 100, scholars will conduct an analysis of a philosophical question by listing claims and counter-claims to your question, and organizing arguments, evidence, reasoning, and examples that support them.  Please note: in a term-project of this complexity, any question you pursue should have, at a minimum, 4 claims / 4 counter-claims.  Your project will have, attached, a full-reference bibliography of all work used or cited.

Your project Part II will read, and perhaps look, like an extended Full-sentence Outline. See here for an example:

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/developing_an_outline/types_of_outlines.html

As an introduction to philosophy, it is important to list and organize the conceptual points of your overall argument, and also to list and organize the conceptual points of any counterclaim in order to refute them. 

For the Stage Two assignment of your Final Project, list claims and counter-claims to your question, then below each one, explore the arguments, reasoning, evidence and examples that can be used to support each one. A good philosopher treats both claim and counter-claim with equal importance. Remember: You are, essentially, putting together a full-sentence outline of your argument.

Think of this as an Outline, and examples of outlines (see Google) may help you organize your own.

A claim positively asserts an answer to a question. For example, to the question "Is it more important for society to be lawful or fair?" one can claim "It is more important for society to be lawful than to be fair." A counter-claim would be "It is more important for society to be fair than lawful."

Question: Is it more important for society to be lawful or fair?

Claim: It is more important for society to be lawful than fair

Counterclaim: It is more important for society to be fair than lawful

Once you have dissected your claim and counterclaim, list the arguments you would use to support each. Arguments are the rationale for why someone should believe the evidence. All arguments are based on logic and reasoning whereby the conclusion you want the reader to arrive at  comes logically from the premises on which you based your argument. Use your research to support your arguments. 

It is not enough to simply provide the rationale of the argument (as above). You must also provide evidence. Evidence can come in many forms but the most common in philosophy is the evidence of the primary texts of the philosopher and texts about the philosopher's work. Another form of evidence is the evidence of your observations. Find all the evidence you need to support your arguments in your experiences and the primary text.

Submit this list of claim, counterclaims and the arguments and evidence you need to support them on a word .docx. You will formalize your philosophical argument in the last step, stage 3. This evidence will be cited and referenced, as usual.

Please note: Your project will have, attached, a full-reference bibliography of all work used or cited. Your working bibliography for Stage 2 -- the evidence you are citing for  each of these claims and counterclaims -- will include, but will have works IN ADDITION to your preliminary bibliography of Stage 1.