Resources for Students

Here are some links for students, including several documents I’ve created for my own students. Teachers should feel free to use my documents (wholesale or adapted). And let me know if you found something useful!

• A brief introduction to philosophical methods.

• A primer on basic student skills, which includes:

  • Guidelines for reading

  • Best practices for quoting and citing

  • Guidelines for writing

• A guide to constructing argument maps.

• I also keep a list of links to relevant news and other media for each of my ongoing courses. If you’re looking for those, try this page.

Philosophy has a thoroughly undeserved reputation as a “useless” major. A philosophy education can help you to succeed in many seemingly-unrelated career paths. Here are a few links for prospective philosophy students (or their parents).

• Why Study Philosophy: A portal with links to resources on skills, interesting questions, and test scores.

• Philosophy is a great major: A brief guide to reasons to major in philosophy, along with topical links.

• I offer a few thoughts of my own in the handout on philosophical methods I give my students.

Argument maps may be an effective way to teach critical reasoning, with fewer drawbacks than teaching formal logic (e.g. formal logic is time-consuming to teach, it is unintuitive to many students, classical logic has limited expressive capacity). I’m currently experimenting with argument maps in my courses.

• I have a tentative handout on my own method. There are still a lot of kinks to work out! Constructive advice is welcome.

• MindMup is a free, online resource for argument mapping in the box-and-arrow style (though like a lot of existing standards, it uses a red-green color scheme that might not work for everyone).

• Tim van Gelder (a Pitt grad like me!) has an old blog post on argument mapping, including some remarks about the benefits and history of the practice.

It sounds odd at first, but one of the difficult skills you should learn in a philosophy course is how to read. Of course university students are generally literate, but most undergraduate students are still learning how to read critically and effectively.

• I give my students guidelines for reading, which I’ve made available here. Much of the advice I offer appeared first in the resources below.

• Check out guidelines on reading philosophy by Jim Pryor.

• How to Read Philosophy: a resource for beginning students at Falasafaz!.

• Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition: an article for educators with an appendix for students by David W. Concepción, published in Teaching Philosophy.

• Study Methods that Work: a guide by the philosophy teachers at In Socrates’ Wake.

• SmartScholar has a list of links to resources that might be worth exploring for students at many levels (from merely curious to advanced). Topics include basic philosophy background, study strategies, philosophy in Western and non-Western traditions, and podcasts, blogs, and other media about philosophy (h/t Meghan Truitt).

Writing is an important part of learning philosophy. It forces you to confront your own understanding and to think through your intuitions. Writing is thinking in slow motion. However, philosophical writing is different from many other kinds of writing.

• The best general and easily available advice for writing that I know is Jim Pryor’s guidelines on writing a philosophy paper. These guidelines give a good general idea of what kinds of things should be in a philosophy paper, and what kinds of things are inappropriate in a philosophy paper.

• Ron Amundson offers some brief and highly practical advice on writing philosophy papers.

• Students might also be interested in the commented sample paper by Angela Mendelovici.

• I have another commented sample paper that I sometimes show to my students. This is based on a paper I wrote for my first undergraduate philosophy class. Note that there are some good features and some bad features of this paper, which are pointed out in the comments.

• For a different kind of advice, check out James Lenman's How to Write a Crap Philosophy Essay: A Brief Guide for Students.

• For students who have difficulty getting organized and getting started, I also recommend Stephen Mumford’s Mumford Method, which I often use when I write.

• If you want to splash out for a book, there is good practical advice on constructing arguments in Jay Rosenberg’s The Practice of Philosophy.

• I offer some advice on writing in the Student Skills packet I give my students, but some of it is peculiar to my courses.

A lot of students don’t understand quite what plagiarism is or how to avoid it. Here are some resources that might help.

• Kevin deLaplante has a useful series of short videos on topics in plagiarism. I would draw my students' attention to videos four, five, and six, on copying & pasting and on improper paraphrasing.

• If you prefer text to video, the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin has a helpful resource on “patchwork paraphrase.”

• I offer some general advice in the Student Skills packet I give my students.

• I don’t recommend my undergraduates worry about this, but for long documents I use reference management software. EndNote integrates pretty well with MS Word and is functionally free for most academics (it’s also fairly powerful if you learn the markup language for in-text citations and reference formatting). I know others who swear by Zotero, and of course LaTeX users will already be familiar with BibTeX. And I’m always interested in hearing about other alternatives.

There are also some good research resources for advanced students. These are not recommended for students looking to pump up short papers for introductory classes—they’re unlikely to be helpful at that level, and at worst may raise your instructor’s suspicions concerning plagiarism. Still, for the advanced and the curious, these are excellent tools.

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the best free resource for sophisticated introductions to topics in academic philosophy. It is especially helpful as a way to discover important papers, so you can look up a topic and mine entries for foundational texts.

• PhilPapers, an outgrowth of Chalmers’ MindPapers project, is an excellent discovery tool for scholarly articles (though you often need library access to view the articles).

As a typography nerd, I love a well-prepared document. And since academics are professional writers, it is good for us to know the basics. A little extra effort as one writes may save a lot of effort in revision. I once started putting together a guide but it was superseded by other projects. I may return to it someday.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for advice on typography, typesetting, and techniques for smart document composition, I strongly recommend Butterick’s Practical Typography.