Resources for Students
Why Study Philosophy?
Philosophy is often thought to be a useless major and a useless discipline. This is a thoroughly undeserved reputation; 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.
The Philosophy Department at Harvard University also has a list of articles and other resources on the value of philosophy education.
I offer a few thoughts of my own in the methodology handout I give my students.
Argument Maps
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, the expressive capacity of classical logic is limited). I’m currently experimenting with argument maps in my courses.
I have a tentative handout on my own method. But 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.
Reading Philosophy
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 many beginning students will not know 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 and 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 the Western and non-Western traditions, and podcasts, blogs, and other media about philosophy (h/t Meghan Truitt).
Philosophical Writing
Writing is an important part of learning philosophy. You don’t just write so that there is something to grade; writing forces students to confront their own understanding and to think through their own 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.
Plagiarism
A lot of current students don’t seem to understand precisely what plagiarism is or how to avoid it. Here are a few 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 4, 5, and 6, 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.”
Research
There are also some good 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 them up and read the original text.
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).
Practical Typography for Academics
It should be noted, first, that tinkering with typesetting is a devious trap that will distract you from the important work of producing text that is worth setting well! That said, academic writers should be familiar with the basics of typography and typesetting, and a little effort as you write may save you a lot of effort when you revise. (Just don’t get distracted when you have a deadline coming up.) Someday I may put together my own guide. If you’re looking for typographical advice in the meantime, I strongly recommend Butterick’s Practical Typography.