philosophy 160
Philosophy 160
Critical Thinking
WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Below, there is a passage that contains a long argument. Write a two-to-three-page paper evaluating this argument. In particular, you should (a) discuss which of the premises are false or questionable (especially those which are unsupported by other premises) and say why; and/or (b) discuss whether the various premises provide adequate support for their conclusions. You do not need to discuss every problem that you discover. You can discuss just one problem if you’d like; or if you’d rather, you can a discuss a few problems. The paper must be typed and written in complete sentences. Also, students are to work alone on this project; no collaboration is permitted. (NOTE: You might agree with some or all of what is said in this argument; but even if you do, you should still be able to discuss some potential problems with the argument or some places where the argument is vulnerable or controversial.)
You can start working on the writing assignment whenever you want to. However, it is strongly recommended that you not attempt the writing assignment until you make your way through chapters 1-14 in the Course Reader. Thus, the only chapter in the Course Reader that’s not very relevant to the writing assignment is chapter 15. Thus, it is recommended that you wait until fairly late in the term before doing the writing assignment.
How to Submit Your Paper: First of all, you should either write the paper in Microsoft Word or, if you use some other program to write your paper, you should save your file as an rtf file, i.e. a “rich text format” file. Thus, all papers should either be MS Word files or rtf files. Second, once you’ve written your paper, you should submit it as follows: (i) From the course homepage, click on the “Assignments” icon (this is in the list of icons on the left-hand side of the home page for the course; if you don’t see a list of icons, you should see a pair of arrows, and if
Critical Thinking
WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Below, there is a passage that contains a long argument. Write a two-to-three-page paper evaluating this argument. In particular, you should (a) discuss which of the premises are false or questionable (especially those which are unsupported by other premises) and say why; and/or (b) discuss whether the various premises provide adequate support for their conclusions. You do not need to discuss every problem that you discover. You can discuss just one problem if you’d like; or if you’d rather, you can a discuss a few problems. The paper must be typed and written in complete sentences. Also, students are to work alone on this project; no collaboration is permitted. (NOTE: You might agree with some or all of what is said in this argument; but even if you do, you should still be able to discuss some potential problems with the argument or some places where the argument is vulnerable or controversial.)
You can start working on the writing assignment whenever you want to. However, it is strongly recommended that you not attempt the writing assignment until you make your way through chapters 1-14 in the Course Reader. Thus, the only chapter in the Course Reader that’s not very relevant to the writing assignment is chapter 15. Thus, it is recommended that you wait until fairly late in the term before doing the writing assignment.
How to Submit Your Paper: First of all, you should either write the paper in Microsoft Word or, if you use some other program to write your paper, you should save your file as an rtf file, i.e. a “rich text format” file. Thus, all papers should either be MS Word files or rtf files. Second, once you’ve written your paper, you should submit it as follows: (i) From the course homepage, click on the “Assignments” icon (this is in the list of icons on the left-hand side of the home page for the course; if you don’t see a list of icons, you should see a pair of arrows, and if