Doing Philosophy

Clear and concise, this brief guide will help you write a successful paper-even if you have no previous formal background in writing philosophy papers. Contents include topic selection, outlines, drafts, proper and improper quotation, argument development and evaluation, principles of good writing, style, criteria for grading student papers, and a review of common grammatical and dictional errors. In addition, the book devotes several chapters to basic concepts in logic, which have proven invaluable for philosophy students like you in the course of critically considering and writing about the ideas and arguments they encounter.

Joel Feinberg (Professor Emeritus, late of University of Arizona) was widely recognized as one of America's leading political and social philosophers. Acclaimed both for his ground-breaking scholarship and his exemplary teaching skills, Feinberg published widely on topics such as individual rights, legal theory, capital punishment, the treatment of the mentally ill, civil disobedience, and environmental ethics. Before joining the University of Arizona faculty, he taught at Brown, Princeton, and Rockefeller universities. Feinberg was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1987-88 to work in Japan and served as chairman of the National Board of Officers in the American Philosophical Association in the mid-1980s. Some of the royalties from Reason and Responsibility have been used to establish the Regents Professor Joel Feinberg Dissertation Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Arizona.

Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he focuses on ethical theory and philosophy of the law. He is the author of The Fundamentals of Ethics; Moral Realism: A Defence; and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He also serves as series editor for Oxford Studies in Metaethics.