Choose one of the prompts at the end of this page and write a 3–4 page paper in response (typically between 1000 and 1600 words). The paper is due by the end of the day (11:59 pm) on Friday Mar 7.
In addition to submitting a polished file that you want to have evaluated and get feedback on, you will also have to turn in your notes, drafts, and other work-in-progress files, as well as a log of your work schedule explaining where each work-in-progress file comes from.
Your polished submissions will get a grade and written feedback, explaining some of their problems and making suggestions for how to improve them. We’ll discuss the meaning of this grade in class. You will also get some drafts of each others to provide peer feedback on. Then you will do a major rewrite of the paper (in most cases expanding it somewhat) in response to all the feedback, and your further thinking and planning. These rewrites are due on Friday Mar 28. They will also be graded. For your course grade, I am only going to evaluate your papers for your overall effort. But I will also be telling you what grade they would have gotten if they were being evaluated for the quality of what you produced; and higher-quality submissions may earn you some extra credit for the course.
Information about extensions and missed deadlines is on the course’s front webpage.
You can’t resubmit your own (or anyone else’s!) work for different courses, whether taken the same semester or not. Work you turn in for different courses must be substantially different.
Read the prompts carefully and be sure to answer the specific questions asked. Don’t try to write everything you know about the topic. 1000–1600 words is not much space, so you will have to budget. What are the most important things to say? What can you leave out?
To write a good paper, you’ll need a clear plan or outline for how you want your paper to go. And you should expect to write several drafts before you submit anything. That is, just because you’ll rewrite and resubmit this paper later in the term, you shouldn’t now be turning in the first complete draft you manage to put together.
In your papers, you’ll have to set up the issues/questions you’re discussing —pretend your paper will be evaluated by someone who hasn’t read the texts you’re talking about, and hasn’t read the question prompt either. Then you’ll have to make some reasonable argumentative steps pushing for or against some proposed answers. Your papers must present some reasons for or against something. Perhaps for/against a philosophical position, or for/against a verdict on whether that position’s response to some objection is reasonable, or so on.
When presenting your reasons, keep in mind that asserting a thesis again and again isn’t an argument. Nor do you count as objecting to a thesis when all you’ve done is describe an opposing thesis. Another bad strategy students sometimes employ is to say “Theory T has to answer this question this way, and I believe theory T.” That’s not yet an argument, either. You’d need to offer some reasons in support of theory T, or against competing theories.
Right now, our course is trying to teach you how to write good philosophical prose. This will probably be different from the sorts of writing you’ve done in other contexts. Because the primary aim is to teach you how to write philosophy, it is not essential that your papers be totally original. They do have to present reasons for/against something, but it’s OK if the reasons you’re presenting were discussed in class or addressed in course readings. (It’s also OK if they’re not, so long as they’re still responding to an assigned prompt.) But your papers do need to at least contain some of your own ideas or examples, and be written in your own voice. And originality will contribute towards your paper getting a stronger grade.
You should try to write as clearly, straightforwardly, and accessibly as you can. Don’t use special philosophical vocabulary (some examples are “dualism,” “physicalism/materialism,” “causally closed”) without explaining it or giving an illustration of what it means. You need to explain the vocabulary you’re using even if it was introduced and explained in class. Philosophers often attach subtly different meanings to their technical words, so it’s important that your reader knows precisely what you mean by them. When introducing philosophical vocabulary or positions or arguments, write as though you’re explaining it to a reader who’s never encountered it before.
Here are more detailed guidelines about philosophical writing. Here are some additional tips from Douglas Portmore. We’ll continue to talk about what’s expected, both in class and on the course website.
Here is our course’s grading rubric, that will be used in evaluating your papers.
You are welcome to come talk to me in office hours (or on Zoom) about your ideas. As I explained on the course syllabus, I won’t read drafts in advance of your submitting them, but you’ll be welcome to talk me through the arguments you’re planning to give, and we can discuss those.
I also encourage you to talk to each other, and give each other feedback on your ideas and/or drafts before they’re submitted. You’re allowed to use each other’s ideas as starting points for, or additional inputs to, your own writing. (More on this below.)
You can also consult with UNC’s Writing Center, online or in person, and even before you have a draft.
You are also allowed to use AI tools (like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, LLaMa/Meta AI, or similar) to help you in various ways:
If you use AI tools, you must explicitly document that you’ve done so, and in what ways.
In every case, whether you’re helped by a person or by an AI tool, whether orally or by written text, you must always give appropriate credit for ways that they influenced your essay. If they gave you an idea, or helped you substantially to refine your own ideas, you’ll need to say so, and to give me enough information to evaluate what you’re taking from your sources, and what you’re adding to it. Here is how to do that:
When some ideas originate from another person or AI, the appropriate acknowledgment of this input is with a footnote in your essay. (For AIs, just say in the essay how much originates from which AI. Supply the details in your work-in-progress files and work log.)
When another person or AI helps you in other ways, such as structuring ideas that originated with you, or refining your language, it’s enough to document this in your work-in-progress files and work log; it doesn’t need a footnote saying so in the final essay.
For any session using an AI tool, your work-in-progress files should contain a document that has both a link to the session, and a transcript of the interaction (both your prompts and the AI’s responses). Your work log should also explain how you incorporated those results into your essay. Omitting to supply these details will at least count against the “following instructions” part of your grade, and could in some cases count as an Honor Code Violation. If your work-in-progress files and work log do not document your use of AI tools, that will be treated as an attestation that you did not use AI tools at any stage of your assignment.
I said that you are allowed to build on work that was started by others. Your initial ideas or even drafts of paragraphs can come from AI tools. They can also come from a friend, or from papers you found online. You are allowed to begin with such sources, so long as you fully document that you’ve done so. But as I’ll explain, the more you do this, the worse it will tend to work out for you, both educationally and in terms of your class performance/grade.
There won’t be any automatic penalty for starting with others’ ideas. But your grade for the assignment will be based on what contributions you made to the final product. So if you, say, started with a mediocre paper found on a paper mill or output by ChatGPT, but then you transformed and refined it into something much better, using it as a springboard for your own original thinking, and you’re completely forthcoming about having done this, that’s okay, and you can get a decent grade from doing that.
Your grade for the assignment will reflect the distance between what you start with and your finished product, which in some cases may not be very substantial. This is one reason why it may be hard to get a good grade from these methods. Another is that often the sources you start with will contain ideas or argumentative moves that you’re not fully on top of, and that will tend to be evident in the finished product. This will also be reflected in your grades.
So if you want to explore the freedom our course allows you to honestly incorporate/build on work started by others, and develop your skills of finding such work and adding to it to make it your own, you are free to do so. But the nature of what you’re doing will often (in most cases) make it harder for you to get the best grades.
The important thing is for you to be explicit and straightforward about how you produced your assignment, and what resources you made use of. To the extent you do that, I will be fair and charitable in grading what value your own efforts added to the final result.
Misrepresenting any of this is a terrible idea. Use of online papers or AI-generated work may be caught by the courseware. It may stand out when I’m reading your essay, and reviewing your notes/drafts/work log. Or your submission may be manifestly similar to work turned in by other students in the class, who relied on the same kinds of resources you did. If there’s any doubt about this, there won’t be opportunities for you to suddenly come up with earlier drafts. It’s part of the assignment that you already provide evidence of what is your own work with the original submission. Ultimately, I will rely on my best judgment about what extent a submission reflects your independent work.
If there’s reason to believe there are undocumented sources, or that students have misrepresented the ways and extent to which they’re making use of their sources, that will minimally be a sign of low effort. It may also be presumptive evidence of an Honor Court violation, in which case the facts will be given to the Honors Court for investigation. This starts a formal process where ultimately, a committee of faculty and other students will decide whether wrongdoing occurred, and if so, what the penalty should be.
Here is more information about the university honor code.
With AI tools in particular, also keep in mind:
It’s impressive that current AI tools are able to do as much as they are. But in my experience with these tools, and student work from recent semesters, AI-generated philosophical text has a distinctive cadence or “smell,” and tends not to be especially good — on balance, worse than what most of you are producing on your own.
AI-generated output may be inaccurate or entirely made-up, even if it appears factual. Some AI tools will fabricate sources (such as journal articles) and authors. If an AI tool suggests a source that you want to use, you’ll need to find the original and verify what it says. You have full responsibility for work that you submit: if an AI tool makes a mistake, and you rely on it, the mistake becomes your own.
Note that the made-up stuff AI tools will generate is not limited to facts about who said what, or even what the concrete world is like. They will also make conceptual and logical mistakes. They will sometimes put together claims that make no logical sense — but they’ll do it with a veneer of authority and plausibility.
Here are some examples. I recently asked ChatGPT to do a laborious logical transformation for me — some easy but tedious math — and it gave me back a result that I happened to know was incorrect. I said I think that’s not equivalent to my original formula, can you double-check it? And it went through some different reasoning to get the same result. I then asked it some specific questions, after which it said yes I see you are correct, my answer doesn’t after all mean the same as your original. I’m sorry, do you want me to try again. I said yes please, and it went through some more complicated steps to get yet another result, that I also knew was wrong. I asked it some more specific questions, after which it acknowledged it had given another wrong answer. And “apologized” and “thanked” me for my patience. All of this was with the surface appearance of knowing what it was doing.
Just now, I asked ChaptGPT to generate some made-up sentences in the style of academic writing, and then count how many words were in each sentence. Of course computers can be programmed to count words accurately. But AI tools don’t answer general requests like these by making use of such programs. They generate statistically plausible continuations of a sentence or conversation. And that is not guaranteed to include correct counting. Indeed, when I tested ChatGPT in this way it only gave the correct word count for 5/10 sentences.
So don’t make the mistake of thinking “It’s a computer so at least it will be good at logic and basic math.”
If you’re going to rely on any arguments suggested by an AI tool (or by another human, for that matter) make sure that you yourself understand those arguments, and the conceptual connections their author is asserting, and that you agree with them. (Or you may want to discuss them as arguments that others may be tempted to agree with, but that you have objections to.)
Information that’s confidential or personal should not be entered into a public AI. Any information so entered (in your prompts or otherwise) is being shared publically, and there’s no way to predict how it will be used in the future.
As I said in the course syllabus, while you’re developing your paper, you must save several copies of your work-in-progress to submit along with the final version. Use “Save As…” to make sure you have these as separate files. I’ll normally expect to see between 2–6 of these, each substantially different. The early ones will normally not yet be full drafts but only outlines and/or notes.
You must also prepare a “log” of when you worked on the paper, what you did during each time interval, explaining what parts of that workflow produced which of the work-in-progress drafts you’re submitting.
So then at the end you’ll have a collection of work-in-progress files, a log of your work schedule explaining where in the schedule each work-in-progress file comes from, and also the final most polished file, which is what you want to have evaluated and get feedback on. All of these files should be in PDF format. If this is a problem, discuss with me.
Name the final most polished file “00000000-submission-midterm1.pdf”, with the 0s replaced by your PID. This file’s contents should also state your PID at the top and should not have your name inside it. This prepares it for anonymous grading.
In addition to having your PID at the top, your submissions pdf should also have the following information at the top:
I certify that no unauthorized assistance has been received or given in the completion of this work.(What assistance counts as authorized is addressed above. Don’t include this parenthetical comment, just the quoted pledge.)
Name the log file something like “00000000-log-midterm1.pdf”, again using your PID. This file should also be anonymized, and have your PID at the top.
Name the work-in-progress files something like “00000000-wip1-midterm1.pdf”, “00000000-wip2-midterm1.pdf”, and so on, again using your PID. If some of your work-in-progress files are handwritten, it’s fine to use scans of them. These files should also contain any outside sources or transcripts of AI sessions you made use of. Your log file should refer to these work-in-progress files by these filenames.
Upload all these documents to Canvas, starting the with submissions pdf file, next the log file, and next the work-in-progress files (in order).
I recognize that these instructions are non-trivial, but you are intelligent people and I’m sure you’re capable of following them. If you don’t follow them, it makes for more issues and work on my end. So following these instructions correctly will be part of the grade you get for your papers — see the grading rubric. Those will be the easiest points for you to secure! (Or not, if you’re not careful enough.)
A. We considered several arguments against dualist interactionism. Choose one of:
First exposit/explain how the argument you chose is supposed to work. Next present some response on behalf of the dualist interactionist. The rest of your paper should then either take the side of the materialist, and criticize that dualist response you presented; or stay on the dualist’s side, and support their response to be as strong as possible (which may involve responding to objections).
B. As we saw, epiphenomenalism has some downsides: it involves denying some things that common sense assumes to be true (van Inwagen and Gennaro survey some of these). Epiphenomenalism also has some upsides: it escapes some (though not all) of the objections to interactionism. Your paper should first explain how epiphenomenalism differs from interactionism. If you want to, you can take a specific stand on whether mental events can cause other mental events, or you can leave this open, as we did in class. Then explain the upsides and downsides, and give a critical evaluation of whether the upsides outweigh the downsides, or the other way around.
Perhaps the advantage epiphenomenalists get from escaping some of the interactionist’s problems doesn’t offset their downside, since the problems they don’t escape are still bad enough? Or perhaps there are things epiphenomenalists can say to make their counter-intuitive commitments sound less bad?