Syllabus: Assignments

Grading and Course Requirements
1. Attendance and Participation is 15% of your final grade
2. Contributions to Course Blog is 15% of your final grade
3. Short 4-5 pg. Locke Essay (Tu 4/21) is 15% of your final grade
4. Short 3 pg. Berkeley Essay (Tu 5/5) is 15% of your final grade
5. Short 4-5 pg. Hume Essay (Thr 5/21) is 15% of your final grade
6. Long 10-12 pg. Final Revised Essay (Mo 6/8) is 25% of final grade

(1). Attendance and Participation
This grade is based on your regular attendance in both lecture and seminar. If you miss more than one session of either discussion or lecture combined, we will begin to deduct points from your overall grade for this course. If you miss more than three sessions of either combined, you will not pass this course except by special petition to the instructor. You are expected to participate in discussions in your seminar and, when relevant, question and answer sessions during lecture. Philosophy is in many ways about conversation, collaboration, and exchange of ideas. Your seminars are meant to facilitate these.

(2). Course Blog Posts.
Course Website URL: (YOU ARE HERE!)
You are expected to post very short responses (questions, comments, replies to posts by others) to the course blog at least four times over the course of the quarter as follows: you must post once every two weeks and no later than midnight on Wednesday of that week (this means, e.g., that you must sign up for the blog and post by tomorrow night). In your seminars your T.A. will assign everybody an (a) or a (b) and each group will post on alternating weeks. This will begin in Week 2 (group (a)) and continue until Week 9 (group (b)). Late posts to the blog will not be accepted under any circumstances (time to get with the times, and notice that the times these days do not wait around). Your post should concern any material we are covering in lecture that week.

Your contributions to the blog will be graded as follows. Each of the four posts will be worth one-fourth of the overall credit for your ‘blog grade’. You will receive full credit for each post you make, so long as it demonstrates some engagement with the text. Late posts will not be accepted for credit. Extra posts are very welcome and are an easy way to increase your participation grade for this course. Each Teaching Assistant will choose to record your blog posts as suits them best, so note that in some cases you will be required to print your blog posts and bring them to your T.A..

(3-5), (6). Three Short Essays and Longer Revised Essay.
This is a writing intensive course which satisfies ½ of your ‘W’ requirement for the major. As such this means you will be expected to do a great deal of writing in this course. This is good news for you because we have structured the course to facilitate this for you: your seminars are small and each Teaching Assistant has fewer students than normal so that they can give your writing increased attention. One of our primary aims in this course is to prepare you to write senior-level term papers in the discipline of philosophy by the end of the term. For the most part successful writing requires two things: practice and revision. We will give you plenty of practice in this course as you will be expected to turn in three high-quality short essays. We will also give you opportunity for revision as you will be expected to revise one of these short essays into a longer research essay due at the end of the term.

Toward this you will be expected to write three short essays over the course of the quarter: one 4-5 page essay on Locke, one much shorter 2-3 page essay on Berkeley, and one 4-5 page essay on Hume. These are due on the days indicated on the course schedule below. You must turn these in at the beginning of lecture that day and email them to your T.A. before that. Late assignments will not be accepted unless prior arrangement is made.

Your Teaching Assistant will give you approximately one page of typed feedback on each of these short essays (but perhaps a little less feedback on the very short Berkeley essay). You will then be expected to take one of these short papers and revise it, in light of T.A.’s comments and an in-class peer review exercise we will conduct late in the quarter, into a longer research paper in which you engage at length one of the core topics central to modern empiricist philosophy. Thus, you should write each of your shorter papers on a topic which you feel you could confidently expand into a much longer paper.

Shorter essays can be expository or argumentative in nature. In either case they should engage relevant readings and offer quotations (at least one) from our primary sources. We will in large part be looking that you demonstrate comprehension of the material relevant to your chosen essay topic.

Final research essays must make an argument about some topic we have covered in this course. A detailed and engaging argument at this level requires expository writing describing the views of the philosopher under consideration. As such your paper should most certainly offer quotations from one of our primary sources. Your paper need not engage secondary literature on the topic, but it is highly encouraged. Many of your peers will engage secondary literature and so if you choose not to, your paper is obviously likely to receive a lower grade than theirs (though not necessarily, of course).

Other Notes on Assignments (incl. late paper policy)
(see Hardcopy Syllabus)