[your student number]
How should I format an essay in Philosophy?
An example
Table of contents:
1. Essay presentation: the issues
page 2
2. A Sample of Citation Practices: On Sock Evaluation
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Bibliography
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Word count (excluding bibliography): 846 words
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[your student number]
How should I format an essay in Philosophy?
An example
1. Essay presentation: the issues
When writing a philosophy essay, your overarching aim should be to make the
presentation of your work as transparent and consistent as possible, to allow your
ideas to be the focus of attention. Here we explain how you should present your essay
by providing you with an example of a document (this document you are reading just
now), which is formatted in the way we suggest you should format your philosophy
essays.
You will notice that the text is broken up into different sections, of which this
is the first one. In philosophy, this can make a lot of sense because it is often
important to show, for instance, that a claim (say the claim that your essay title says
you will discuss) can be argued for in different ways, some of which are more
successful than others. So you might, for instance, devote one section to a discussion
of one argument for a given claim, arguing that it is unsuccessful. And then you might
start the next section in something like the following way: “In the preceding section, I
have shown that so-and-so’s argument for claim x fails because… In this section, I
want to present a better argument for claim x…”1 Using separate sections also helps
where your overall argument consists in several steps, which build upon one another,
or where you are presenting a philosopher’s view, where doing so requires
distinguishing different steps in their argument.
By the way (since students sometimes ask), it is OK to use the word ‘I’ in your essay. Look at some
of the recent journal articles or book chapters on the reading list for your module, and you will find that
philosophers do this all the time, especially when they are ‘signposting’ in the kind of way suggested
here (i.e. explaining the argumentative structure of their own paper). It is ultimately this kind of writing
style that you find in the literature you read that you should seek to emulate. (As you can see, using
footnotes in your essays is also OK, but please use them only sparingly.)
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An important part of formatting your essay well is making transparent where
you are relying on what others have said, and where you are offering your own
interpretation or criticism. Documentation of sources is not a merely formal,
bureaucratic distraction from your philosophical project. Showing the scholarly
context of your discussion, and allowing readers full access to the sources appealed
to, are crucial for evaluation of your argument. The bibliographic information is a
shorthand that points readers to the full roots of your discussion and allows for
assessment of the substantive worth of your sources. It is also essential for protecting
your work from charges of plagiarism.
In the next section, we give you a (made-up) example of how to cite texts that
you have used in your essay. Be scrupulous about keeping track of your sources from
the very first moment you start browsing through books and articles and taking notes.
It can be hard to retrieve the relevant information later. In-text citations should to two
things: First, they should allow your reader to find, in the bibliography at the end of
your essay, the precise bibliographic details of the work you are referring to. Second,
they should indicate precisely where in that work the reader of your essay can find the
information you are drawing on – especially, they should give a page number for any
passage you quote.
This document concludes with a bibliography, which should be provided at the
end of all essays. Note that this bibliography contains examples of bibliographic
entries for a number of different types of sources, such as journal articles, whole
books, or book chapters written by one person for a book edited by someone else. The
conventions for providing the bibliographic information differ somewhat for each of
these cases.
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2. A Sample of Citation Practices: On Sock Evaluation
Fiona Argyle urges us to understand the sock in more than functional terms (Argyle
2002). She argues that the sock must be viewed ‘simultaneously as a cultural puzzle
and a subversion of laundering standards’ (Argyle 2002: 287). As one commentator
notes, Argyle sees our commitment to matching socks despite the persistent loss of
single socks in the wash as evidence both of ‘cultural self-sabotage’ and ‘the values of
order and conservation’ implicit in the laundering process (Nehigh 2004b: 16, 23).
While Argyle’s view helpfully advances the debate beyond functional-materialist
analyses that tied socks’ potential rather rigidly to material conditions, a great deal of
constructive work remains to be done.2 The recent controversy over how to deal with
socks that fall down highlights the need for more open conversation about standards
of sock evaluation (Hose and Chaussette 2006). Assuming that claims for radical sock
eliminativism have been rebutted (Nehigh 2004a), the question remains whether we
can move away from narrowly functional criteria without blisters.
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For influential functional-materialist accounts, see Sandal 1957 and Bunion 1978; for criticism, see
Calcetin 1981.
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Bibliography
Argyle, Fiona. 2002. Footwear and Cultural Subversion (Cambridge, MA: Hardware
University Press)
Bunion, Dan. 1978. ‘Polyester Blends and Thin Concepts’, Podological Review, 89:
115-39
Calcetin, Alicia (ed.). 1981. Socks on Feet, Socks on Trial, 3 vols (Laramie, WY:
University of Heel Press)
Hose, Ivan, and Louise Chaussette. 2006. ‘Let the Socks Fall Where They May’, in
Culture Online http://www.cultonline.co.uk [accessed 29 April 2007]
Nehigh, Anders. 2004a. Socks and Necessity (Oxford: Harendon Press)
______ 2004b. ‘Socks and the Separation of Shoes and Feet: A Critical Survey’, in
Brownwell Companion to Philosophy and the Lower Limbs, ed. Carol Leggett
(London: Brownwell), 3-37
Sandal, Greta. 1957. Wool, Elastic, and the Wearable, trans. Kurt Tonhale (New
York: Harper & Towe)
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