Today was the final session of my three-day course on medieval philosophy. As so often when I’m about to send my students home after difficult work on texts, I worry that they end up being mainly confused and at a loss when it comes to writing their papers. So today my doubts got the better of me and I talked them through a brief sheet I had prepared on the fly. The main idea was to hand out questions or tasks that they can use to work through the material in order to get from a mainly explorative phase to actually start a systematic writing process. After talking them through the sheet, I asked them to come up with a response to each item and sketch a paper or thesis based on it. After 20 minutes preparation time, we discussed three sets of replies. The point was not to give exhaustive responses, but to mark starting points. My hope was that the process could be facilitated by indicating (in brackets) what they actually had to do. The results left me stunned. Below, I’ll just leave you with the notes on the sheet.

Getting started

Throughout the course, I asked students to come up with what I call structured questions targeting a difficult paragraph or phrase in the text. So the starting point for the exercise is to look for a difficult passage and write down a structured question about it. Going from there, students had to pick a passage and work on the following items.

Preliminary questions (mostly settled during the course)

1. What type of text is it?
2. What genre is it?
3. What about the text’s transmission / kind of edition / translation?
4. What kind of speech act is it? Who is the author? Who is the intended / targeted audience?

Operationalizing the question about the text:

1. Terminology: Identify problematic words or phrases. Try to clarify them. Are they technical terms or everyday expressions? (Here, you should do searches in encyclopedias and such like.)
2. Content: What would be the case if the claim were true? What would be the case if the claim were not true? If the opposite were true? (Here, you should mainly think through the claims and counterfactuals. Use your imagination.)
3. Context: What points of contact are there to other texts? Both terminological or content-related. (Browse through neighbouring passages, other texts, histories.)
4. Methodological aspects: Ask yourself honestly: What assumptions am I making? Which of my assumptions facilitate understanding? Which of my assumptions make the content of the text appear difficult, absurd, or false? – Which of my assumptions are directly supported by the text? – Which are not? – Qualify the way in which these assumptions are supported / not supported by the text. (Here, you try to evaluate your responses to the former items, i.e. the relation between your assumptions and the material, and figure out what kind of methodological demands they make on your arguments.)

Questions for your planned work:

1. Which of these points are addressed in secondary literature? (Checking this helps you figuring out for which items you’ll have to argue yourself. Most issues can be settled by referencing literature. Try to have your work focusing mainly on one of the above items.)
2. Which points are not sufficiently covered? (research gap)
3. In which respects would you like to diverge from or expand upon the literature? (your own contribution)