Tag: writing

A rough but workable guide to plan an essay

I keep noticing that one of the greatest worries of students is finding a workable research question for their essays – one that allows them to structure their work and keeps them in line with what they intend to promise. I’ve written on this before at length on this blog (here, a Groningen student reviews three of my posts), but I think I managed to break down the issue even more. – I’ve just finished an exciting three-day seminar on “Spinoza’s Ethics. An introduction to doing philosophy systematically for beginners.” The idea was to bring out the systematicity of the Ethics to such a degree that students could continue working with the text independently without loosing grip of the general framework. On the last day, I wanted to turn the tables and have my roughly fourty students work, not primarily through the text, but through potential essays on this book. Hence, I divided them into six groups and gave them pertinent tasks. In a feedback round, most students and I agreed that this was a surprising success. Therefore, I simply want to share the set-up of the tasks:

At the beginning, I asked the students to:

  • find some friction (in the text),
  • provide concrete evidence for this friction by providing at least two passages or sentences from the text,
  • provide a motivation of why the friction arises,
  • provide at least one possible answer as to how to state the friction and how to amend it.

By asking for a friction, I could rule out explorative works that have no natural boundaries and can keep students on the preparatory reading path forwever. By asking for concrete passages of text, students will have a constant fall-back place when themes would have them meander into the wilderness of the space of reasons. By asking for friction in the text, I also wanted to make sure that the friction arises from an immanent reading, rather than from an external criticism (e.g. of the sort: I don’t like this kind of philosophy, so here is why I prefer something else – which doesn’t really engage with the material). This approach mostly yields ambiguous uses / understandings of particular terms. Not everyone is interested in that kind of focus, but the promise is that this provides a workable way in and out, while one still has time to draw in all the pertinent aspects related to working through the friction.

Eventually, the student groups came up with six workable research questions. The evidence and motivations made for a pertinent structure, the possible answer for a fairly clear hypothesis. In the discussion of these approaches, we then tried to establish what the chapters / sections should look like: i.e. how they should implement the friction, motivation, and the answers. (In fact, this idea for planning essays is derived from my account of questions.)

Especially for beginners, it’s also important to counter the feeling that they don’t yet know enough to come up with a proper question. I addressed this worry by making clear that any philosophical thesis can (and indeed will be) countered at some point. So one shouldn’t waste their time by trying to immunise their work against criticism. Whatever you’ll say can be criticised. So you might as well get started immediately.

Of course, this is not waterproof. But my sense was that students now had an idea about how to move from reading to planning their writing – and that’s all I want.

***

Many thanks again to my great students in this course!

Paraphrases as validations. Or how using your own words (tacitly) carries interpretations  

A: Marriage is a speech act.

B: Why do you devalue traditional rituals?

A: I don’t! I just made a point about the constitutive role of language for marriage.

B: Oh, but why did you say that marriage was nothing but talk?

…

It’s common to paraphrase texts, whether written or uttered, with our own words. In fact, students are often encouraged to “use their own words” when asked to restate or summarise an argument. Such instructions are usually intended to allow for checking whether something has been understood correctly or for translating technical terms into common language. The misunderstanding in the example above can serve as an illustration: While A made a point about the act or marrying requiring the people getting married to actually say “yes”, B took A to mean that marriage reduces to talk and is thus devoid of any further value. So B took A’s utterance in a reductive sense, while A meant it in a constitutive sense. These different senses are brought out in the paraphrases. B specifies to have taken the initial sentence in the sense of “nothing but”; A clarifies to have meant “the constitutive role”. Paraphrases are ubiquitous and yet very difficult to master, at least in philosophical contexts. Attempting to outline a simple doctrine often forces me to re-write for hours on end. But what precisely is it that makes paraphrasing so difficult? As the little example shows different paraphrases can already come with different interpretations, which in turn entail different evaluations.

In what follows, I hope to gesture at an answer that shows how paraphrases (tacitly) depend on interpretations and thus also determine evaluations of the paraphrased positions. What’s more: I hope to give a reason for dispelling the common myth that you can present a position without already being committed to an evaluation. I’ll close with some thoughts about how paraphrases also validate the paraphrased thoughts.

Problems with paraphrases in philosophy

While exercises of paraphrasing might be “basic tasks”, they are generally highly contentious and often even lie at the core of academic disputes. On the one hand, paraphrases can be historically problematic in that they introduce ideas unheard of at the time of the original expression; on the other hand, paraphrases can be systematically problematic in that they introduce unwanted (metaphysical) commitments. Historically speaking, the early modern use of the term “man” commonly has a wider scope (including women) than the twentieth-century use that renders it identical to the expression “male human (being)”. At the same time, this etymology is complicated by the fact that the pre-twentieth-century use of “man” is often tacitly referring to human males as the standard. Thus, depending on the context, the paraphrase of “man” with the term “human being” might count as anachronistic, although it is etymologically apt. Metaphysically speaking, we might wonder whether the expression “the present King of France” commits us to non-existent objects. Whichever side you take on such matters, a crucial function of the paraphrase lies in directing the attention or focus of the interlocutor. Thus, it clearly affects the philosophical approach to a given thought or content and also the direction a conversation about it might take. Hence, the worry arises whether different paraphases tacitly commit interlocutors to contrary interpretations. Arguably, such worries are rooted in a holistic understanding of sentence meaning. Assuming that the meaning of a given sentence is not atomistcally determined, but by a set of other sentences that the given sentence is related to, I will worry whether get the implications right. Going back to the initial example, speakers A and B construe the meaning of the initial sentence via different sets of related sentences or implications.

This kind of problem becomes clearly palpable in teaching contexts. A helpful example is Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion. Confronted with the phrase “something than which a greater cannot be thought” (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit), many students begin by asking whether that renders God’s greatness subjective. Given the phrasing in Anselm, this question reveals a certain kind of modern understanding of the term “thinking”. Reading “… cannot be thought”, they render “thought” as an activity that they (or even an ideal thinker) can perform and thus as the individual mental act of a subject. This reading drastically changes when students are exposed to an understanding of “than which a greater cannot be thought” as “greatest possible”, such that it can be seen as a metaphysical modality rather than a subjective act. Again, it’s paraphrases, both tacit and explicit ones, that bring out different commitments. Thus, the seemingly simple task of “saying the same thing in your own words” requires a careful interpretation of the phrase that is to be paraphrased. As I see it, then, giving a paraphrase depends on a specific interpretation of the initial phrase. Where does this leave us?  

The interpretation-ladenness of paraphrases

If our paraphrases are guided by specific interpretations, then this means that there is no such thing as a neutral report or presentation of a position. If I present Anselm’s formula in my own words and mistakenly say, for instance, “God is the greatest being, according to Anselm” (as opposed to “God is the greatest possible being”), then I’ll be mistakenly implying that God is the actually greatest thing (and something greater could be thought). However, most problematic paraphrases are not owing to such obvious blunders. Rather, they can depend on quite nuanced understandings. Now, my point is not that there are problematic interpretations; my point is rather that the paraphrase we choose commits us to a limited set of possible interpretations (as opposed to a different set of possible interpretations owing to a different paraphrase) and that there are no paraphrases that come without implications (and thus specific interpretations contrary to others). If this is correct, then there is no innocent or neutral paraphrase of a given expression. This, in turn, allows us to rid ourselves of a persistent myth: the myth that one could paraphrase a position and only then decide what to make of it. This myth often translates into a common thesis or essay structure, suggesting that you can structure your work by first presenting a position neutrally and only then evaluating it. This is impossible because the paraphrase already commits you to a specific interpretation – whether you know it or not.

The validating nature of paraphrases

But why, you might ask, is this so? Why can’t I simply paraphrase a position neutrally, leaving it open for various possible commitments? I have to admit that I have attempted this for a long time. But it doesn’t seem to work. The reason is that paraphrasing is a strangely bi-directional activity. On the one hand, a paraphrase is a bit like an (indirect) quotation, trying to convey what someone (else) has said. (Of course, we also continuously paraphrase our own expressions.) On the other hand, a paraphrase is like an appropriation, trying to convey what you have understood. These two aspirations can come apart, of course, both in historical and current readings. But what is even more important is that the appropriation often carries with it a sort of validation. In trying to appropriate someone’s form of words, I validate what has been said – by embedding it into my own thoughts. In fact, we often present and paraphrase claims that we take to be commonly accepted without specific references to any particular author. People now constantly say that mariage is a speech act, without particular reference to Austin or a theory of performative utterances. This thought has become part of a fairly common way of thinking about the role of language. Its ubiquitous paraphrases have made it part of the public domain, as it were. This way the initial thought gets validated in various formulations.

To see this, it’s vital to realise just how ubiquitous paraphrases are. In fact, most of the things we say are paraphrases of others’ words. In fact, we learn to speak and practise our daily interactions by constantly saying, in slight variations and paraphrases, what we hear and read others say. And since it often doesn’t matter who precisely said what, the exact authorship of the paraphrased sentences fades – until we fully embrace the thoughts ourselves and think we are original.   

So paraphrasing is a continuous and indeed necessary activity we practise in our daily lives, often used to validate thoughts in new contexts. This feature of validation, I submit, carries over when we, as philosophers, present the position of someone else. To what precise extent remains to be seen. But it’s clear that the concomitant validation plays a crucial role in the way we learn and pick up thoughts both in daily interactions and as philosophers who appropriate thoughts of others into our understanding of the world and the claims of current or past interlocutors.

An afterthought:

If this is remotely correct, using ChatGPT or other tools for paraphrases (instead of learning and constantly practising the validation of thoughts ourselves) might have highly problematic consequences for our (linguistic) interactions with others and indeed ourselves.

How to read (part thirteen): Imagining the author’s desk

I suppose I’ll never quite forget how clueless I was when reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for the first times. Why, to name one confusion of many, did he not bother to provide more motivation for the very first sentence: “The world is everything that is the case”? Was there some common or perhaps divine intuition that I just failed to have? For me at least, things changed drastically when I read somewhere that Wittgenstein was greatly inspired by gestalt psychology. According to the approach he might have had in mind, then, we start grasping stuff from a holistic totality and analyse our way into details rather than from atoms from which we piece together an initially fragmented world. I’m not saying this is the whole story. But for me it provided a possible motivation that helped me understand a sentence that seemed to have been written without justification. Crucial context had been provided by something that seemed utterly absent from the text itself. However, once I took gestalt psychology into account, many things began to add up. By contrast, when texts are sufficiently current or explicit about their inspirations, their motivations seem fairly obvious. So much so that you can predict an author’s response to a given question as soon as you know some of their basic claims. Given demands of consistency, you sort of know what Ruth Milllikan would respond to the question of “whether ChatGPT can think”, even if she has not done so explicitly (just for the record, I’d say she’d point to her considerations of Swampman). But when texts are sufficiently remote in time or cultural conventions, it’s vital to take into account their sources of inspiration. In fact, I think scholarly forms of reading largely consist in re-establishing contexts of this sort. In what follows, I want to motivate this approach to reading and provide some further distinctions along the way.   

Imagining the author’s desk. – One of the first things you learn as a student of medieval philosophy is that you have to start by reading much of the Aristotelian corpus. Even if you don’t follow this advice, you’ll soon find that Aristotle is all over the place. Explicit and indeed implicit references to his works are woven into the fabric of most medieval philosophical texts. When you look at critical editions of medieval works, you’ll learn another important thing: Many medieval texts are full of often unacknowledged quotations from other authors. When you read William of Ockham, you’re often faced with a jumble of chunks from Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and others. This reading experience changed my attitude to texts generally: When I read a text, I (also) want to know which books were lying on the author’s desk when writing the text. The reason for searching such sources is not just a curiosity about the author’s inspirations or the phenomenon of intertextuality; often the material that inspired the author helps you understand the text at hand. Ockham, for instance, will presuppose that his readers also read Boethius or Aquinas. So he wouldn’t bother explaining an issue when a brief reference to a theory of an earlier author would do. While Ockham’s own brief reference can leave you clueless as a modern reader, looking at his sources might provide just what you need to understand where he is coming from. This means that you can figure out what Ockham was trying get at when looking at earlier stuff. Accordingly, the more material on Ockham’s desk you can identify the better you’ll understand his frames of reference and – perhaps – ways of thinking.     

Leaning from Jenny Ashworth. – For students of philosophy, (early) modern philosophy is often introduced as an era in which philosophers shook off the reverence and references to prior authorities. Accordingly, these texts (seem to) encourage a mode of reading as if they were written straightforwardly “for you”, i.e. without the need to recur to earlier, especially scholastic, sources. As I see it, such authors were basically just better at hiding their sources. Jennifer Ashworth’s work on post-medieval scholasticism, even in figures such as John Locke, debunk this myth of textual autonomy, pushing the contextualisation to an instructive extreme. While Locke seems to pretend, even at the time of writing his Essay, that he is completely out of touch with Aristotelian and scholastic sources, Ashworth and others have shown clearly that he was very much inspired or at least wrestling with this material (here is one of Ashworth’s papers on this issue). What helps, then, in understanding such authors is the diligent study of contemporary and earlier texts and trying to get a picture of the books in their libraries.

What to look for. – Studying an author’s sources or gathering them from scrupulous critical editions is a good starting point for getting at the ‘material basis’. But you’re not doing a plagiarism check. (Of course, you might do, and conclude that all authors were less original than you thought, but that would merely betray a lack of understanding intertextuality.) So in what way can you exploit such sources? As I see it, imagining the author’s desk can get from very concrete kinds of inspiration, i.e. the very words someone actually quotes, to fairly abstract modes of thinking: so you’re looking for quoted words, imitated styles, related kinds of arguments, common principles, terminology, leading concepts or models. One thing that made me apply this strategy of reading more explicitly as a proper method was the realisation that I use unacknowledged forms of inspiration much of the time myself. When I wrote my PhD dissertation on Ockham’s philosophy of mental language, for instance, I was greatly inspired by my studies of linguistics, especially text linguistics. Even though hardly any of that made it into my text, certain ways of linguistic reasoning continuously served as a backdrop for my reading and writing. So if I write like this myself, it’s not entirely outlandish to assume that other people were and are inspired in similar ways.

Figuring out how an author ‘thinks’. – Eventuallly, this approach to reading might get you into very elusive interpretive territory. Going from what other texts might have inspired an author’s writing, you might get a feel for more abstract kinds of inspiration. Does John Locke think like a mechanist or does his medical background have a bearing on his thought, such that he might be said to think like a biologist avant la lettre? While this kind of issue is very elusive indeed and very hard to argue for, you might try and find some evidence in the way an author construes or exploits examples, thought experiments or analogies. While elusive, certain styles of reasoning preclude certain forms of consideration and might provide insights into what enables discoveries or inventions (or what might have blocked them).

In other words, trying to make ‘the context’ of a text concrete by imagining sources of inspiration re-establishes the conceptual space in which you can see an author moving within the boundaries that provide both consistency and limitations.   

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* Here is part one of the series on reading.

How to read (part eleven): With texts against interpretations

A telling fact about human intelligence is that we can hold a lot of false beliefs and still survive or even live a jolly good life. For all I know, there are flat-earthers around whose beliefs don’t seem to interfere much with other beliefs. It’s telling because it raises the question of how much really depends on our knowing the truth (imagine the word capitalised). Much less spectacular but vital for philosophers and historians of philosophy, the same might be true for our understanding of texts.* Many of us might live with grand misinterpretations without ever noticing. (I, for one, lived with a mistaken understanding of what the term “proposition” means roughly until I wrote a paper about it. ) This fact triggers at least two responses: (1) A fair amount of people think that this sad state of affairs can be amended by proper reading which will eventually lead to a proper understanding. “I just read carefully and see what it says”, or something like that. (2) To this a more sceptically inclined colleague might respond: “Well yeah, but it’s all down to your interpretation.” These fairly common yet opposed responses give rise to two opposed myths about reading: The first is that the text simply contains what we can say about it. This kind of hermeneutical givenism is often met with what one might call interpretationism, that is, the idea that there is no text an sich but only interpretations. This opposition is frustrating because it polarises approaches that actually depend on one another. As I see it, the relation between them is not one of contrariety but of a dialectical swinging back and forth. Even if there is not one single correct understanding of a text, there are many false ones. If this is correct, we should exploit this fact for (becoming aware of) our practice of reading by looking for frictions between what we think we know and what the text presents us with. In what follows, I would like to share some ideas how to exploit such frictions. The crucial point is that a claim on what a given text is about should be refined in the course of confronting the actual text. You may start with the assumption that a text is about X. If you’ve done some proper work, you should find that the text is about Y. Here is how:

What are philosophical texts about? – Contrary to a widespread assumption, the answer to that question is normally not given in the text itself. Philosophical texts typically consist of arguments for a certain claim. That’s at least what should be true of our currently most common genre, the philosophical paper or essay. Thus, a good way to read those is to begin by identifying the conclusion that is argued for and then to look for the premisses supporting to the conclusion. How do you find the conclusion, though? What’s often overlooked is that this question is twofold. It has a textual or grammatical sense and a topical or disciplinary sense. In the textual sense, papers or passages often contain a line saying “the aim is to show”, an explicit statement with the defended view or a “therefore” (or “thus” or a similar word or phrase) introducing a conclusion. You should by all means look for such items when reading, but I suppose that the assumption of what a given text or passage is about is settled well in advance by what I call topical sense. Usually, you don’t just bump into a text wondering what it’s about. That question is normally settled by a a course instructor, secondary literature or a bibliography listing this text under a course title or keyword. In this sense, the conclusion is generally embedded in a topical network of a topic (the nature of the mind) as related to a discipline (like philosophy of mind), a common problem (how do mind and body interact), and a set of positions (say, dualism vs monism) on that problem. So even if you look for the conclusion in the text, it will be the topic suggested by the instructor or some other context that guides your search for the conclusion. I bet that if you were to list Cinderella in a syllabus for a consciousness course, people would start looking for the pertinent points in the text. What this comes down to is, again, twofold: On the one hand, a philosophical text is about (arguing for) a conclusion; and identifying the conclusion settles what you take the premisses to be. However, on the other hand, the conclusion is commonly assumed in advance, since the text is given to you in a topical context that suggests and constrains potential conclusions. If this is correct, it seems that prior interpretations (taken on authority) often settle what a text is about. Try reading Descartes’ Meditations as a text that is not in some sense about dualism and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not impossible, but many people will think you’re avoiding the elephant in the room.

Points of contact. – Guiding topical assumptions might seem problematic, but they are not. They belong to the way we receive the text. Rival interpretations often argue about the right topical context. They can be quite controversial and seem mutually exclusive. Just think of the Bible as a religious text as opposed to a historical document. Sometimes they seem more complementary. You can see the Bible as both a historical document and a religious foundation. The point is, then, not to avoid such contexts (and go for givenism), but to see what actually connects text and interpretations. In other words, you should look for points of contact. What are the interpretations arguing about and how do they relate to the text. Interpretations worth your time do not only argue about the proper topical context but do so by also pointing out a concrete term or passage in the text. This is the proper point of contact. Interpretations and related disagreement must have a clear textual basis.

Where are you now and what is next? – If you have found one or several points of contact, you can begin to see what the text is about – in keeping with various interpretations. Don’t downplay this! Figuring out a point of contact is an achievement going well beyond engaging with doxography or an individual interpretation. You could now write something about the state of the art. But note that, so far, you have not begun to work with the text as such. But how do you begin that and why should you bother? Many people won’t even delve into different interpretations but stick to a doxography telling them authoritatively what certain texts are about. Although doxographies initially derive from engagements with the text, they don’t make these engagments explicit. No one today will actually argue that Locke was an empiricist. Such interpretations are taken for granted, not in the sense that they are taken to be true, but in that they are taken to belong to an interpretive tradition. (In the same way, we wouldn’t call a map of Paris from 1250 or from 1950 false; although it still tells us something, we know that it’s outdated.) If you want to move on, you should know what you want. Do you actually want to read the text or do you want to pass an exam? Are you interested in a certain kind of philosophy or do you want to see how it was or is done, that is, written? As I like to put it, if you’re merely doing philosophy, it’s enough to get the hang of some interpretations. If you want to do history of philosophy, you have to engage with the text. But how?

Build up friction between the text and the interpretations. – Topical contextualisations or doxographies are often taken as a starting point, but they do obscure (earlier) failures of understanding. Students often don’t notice that they have mainly learned to project an interpretation into a text, rather than reading a text. So how do you move ahead? Start from your point of contact, but rather than taking an interpretation for granted, ask yourself what the term or passage in question is about. Begin by trying to explain the passage in virtue of the other parts of the same text. How? Explanations like “Locke is an empiricist” or “This passage contains Locke’s account of linguistic meaning”, for example, will commonly block actual reading. You’ll notice this when you ask for details in the text. Once people parse Locke’s famous claim that “Words in their primary and immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them …” with the assumption that Locke discusses meaning, they are likely to think that “signification” means “meaning”. Arguably, Locke’s text doesn’t offer any such account. So what do you do instead?

  • Provide an analysis of the content and style of the passage as such: explain (technical) terms, see how they hang together and get taken up. Look at logical operators and connections between sentences. See whether it contains arguments or explications of terms. See whether it contains examples. References to other authors or texts. See whether it contains metaphorical expressions. Ask yourself what work the metaphors do.
  • Make a strict distinction between the content and the function of a passage in the overall text. Does it function as an introduction or is it a refinement of something earlier? Is it a key passage in the text itself or part of a larger argument?
  • See whether the technical terms used are part of a common terminology. Study the terminology through dictionaries, handbooks or related texts.
  • Check the translation (if it is one) for consistency with regard to technical terms. Is it a use of terms that’s still common or now part of a different discipline?

Going through some of these considerations will quickly challenge the interpretive ideas. You will likely notice that a text, once you look at the whole, can be part of quite different topics or disciplines and also that the priorities provided in the text rarely match what is deemed relevant in current interpretations. As Jenny Ahworth has shown with regard to Locke’s notion of signification, sometimes a different understanding of one technical term can turn over whole traditions of reading a text. But even if you don’t intend to contribute original research, you’ll have made a first step to developing a solid and independent understanding.

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* Here is part one of my series on how to read.

Reviving the commentary as a philosophical genre

When I was in my final school years and reading lots of Goethe, my German teacher recommended I read some commentaries by Erich Trunz. This was an amazing discovery: Trunz explained the texts on various levels and, above all, he left out none of the difficult passages that seemed impossible to grasp. When I began reading philosophy at Bochum university I found like-mined approaches, especially in medieval studies. But especially the so-called secondary literature on modern philosophy was often disappointing: True, the interpretations were often quite elegant, but they mostly bypassed the dark passages that clearly required a professional interpretation to make any sense whatsoever. The often fleeting remarks on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its numbering system, for instance, left me in despair. Was I not seeing the obvious or were the interpretations I consulted just not geared towards explaining the text? Only much later it dawned on me that the commentary was a philosophical genre in its own right and, outside more philologically inclined circles, a rather rare treat. These days, this is especially perplexing, given that the “diversification of the canon” requires reading unfamiliar material and thus a lot of detailed commentary. But apart from a couple of good examples (especially in classics and medieval studies), one can’t say that the commentary is exactly fashionable again. (See Barry Smith on the neglect of this genre.) Students are often entirely unfamiliar with the genre and sometimes seem to conflate it with what is known as an “opinion piece” in newspapers. After some sketchy remarks here and there, it is high time, then, to say more clearly why a revival of this genre is overdue.

So what is a commentary? – My rule of thump is that commentaries focus on explaining given texts, the linguistic forms of utterances themselves, rather than merely on ideas and arguments. Commentators do not solely attempt to say what a text is saying and what it means or has meant, but also why it is expressed in the way it is expessed. This means that the structure of the commentary follows the text and not the interpretive ideas or goals of the commentator. The beginning of a commentary is thus marked by a quotation of a word or passage from the text itself. Commentaries are often provided along with critical editions or translations of primary texts. They range from occasional annotations to “dark” passages or unfamiliar terminology to full-blown interpretations, giving background information on related texts or tracing unacknowledged sources. That said, a commentary can of course also be a part of a larger interpretation and typically occurs when a specific text passage or term forms the point of contact between different interpretations of a text. In fact, many introductions or guidebooks are commentaries in disguise. But besides critical editions of ancient and medieval texts, it’s mainly Wittgenstein’s work that seems to have invited the genre of commentary.

Why bother? – Do you know Beethoven’s 5th Symphony? Of course you do! Most people only know the opening theme, though. Secondary literature focussing on “central themes” is a bit like that. Arguably, you need a line-by-line commentary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to get beyond the famous Proposition 7 (see e.g. Duncan Richter’s commentary). The point is, then, that understanding a thought, argument or concept is different from understanding a text. But if philosophers care mainly about the former, why bother with the latter? Aren’t the essential ideas enough? Getting the “essentials” of the Tractatus, for instance, is like getting a Readers Digest or worse perhaps a cartoon version of it. Nothing wong with cartoons, you say. Of course not, but why bother with philosophical texts in the first place? But here is a more important point: It is often said that the text as such only really matters, if we consider it or the author an authority we want to defer to. Arguably, then, if we value independent thinking we can bypass the textual details. However, this gets things the wrong way round. For who tells you what “the main point” of a text is, if not an authority that you implicitly defer to? As I see it, then, the supposed “main points” are taken on mere authority and are in fact the outcome of earlier textual work of past generations. It is the detailed commentary that equips you with the material necessary for independent study and thought.

How to write a commentary? – Getting a glimpse of the scholarly work going into a commentary often makes the idea of writing such a thing overwhelming. But fear not, it’s doable. Especially these days with so many searchable resources at hand, you often don’t even need to travel. Here are a couple of preparatory moves, though, that might help you getting into the right frame of mind for beginning to write a commentary:

  • Pick and prepare a bit of text: Pick a text you like and find a bit tricky. Not too much: just a couple of lines. The text is your guide. So actually write it down. No, don’t copy it. Only if you actually write it, you will begin to see tricky bits. Write it down, number the sentences, underline words that you want to focus on, and highlight sections that you find tricky.
  • Think about the origin of the text: Make clear to yourself how the text made it onto your screen: Is it from an early print, a student or critical edition, a translation? Who edited it and when and why? Is the spelling in keeping with the original, is there something standardized? All these things tell you something about the material basis and politics involved in the text and might matter to what you actually find on the page.
  • Translation: If the text is in a foreign language, then try to translate it or write out a given translation beneath or beside it. If you don’t know the language, try to get at least keyterms. Check every keyterm and ask yourself whether you can think of a better alternative. Making a translation is the best way to see what you really don’t get. In my experience, many sentences begin to become unclear if you try translating or paraphrasing them.
  • Paraphrase: If the text is in your native or working language, try to make a paraphrase or transfer bits into formal language.
  • Variants: If you waver between different paraphrases, write down both or more. These are possible interpretations. If applicable: Have someone else make a paraphrase, too.

Now that you have a version of the text, you can begin with the actual commentary:

  • Start with a term you find central: Explain briefly why the term is central. Try saying how its centrality affects the rest of the passage you’ve picked. Say how the term relates to (modern or contemporary) cognates (similarities, differences). Say in what sense the term is part of a terminology.
  • Move on to a phrase you find difficult: Say what makes the phrase difficult for an imagined reader (even if it’s no longer dark for you): a certain grammatical feature, an unknown lexical meaning, unfamiliar terminology, strange wording etc. Now spell out some resources that help(ed you) figuring out what the phrase means: a grammar, dictionary, related texts that come with similar phrases.
  • Where does the idea expressed by the phrase come from? Hardly anything you find in a text is (entirely) original. This means that there is often something to be gained from asking genealogical questions: Where does this idea come from? Is it almost a quotation? Does the terminology perhaps just signal a slight shift of interest?

When writing your commentary, there are some obvious techniques to be used:

  • What if you can’t figure something out? Take the phrase and google it! Likely someone else has commented on it. Or something similar is in a different text that helps you figure it out.
  • Make connections within the text: Try to see whether the terms you commented on shed light on the dark phrases. Check logical connectives and see whether they are well used. Check for omissions, enthymemes, implicit assumptions etc. and write them down. Relate these notes to other parts of the same or a different text.
  • Think of audiences: Who will understand thee text better with your comments. Will it help students, people new to the material or fellow specialists? Try too gear your comments to one of those audiences. Ideally begin with students who had no exposure to the material.
  • Contextualise your priorities: Even if you try focussing on “the text as such”, your interests and what you find worth commenting on will be in keeping with certain interpretive traditions. Make them clear to yourself and use them for deciding how to move forward.

It goes without saying that there are many other factors that you could take into account, but if you follow at least some of these stepts, you’ll end up with a bit of commentary on a bit of text that might present you with a way forward or a spark for doing something else with it. Perhaps you’ll extend it, move on to another text or integrate it in an interpretation. I for one will begin to make the commentary a decisive part of writing exercises for students. My hope is that we might write more commentaries in the future. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions or about your favourite commentaries.*

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* Thanks to Susanne Bobzien, Nicholas Denyer, Michael Kremer, and Michael Walschots for some first suggestions.

Writing is decision-making. Introducing reflective tasks in examination (in the light of ChatGPT)

It’s true, even though I said that I wouldn’t worry too much about students using ChatGPT, a few doubtful cases have made me wonder what to do about it. I’ve seen a lot of good advice and discussion already (see e.g. this piece by Matthew Noah Smith among further discussions and resources), but nothing has quite convinced me for my own endeavours and settings. What I am particularly worried about is that some students might stop entirely with working through crucial hardships of writing: trying out formulations, thinking carefully about structure and terminology, setting goals, failing, revising, refining and trying again. Obsessing (especially in how we grade) about the quality of the product (the exam or essay), we might forget about the point of teaching writing. After all, it’s not the odd successful exam or essay but reflecting on shortcomings and setting priorities that will foster learning. As Irina Dumitrescu aptly puts it: “But the goal of school writing isn’t to produce goods for a market. We do not ask students to write a ten-page essay on the Peace of Westphalia because there’s a worldwide shortage of such essays. Writing is an invaluable part of how students learn. And much of what they learn begins with the hard, messy work of getting the first words down.” The main reason for emphasising such tasks, then, is not to torture students, but to teach them thinking successfully and affording control over the process of thinking. So before I set out my ideas for examination, let me briefly motivate my approach.

Two phases of writing. – As I see it, writing is a kind of decision-making. While (1) tacitly articulating things in one’s head and attempting to write them down might count as thinking, (2) coming down on a certain way of phrasing means to decide or commit oneself to a particular mode of expression. It’s crucial to see that these are two very different phases and the way from phase one to phase two might be very long and disparate. As a student, I simply could not get to phase two without very torturous and long processes of trying things out. And sometimes I would never even reach phase two. Other times, I would need to write down two to three pages in order to end up writing and committing to a phrase that I had initially formulated in my head. It felt like slowly working towards finally writing down a phrase legitimately that I had idly considered in the beginning of writing my text. (Even if you’re different from me and do everything in your head before writing down a single line, you need to practise weeding out bad formulations before.) When you do this in handwriting, the constant crossing out and revising remains visible. Today, computers and formatting allow even the most hapless scribbles to look like parts of a finished book manuscript. The perfection of layout suggests a perfection of presentation that leaves the traces of desperate revisions invisible. Coming to phase two, then, means to have ruled out plenty of unsatisfactory formulations and alternative modes of structuring. Arguably, shortening this process of phase one by jumping on the next best phrase or sidestepping it completely by leaving it to ChatGPT means sidestepping thinking altogether and ending up with at text that no-one ever decided on.

Accordingly, I want to discourage students generally from unreflectively holding on to the first form of words that passes through their minds. Rather, I’m looking for tasks that make students ponder on their work and encourage second thoughts. So I hope to design something that works even for students who are not resorting to ChatGPT or other forms of cheating.

What I want students to go through. – Is this a fitting expression, and what is left out in using it? Does this structure work, given the content? What would change if I presented things in a different order? What is the main point I need to get across? How did I come to think of this as the main point? Should I rather focus on a seeming side-issue? Etc. Between the blank page and a successful piece, there are so many things and versions and other potential pieces that might be equally successful. Despairing over such choices is a crucial part of the process of writing. Leaving it to ChatGPT means learning nothing, nothing at all about writing and about yourself, let alone about ways to find your voice. Drawing out the gloomy consequences of leaving thought-processes to machines, Maarten Steenhagen sees us heading “towards a de-skilled society. More and more, thinking itself is being turned into a service, a product that is offered by some company or other. When people look for answers or want to understand something, they turn to Google, Bing, or to social media. There, they are likely to find easily digestible, byte-sized snippets that will do for most practical purposes.”

So what are the tasks I’m going to try out in my courses? – How can I see and evaluate whether students thought about the presentation of their ideas? I guess by asking to do so explicitly. So in future exams and essays I will add two kinds of tasks to the standardly requested answers (or papers).

  1. On the level of content: Instead of having students just write down answers to exam questions, I will ask them to motivate their answer in relation to an insight they had. Ideally, this insight should relate to a previous discussion in class. It could take the form of “I think this or that in the light of the following idea, premise, assumption, argument (where the specific item relates to a discussion in class)”. If one wants to extend this procedure, one could add further steps to the motivation, such as an objection to the answer given and a tentative response to the objection. (This idea builds on my teaching of structured questions.) So whereas the actual answer is the item to be graded, the additional items (motivation, objection, response) ensure a relation to the previous action in class (or whatever you ask it to be related to). Obviously, the addition items allow for a fine-tuning of the grade, too, but the main point is to encourage reflection, ideally by means of relating to actual discussions in class so as to introduce elements that cannot be achieved by ChatGPT.
  2. On the level of articulation: Here, I would ask students to add a reflection on their formulations or terminology. Either positively, by explaining why they have chosen a certain form of words, or negatively, by explaining why they have decided against a certain form of words. The precise term or phrase is for the students to pick. What they need to do is say something like “I used the term necessary because this excludes the possibility of exceptions.” Or, “I first thought about using the term thing but then I realised that what I meant could also include processes.” Again, the point is not to turn this into a demand for whater-tight arguments for certain modes of expression, but rather to encourage and monitor some level of reflection on one’s own language. It goes without saying that this also could be done or requested in relation to discussions in class. (Ideally, this exercise will also train the grasp of “operational concepts”, i.e. the means through which we express certain contents. See on this my conversation with Daniel-Pascal Zorn.)

While these tasks are thought of in relation to exam questions, they could also be introduced in essays and other assignments. Here, they could easily be requested in the form of footnotes offering some self-reflection.

I don’t know if these and related tasks will prevent ChatGPT from being used and abused, but at least the request to invoke discussions that happened in class will be difficult to mimic for such a device. In any case, they would take some reflection for making the relation, ensuring at least some reflection on part of the student.

At this point, I’m just beginning to experiment with tasks that encourage reflecting on one’s texts. I’m pretty sure, there are many people who have already thought of this and related issues more thoroughly. (* I am particularly grateful to Sara Uckelman for sharing her reflections. You can follow up on these on FB.) Please feel free to add ideas or, as always, comment on the ones presented.

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As it happens, this blog is now up and running for five years. So I’d like to thank you all for your continuous reading, encouragement, and discussion.

Love as imitation. A note on the role of love in academic teaching and learning

“I am touching on a point that I’ll soon leave behind again, since it relates to the profoundness that I intend to bypass, I mean the disparity between university and truth. To study medieval philosophy in a philosophical way one has to learn a lot, but one should not prioritise learning. As with any kind of philosophy, one has to ask questions. One has to have problems; one has to have confidence in being able to solve them; one still has to be on the move, wishing to make discoveries, wishing to learn something of vital importance from old books. This is countered by many intimidating experiences, especially during one’s studies. One loses this confidence if one is not encouraged. This encouragement comes only from others, from role models, from friends, from teachers whom one – let’s be frank – loves. Only among friends can one do philosophy. But if university career paths merely produce sober thinking clerks (Denkbeamte), then philosophy does no longer exist at universities. And without this spark you might still become a specialist in medieval logic – which is no small endeavour – but then medieval philosophy is not just dead but forgotten, too.”

Kurt Flasch, Historische Philosophie, 2003*

In times of increasing worries about ChatGPT and education systems more generally it’s soothing and inspiring to re-read some of the works of my teacher Kurt Flasch. Neither he nor my PhD supervisors Burkhard Mojsisch and Gert König were very good at preparing me for a career on the international job market, but they surely inspired some resilience against its crushing mechanisms. Re-reading the passage I translated above made me think about love of teachers again. Not in the recently well-rehearsed sense of academic ‘metoo stories’, but in the sense of what I’d like to call love as imitation. I know there are a lot more topics in the offing, but the idea of love in academia is, as far as I can see, perhaps the least understood.

So what does it mean to love a teacher? – Quite simply, to love one’s teacher means wanting to be like them. While it might involve interacting with them on some level, the crucial aspect is wanting to become like them, and that means, for instance, approach problems like them; speak, sound and listen like them; read like them or perhaps even enter into the form of life displayed by them – in one word: imitate them. (As I have argued earlier, love is, amongst other things, the ability and desire to understand another person. A strong way of understanding the other, then, is imitating them.) When I was a student, I had a couple of professors I really loved in that sense. I ended up following their courses, not primarily because I was into the topic all too much, but because I thought that, whatever they would teach, I would be learning something worthwhile. But how do you learn, how does that kind of love play out? While I was (back then) completely unaware what that meant, I just attempted to imitate them. This was quite palpable to me. When I wanted to pursue a certain (stylistic) approach, I would simply hear and try to imitate their voice in or their style when writing. – You might find this strange, but that’s probably what’s going on when we learn to find our voice in any kind of art, be it playing music, trying to paint or draw, or trying to speak and write.

Shouldn’t we aim at independence? – I guess the reason why imitation is so underrated in teaching is that we’re told to value independence. This is a fair point, but there are two issues that should be considered in response: Firstly, there is no independence without belonging. We’re not monads but always relating to a form of life and style that allows us (and others) to recognise that we’re engaging in the kind of practice we wish to engage in. How do I know I’m playing music if there is no one I’m relating to in my musicianship? Secondly, when we imitate we are never perfect imitators or impersonators – we end up appropriating and making things our own. So when I imitate my favourite teacher, you won’t hear Kurt Flasch but – willy nilly – an appropriation of his approach. In fact, the initial enthusiasm for pursuing something is fostered most by imitating a role model, be it a musician, an actor or a philosophy professor. In doing so, we might begin by rehearsing the things – half understood – we value most. After a while, though, we’ll find them pervading what we take to be our own voice.

Where to go from here? – Being a teacher myself, I think I should be aware of the facts surrounding the imitative ways of learning. After all, students don’t do as we say but imitate what we do. So if we act mainly as competitors on “the market”, students will see and imitate us in this respect. If we’re policing them as potentially fraudulent users of ChatGPT, they might follow suit. But what if we were to follow through with the idea that the best kind of philosophy develops in a community of friends?

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* Kurt Flasch, Historische Philosophie, 2003, S. 67:

How to read (part ten): What if authors are not consistent?

At a recent conference, a colleague kindly pointed out that my interpretation of Spinoza had changed over the last two weeks, since I gave two rather different answers to the same question. Of course, it’s possible that I change or even improve my interpretation in the course of two weeks, but the suggestion was not really that I had improved my position. Rather, the assumption seemed to be that my utterances were inconsistent. Although we could settle the matter most amicably, such a situation can be quite a nightmare. Am I talking nonsense? Am I inconsistent without noticing it? Am I just opportunistically changing my views to align with certain people in the audience? Of course, I could also blame the listener: Was he being uncharitable? This matter is difficult to figure out. But rather than trying to figure out who is to blame, it might be better to ask what it is that affords (criteria for) consistency in the first place.

Let’s first look how important this is. It’s a common and rational expectation that authors be consistent. (This is why I include the following musings in my series on how to read.) If you read someone asserting that p and then asserting not-p, you can easily recognise their inconsistency by the very form of words. Of course, most types of inconsistency are a bit harder to detect, but once you notice them, you seem be faced with a choice: Either you find a factor that explains the inconsistency (away) or you have to doubt the rationality of the person whose text you read. Factors to deal with apparent inconsistencies are abundant features in interpretations. Faced for instance with Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophy, many readers think that he changed his mind or that he shifted his focus. A sensible and charitable reading of such changes will harmonise inconsistencies and look for evidence that confirms the assumption of a change of mind or focus. Even if it’s tricky to settle on a clear story of the changes in Wittgenstein, his case is fairly straightforward because he explicitly declares that he found his earlier work problematic. It’s harder, though, if no such evidence can be found. Of course, one might still assume that there is an explanation that resolves the inconsistency, but if no evidence can be found, we must also allow for the assumption that an author is in fact inconsistent.

But what does such a verdict amount to? I think we’re faced with a choice again: Either we assume a failure of what we call rationality, or we consider the option that consistency is too high a bar. What if authors are, by and large, more inconsistent than we like to admit? I think there is an explanation that leaves the rationality of the author untouched and focuses on what affords consistency. In philosophy, such factors might be found most straightforwardly in the debates that the author’s text is related to. What looks like a failure of rationality might in fact boil down to a change of debate. For me, some of the most obvious examples are to be found in medieval commentaries. Reading Ockham, I often thought he was inconsistent because he addressed problems for his position in one text, while he seemed completely oblivious to these problems in the next text. After a while, however, it dawned on me that the contexts and stakes were different. One text was a commentary on Aristotle’s logic; the other text was a mainly theological commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. Having noticed this changed my expectations as a reader across the board. While we might expect an author today to be consistent or “systematic” across their works, this might not have been a common expectation in other times or contexts.

Noting changes in genre or shifts in contexts is certainly good advice for texts of the past. But what about our own practices? Is consistency really a feature of what we call rationality? Or might the phenomenon by much more “local”, pertaining more to certain stable contexts such as debates rather than to minds? For the time being, I’d like to settle for the assumption that consistency is a feature of debates rather than authors.

Worlds, norms, and empathy. A conversation with Tom Poljanšek (podcast)

This is the tenth installment of my series Philosophical Chats. In this episode, I have a conversation with Tom Poljanšek who is currently working as a postdoc at the University of Göttingen.

Our conversation is inspired by his recent book Realität und Wirklichkeit: Zur Ontologie geteilter Welten and zooms in on topics such as the relation between reality and appearance, relativism, bureaucracy, norms, Musil’s Man without Qualities, and empathy as well as Tom’s approach to writing this book. Here is a rough overview:

Introduction 00:00

Tom’s book  01:20

Rules – from semantics to politics   22:00

Implicit rules and trust        28:26

Empathy – and how it figures in sharing experience       40:40

How to read work by students and others openly            51:50

On mapping philosophy and being part of the map        55:40

Philosophy as orientation    01:11:00

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If you prefer to watch this conversation as a video, see below:

Worlds, norms, and empathy. A conversation with Tom Poljanšek

How can you ask and structure questions?

For the last four years or so I’ve tried to integrate exercises for asking questions in my courses. (Here is a blog post on my first attempt.) To my great surprise, students in my faculty now kindly selected my musings and instructions about questions as a “best practice in teaching and learning”, and my faculty nominated me for the pertinent award given by our university.

In what follows, I post a promotional video featuring one of my students* and myself as well as the text that I wrote for the award jury.

Structured Questions

If you ask students whether they have questions about any given text, you’re often met with embarrassed silence. It’s hard to admit that you’re confused. Although asking questions is a crucial activity, how to do this is hardly ever explained. By teaching to structure and analyse questions, I attempt to achieve five things:

  1. Countering embarrassment by suggesting that genuine questions require confusion;
  2. Showing how confusion generates the motivation of a question by having students spell out what (passage) precisely causes confusion;
  3. Showing that confusion is often the result of (frustrated) expectations as a reader;
  4. Detailing how to analyse such expectations as hidden theoretical assumptions;
  5. Having students estimate what possible answers might look like, e.g. by estimating how assumptions in the text differ from one’s own assumptions. 

While stimulating active learning, most steps can be achieved without requiring new information, but rather by developing an understanding of how one’s confusion arises. Accordingly, students are encouraged to enter into a dialogue with their own hidden assumptions and with others, for instance, by articulating how their background assumptions might differ. It is designed to stimulate self-directed learning and exchange as well as benefitting from seeing diversity in assumptions.

The technique of structured questions is an active learning device and was positively evaluated by students at my Faculty. I designed it to foster self-directed learning and interaction with texts and interlocutors. Being geared towards texts and discussions generally, it should be easily transferable to other disciplines. Here is some more information about it:

Questions are an ubiquitous genre in academic exchange. In the analysis of old philosophical texts, questions are a crucial guide in approaching material and in entering a dialogue about it.  As an instructor, I’ve often been surprised by how hard students find it to formulate questions themselves, even if they are good at giving answers. Discussions with students made me realise that the reason is only partly psychological (i.e. owing to embarrassment). Even in philosophy, it is hardly taught how to articulate genuine questions and what (partly tacit) components questions consist of.

I often teach and write (on my blog) about reading and writing texts. So I designed a format for asking structured questions about texts to foster an understanding about one’s own confusions and actually benefit from confusions.

Ideally, the question focuses on a brief passage from the text. It must be no longer than 500 words and contain the following components:

– Topic: say what the question is about (the passage or concepts that cause confusion);
– Question: state the actual question;
– Motivation: give a brief explanation why the question arises (use your assumptions or frustrated expectations);
– Answer: provide a brief anticipation of at least one possible answer (e.g. by guessing at the implicit assumptions in the text and how they might differ from yours).

What did I want to teach in designing this? My initial goal was to offer a way of engaging with all kinds of difficult texts. When doing so I assumed that understanding (a text) can be a general aim of asking questions. I often think of questions as a means of making contact with the text or interlocutor. For a genuine question brings two aspects together: on the one hand, there is your question, on the other hand, there is that particular bit of the text that you don’t understand or would like to hear more about.

In order to enter into dialogue, readers or interlocutors need to learn to consider questions such as: Why exactly am I confused? Could it be that my own expectations about the text send me astray? What am I expecting? What is it that the text doesn’t give me? Arguably, readers need to understand their confusion to make genuine contact with the text. One’s own confusion needs to be understood. The good news is: this often can be achieved without acquiring new information. Instead, bringing together one’s own expectations or assumptions with those of the text (or those of other readers) initiates a meeting of minds.

I began to implement this technique in autumn 2019 with first-year students and have since then introduced it in all my courses. While it was designed with medieval philosophical texts in mind, I realised that it can be used in various contexts and indeed both for approaching texts and discussions. What I didn’t anticipate was that it also seems to help in contexts of blended learning. Last year, I received a number of mails from students thanking me for how this technique had helped them to engage in self-study and prepare for exchanges in online contexts. Since it is geared towards articulating one’s confusion about texts in general, it should be easily adaptable to other disciplines.

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* I’m very grateful the students of our faculty and in particular to Maddalena Fazzo Cusan who kindly agreed to speak on behalf of the faculty’s programme committee at the very last minute.