“Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Explain.

This is the first essay assignment of two for the class. It is due by Wednesday, June 24, at 11:59 pm. Your paper should be uploaded to the Springboard dropbox.

The paper should be 3-4 pages in length at double spacing, not including title pages, bibliography, headers/footers, and footnotes/endnotes.

David Hume famously said that “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Explain what he meant by this, then discuss whether you agree or disagree with it. Explain your reasons for thinking as you do.

I do want you to draw from the class materials in your answer, and the strongest papers will demonstrate use and understanding of those materials, but I really do NOT want a mere condensation or summary. This isn’t a research paper. It also isn’t really a test of detailed understanding of the materials. I want you to really think hard about the question. In violation of many guides for writing philosophy papers, it isn’t necessary for you to articulate and defend a central thesis. But I DO want you to organize your thoughts, questions, concerns, and speculations and express them clearly in writing. Pay attention to spelling and grammar – not from fear that points will be deducted, but because ungrammatical and error-saturated writing is miserable to read.

There are many ways to draw from the course materials. Some papers may focus quite narrowly on Hume, while others may incorporate material from other authors.

You absolutely may (but you don’t have to) draw from materials not specifically assigned for the course. However, papers that ignore course materials will not receive the highest grades.

If you quote or paraphrase, please include a citation. A short bibliography identifying any resources used should be included. The format for citations (MLA, Turabian, Chicago, …) doesn’t matter to me. In fact, for present purposes, here is what I recommend: If you are citing a book, just give the author, book title, and page #. If it is an article, then give author, article title, publication title, page #. And if you are using an online source, just copy and paste the url.

There are three mains reasons to include citations in your paper:

Using someone else’s ideas without citing is plagiarism, and professors hate plagiarism with a deep passion. There is no quicker way to make your professor develop an incurable loathing for you than to commit plagiarism. Most of us would be quicker to forgive you for spray painting our cars lime green than for plagiarizing.

Having a citation allows the reader to look up the source and check for accuracy of quote or interpretation. If you make a weird claim and attribute it to someone else, it is sometimes the fault of your source for expressing things ambiguously, or confusingly. In some cases the source may contain a misprint and you may be forgiven much if the blame can be shifted onto your source.

Citations allow the reader to learn more about interesting information in your paper. Speaking for myself, I have learned about books, articles, songs, websites, and even video games from student papers.

One of the most commonly given reasons for citing is actually not all that important in my opinion, so I will only give it “honorable mention”: That is that making students learn citation formats helps prepare them for publishing their own scholarly articles and books. The great majority of students will never do this, however, and I think it is far more important for students to focus on the content of the paper than the formatting of citations.