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Philosophers
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What is Philosophers?

Philosophers as a topic appears across disciplines including political science, ethics, social theory, and the history of ideas. Courses in philosophy, sociology, and the humanities regularly ask students to engage with foundational thinkers because their frameworks continue to shape how society understands justice, human nature, the individual, and the good life. The breadth of the subject is part of what makes it academically rich — a single concept like justice or the nature of the mind can be traced across radically different traditions and historical moments, from ancient Greek dialogues to Enlightenment political theory to Taoist texts like the Tao Te Ching.

Student papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Some focus on close reading and textual analysis, examining specific arguments such as Epicurus on the fear of death, the riddle of the Meno, or the concept of justice as it appears in the Republic, the Prince, and the Analects. Others are comparative, placing thinkers like Rousseau and Kant alongside each other to evaluate competing recommendations for reducing social conflict, or pairing figures like C. Wright Mills and Hannah Arendt to explore theories of mass society. A smaller set of papers applies philosophical frameworks to contemporary issues, including community reintegration and crisis intervention.

A strong essay on philosophers grounds its thesis in a clearly defined concept or argument rather than attempting to survey an entire thinker's work. Evidence drawn from primary texts carries the most weight, supported by careful interpretation rather than broad generalization. The most common pitfall is treating a philosopher's ideas as a fixed set of opinions rather than as arguments that require analysis, evaluation, and engagement with counterpositions.

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Research Paper Undergraduate

Figurative language and tropes in literary communication

Monikers like "The King" for Elvis rely on the use of figurative language. Figurative language is used under the assumption that no one would mistake the image for reality. Figures of speech, known as tropes, are…

Research Paper Doctorate

Justice in Federalist Paper 51 and Plato's Phaedo compared

Governing one's own bodily lust in Plato and governance and the legislature in Publius -- justice in the American Constitution and Classical Greece

Research Paper Doctorate

China's one-child policy and its effects on Han Chinese population

The population of China has been exploding in the last several decades, with reports of more than 549 million people in the early 20th century alone (Smith, 1991). The population reached and exceeded 1 billion in the…

Research Paper Doctorate

Plato and Aristotle's contrasting views on democracy and governance

Philosophical Discourse on Democracy in "Gorgias" and "The Republic" by Plato and "Politics" by Aristotle

Research Paper Undergraduate

The definition and characteristics of wisdom

If I have learned nothing else from this course, what I have learned is that it is almost impossible to define wisdom. After all, wisdom cannot be defined in positive terms. It is not the presence of a certain degree of…

Paper Doctorate

Godard's Masculin Féminin and 1960s French youth counter-culture

This paper is about Goddard's Masculin Feminin. Godard has managed to capture the ignorant side of the youth –maybe even all of humanity- along with the concerned informed side, showing the disparity and variance in attitudes towards society that the coming together of cultures and increasing globalization has instigated, through the matter of war. Paul has concerned himself with the issues of the world as shown in his off-screen question in a bookstore, heard over the chatter of the gathered crowd: "Do you know that a war is going on between the Iraqis and the Kurds?" In direct contrast to this, is the scene where Paul is interviewing Elsa at Miss 19 for a magazine survey and asks about the ongoing war which she appears to be unaware of.

Research Paper Doctorate

Growing up between Japan and America: a Japanese-American identity

My mother is Japanese; she is a beautiful, inspiring woman that Disney's Mulan could never do justice, nor the near-flawless view of Amy Tan as the Great Japanese-American Writer, nor Mineko Iwasaki, the perfect Gieisha…

Research Paper Doctorate

Spinoza's controversial theology in Jewish thought and tradition

Baruch Spinoza was from a Portuguese Jewish family, which had fled to the Netherlands.

Paper Undergraduate

Wittgenstein's philosophical transformation from logical positivism to language games

Ludwig Wittgenstein is particularly interesting because in Philosophical Investigations (PI) he repudiated all of his earlier work in logical positivism and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), along with much of what was traditionally thought of as philosophy, and took a radically new track in the last twenty years of his life. Young Wittgenstein was more certain that he had solved all major philosophical problems, while the older Wittgenstein had completely lost all such certainties. There were even hints in his earlier work of this later, more explicit existential despair, pessimism and even cynicism about the limits of philosophy, which certainly became more profound over the years. He was no longer able to view the world as consisting of facts that were logical representations of objects that really existed or at least had the potential to exist.

Paper Doctorate

Goodman's new riddle of induction and projectability

According to Goodman's New Riddle of Induction, the original problem with induction that philosophers tried to solve was that anything can follow anything else. People such as Hume, however, showed this to be impossible and so philosophers, such as Hempel, tried to loosen it to statements that could confirm another (i.e. project one from the other and be to some extent projectable). Goodman showed, however, that inventing a word with an invented term such as ‘grue' does not eliminate the former problem and inductive statements still do not grant us any form of certainty. Not only does one not follow from the other, but we also cannot draw any projectable conclusions. The best that we can do is find a way to validate certain hypotheses (i.e. formulate reasons/ conditions for accepting some above others) and for making a distinction between valid and invalid inferences. Invalid hypothesis would be for the form ‘grue' and, in order to accept inductive statements, we need to distinguish between those that are invalid (namely those that accept illegitimate terms such as ‘grue') and those that are valid.

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