A Guide for Explicating a Philosophical Text
• A Guide for Explicating a Philosophical Text (short version)
• A Guide for Explicating a Philosophical Text (long version)
A Guide for Explicating a Philosophical Text (short version)
Robert Burch ©
The task at hand: To write a critical explication of one of the assigned passages from the required readings. To explicate means literally to "fold out." The task is to unfold the meaning of the passage in context and to come to some assessment of its importance and its truth. What this assignment is not: This assignment is not a standard essay assignment where you begin with a thesis statement, provide a series of arguments in defense of it, and finish with a summary statement or reiterating conclusion. What this assignment really is: Basically, this assignment is a matter of writing down in an organized and explicit way your actual process of critical reading. Your task is to demonstrate in the essay how in your own reading of the text, you make sense of the passage in question and how you come to terms with it. Your essay will be judged on the basis of the depth, coherence, thoroughness and insight of the reading that it provides.
The underlying purpose of this exercise: To encourage the student to read actively. At its best, active reading is a process of critical appropriation, that is, a process of making the text 'properly one's own' by investigating its meaning and truth, ultimately with a view to how the position articulated in the text accords with or differs from, challenges or confirms, the constellation of your own fundamental philosophical beliefs and assumptions. To this end, you will seek first of all to understand the text sympathetically on its own terms as presenting a way of looking at the world, and then to respond to the challenge that this way of looking may pose.
Strategies: You are strongly advised to read the entire assigned text first, if only quickly to glean its basic outline and trajectory. Without writing a word, ask yourself the following sorts of questions: What are the guiding questions and issues to which this text as a whole is addressed? What are the immediate concerns and purposes of the section of the text in which the passage appears? How exactly does the assigned passage relate to these concerns and purposes? What precisely is the author trying to say in the passage itself, and what does he hope to accomplish by saying it? Do you understand the technical sense of the key terms being used? What is your initial assessment of the plausibility of what is being said in the passage?
To make a start with the actual task of writing, you should in the first place focus directly on the passage itself and structure your essay by working out from the passage (as opposed to starting with generalities and trying then to narrow your focus to the passage). Indeed, your explication should explicitly begin by quoting the particular passage that you are explicating and proceed first to attend directly to it. The work of situating and contextualizing and assessing is best done as you move from the passage to its broader contexts, rather than vice versa.
Starting with the passage, you will need to form a judgement about just what sort of passage it is; for example, does it state a supposedly self-evident truth? Is it a description? a definition? Is it an argument, or at least part of an argument (a premise, conclusion [here look for signal words, e.g., "thus," "therefore"], a corollary)? Is it meant at face value, or does it have an ironic or ulterior purpose? You will need to attend in detail to what is claimed in the passage itself and to the terms used to express its guiding ideas. You need to do this before you attempt to situate the passage in terms of the unfolding argument of the assigned text.
Goals: The first concern of your essay is simply to show that you have read the particular passage in question and understand what is being said in it. Second, you should look to add to this meaning by situating the passage in the larger context of the text, ultimately with a view to the role it plays both in the immediate discussion in which it is found and with respect to the broader purposes and main argument of the text as a whole. Third, you should try to come to some overall conclusion or assessment of the passage being considered. Be forewarned, however that whatever you may say in regard to a conclusion or assessment should emerge directly from your explication. Avoid tacking some positive or negative pronouncement on to the end of your paper just because you think it is expected. More careful and thoughtful work on the first two concerns with no conclusion or assessment will likely be better than less work on these two concerns but with some extraneous concluding comment added on.
A Guide for Explicating a Philosophical Text (long version)
Robert Burch ©
Purpose of the exercise: To encourage the student to read actively. In reading actively you will seek first of all to understand the text on its own terms and in its full and proper context. (Since this first requirement might plausibly entail reference to the whole history of philosophy in relation to history itself, you will have to make hard and careful decisions concerning what the terms, scope and limits of the philosophically relevant context are, given the level of the course, the length of the assignment, and the extent of the required readings.) You will also seek to interpret the text critically with a view to assessing its truth or falsity. Active reading is a process of critical appropriation, that is, a process of "making" the text "properly one's own" (ap-propriatio) by investigating its meaning and truth, ultimately with a view to how that accords with or differs from, challenges or confirms, the constellation of your own fundamental philosophical beliefs and assumptions.
The task at hand: To write a critical essay discussing the meaning and truth of the assigned passage. To do this, you will need to form a judgement about what sort of passage it is -- does it state a supposedly self-evident truth? Is it a description? a definition? Is it an argument, or at least part of an argument (a premise, conclusion [here look for signal words, e.g., "thus," "therefore"], a corollary)? Is it meant at face value, or does it have an ironic purpose? Is it to be read in strictly philosophical terms, or does it have an important extra-philosophical sense? Does it challenge the philosophical/non-philosophical distinction? Accordingly, you will need also to situate the passage and so to decide for yourself in what respects it may be central to the thought of the thinker you are reading, or at least to the outlook of the assigned text. Is it central to a philosophical topic at issue in the course? Does it establish a truth? Does it pose problems? Does it lead to hesitations about the philosopher's whole outlook, as you understand it so far? The success of your active reading will be judged on the basis of the accuracy, organization and penetration of the essay that you write. To facilitate the fulfillment of these desiderata, the following procedures are offered for your consideration, keeping in mind that there is no sure-fire recipe for writing a successful explication, since what you write must in each case be geared to the passage, text, philosopher and issue(s) in question.
General Preliminaries: Read the entire assigned text first! Then, before writing a word, ask yourself these sorts of questions: (1) What are the guiding questions to which this text is addressed, and how does this passage relate to them? How do these questions relate to those questions which you yourself had about the topic and which you first brought to your reading? (If you had no questions at all, you might wonder why you were reading in the first place!) (2) Where does the passage in question fit into the structure of the work as a whole, into the organization and development of its reasoning, explanations, descriptions, arguments. How does it stand with respect to the presuppositions and principles the author seems to bring to the exploration of the topic? In a mechanical way, you might ask yourself here, for example, in what relation does the passage stand to the title of the work, to its various division, chapter, section headings, etc.? At a deeper level, you might ask yourself how the passage affects the discussion which follows? Does it redirect or focus the discussion in a particular way? (3) What precisely is the author trying to say in this passage? Do you understand the technical sense of all the key terms used? What is your initial assessment of the plausibility of what is being said?
Specific Preliminaries: Often, much of the sense of a text lies hidden in the way that its reasoning unfolds. Arguments are often imbedded in discourse that has a multiple purpose and theme, that unfolds dramatically and at different levels at once, and in which the "logic" of the transitions from one argument and one topic to the next is not always perfectly transparent. Part of your task will be to test the soundness of the reasoning that pertains to the passage, and hence to examine the cogency of the relevant insights, proofs, arguments, explanations, descriptions, "self-evident" truths, etc., and the evidence that is offered or that might be offered for its claims and presuppositions. To make a start with this task, you might want to consider the following two-part procedure:
(1) Select the words or phrases which you think hold the key to the sense of the passage, using the following criteria: a) Is the word or phrase central simply to understanding in a preliminary way what is being said in the passage? Though this step may seem vacuous, it is meant to focus your attention closely on the terms being used, after you have some initial, vague sense of what is being said; b) Are there words or phrases that you can identify as important to the author's whole philosophy; c) Is a word or phrase being used in a apparently technical sense, different from common English usage? (If called upon, you should be able to say briefly how each term in the passage is being used. You might even wish to write out the meaning of the keys terms and phrases you have chosen, considering any explicit definitions given by the author and how the terms in question relate to each other. To check how terms are used, don't be shy about consulting the index, if there is one). Keep in mind that it is often the case with philosophers that their language is contextual and can properly be understood, justified and criticized only in terms of how meanings are constituted in the actual process of the philosophical discourse.
(2) Give a single statement of what seems to be the main point of the passage. (If there are secondary points, state in single sentences what these are.) Tell by what means the author arrives at the main point of the passage (e.g., Is it a premise or the conclusion of an argument? a supposedly self-evident truth? a definition? an explanation? a description?). In this way, you can also establish what sort of claim the main point amounts to and then ask yourself what sort of validation would be sufficient to establish the truth of the claim (here, of course, one's view might well differ from that of the author). Decide on the issue of consistency. Does the claim enunciated by the passage conflict with any other claim the author has made? If you discover a conflict, double-check your own interpretation to ensure that the conflict lies in the author's thought and not in your reading. (In this regard, you might choose to follow a principle of interpretive charity, namely, to assume that great philosophers typically don't make elementary errors in logic or fall stupidly into blatant inconsistencies. Instead, on this principle one assumes that where fallacies or inconsistencies cannot be resolved, this may reveal something important about the fundamental vision that guides the thinker's thought, and the paradoxes to which that vision and the manner of questioning that follows from it give rise. In this regard, to rejoice straightway in the discovery of a logical non sequitur by which one presumes to "refute" a thinker is usually the death-knell of a truly active reading).
Explication: Read through the preliminary materials you have written, noting the points that you have made which you think hold the most potential for explaining the full meaning of the passage. After collecting these points together decide which is best seen as the main idea, i.e., that which contributes most to revealing the deeper sense of the passage. (It may well be that what you think reveals the deeper sense of the passage is not what the author puts forth as the obvious main point!) Build your explicatory essay around this main idea you have chosen. (Done well, this is an extremely difficult procedure, since you will have to decide on a focus that inevitably excludes some things from consideration, yet ideally in such a way as to point to what remains unsaid in the context of what is being said.) Thus, you will also have to decide how much of your preliminary notes will be included in the final essay and what the structure of that essay ought to be. For this purpose it is usually best to work from a close focus on the passage itself to the broader context and issues rather than vice versa. In the end, you should try to come to some overall conclusion or assessment of the passage being considered. However, the conclusion or assessment should emerge from your explication and from the way in which you have appropriated the passage in question. (Be wary of simply tacking positive or negative pronouncements on to the end of your paper in order to make it look more "philosophical" i.e., judgmental. These usually aren't worth much.)
(N.B. The preceding instructions are offered as a rough guide to assist you in the task of writing your explication. They are to be taken neither as a set of strict procedures to be followed mechanically, nor as an hard and fast structure for your finished essay. Indeed, part of the task of writing the explication will be for you to determine for yourself in each case what is the most appropriate line of interpretation and presentation.)