- We will meet in my office, once per week.
- Prior to each meeting, you should submit (i) an essay answering the question assigned for that week and (ii) a typed up body of condensed notes from the reading you've completed.
- The essay should be no more than 1400 words long and should be submitted as a Google Doc. (You are welcome to write your essay using a different word processor. But once you finish writing it, you should create a Google Doc and paste what you wrote there.)
- The notes can be of whatever form is most useful for you. I find that a 'map' of the different philosophical positions, with each position labelled with the main arguments for (and each counterarguments against) to be particularly useful; I lay out these arguments for and against just using bullet points. Again, they should be uploaded as a Google Doc along with your essay.
- This essay length is short: that's because I'm looking for quality, not quantity. If you haven't redrafted the essay twice before submitting it, then you probably aren't investing enough time in polishing the essay.
- You should share your essay and notes with me (william.macaskill@philosophy.ox.ac.uk) no later than 5pm the day before the tutorial. For example, if we are meeting on Thursday at 3pm, you should submit the essay by Wednesday at 5pm. I will treat late submissions as non-submissions and will not read them.
- Christiano, Thomas & John Philip Christman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
- Dryzek, John S. Bonnie Honig & Anne Phillips (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Estlund, David (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Goodin, Robert E., Philip Pettit & Thomas Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
- Goodin, Robert E. & Philip Pettit (eds.), Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2012.
- Kymlicka, Will, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
- Miller, David, Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Wolff, Jonathan, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Research
Writing
For more resources on writing, see the final section of 'How to Do Well in Philosophy, part 1', listed above.