Adamson’s “Rules” for Writing Philosophy
“The first question is: what is the question?”
That’s the first in a set of “rules for writing” which Peter Adamson (LMU, KCL) developed for his students over the years, and which he is currently sharing in a series of posts this month at the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps blog.
He writes:
“The first question is, what is the question?” I’ve said this to students countless times when they are in the first stages of working on a piece of writing. The point of the slogan is that people usually think they are looking for a topic or theme. That makes sense as a first initial framework to have in mind, but only insofar as it gives you a guide to what primary and secondary literature to read as you are thinking about your writing project. It is not the right idea when you are close to producing the piece of writing, still less when you are actually writing it. To imagine yourself addressing a mere topic can lead to writing that merely rehearses what the philosopher is saying about that topic in the primary text. But writing a book report is not doing philosophy! Rather, you are looking for a question to answer in the piece.
This question needs to be neither too difficult nor too easy to answer, or as I sometimes tell students, the issue needs to be resolvable but not obvious. This may itself seem obvious, but it is a surprisingly difficult balance to get right. On the one hand, you need a question such that there are resources in the text to address it; on the other hand, the text can’t address it so squarely that the answer is right there in what the author says. Often, a good way to find a question like this is to pay attention to what you yourself find puzzling when you are reading; when you are confused, that’s a good sign! Because it means there is something unclear that you could then work on clarifying for others. When you actually start writing, at the outset you should try to get the reader to feel that same tension or puzzlement, so they get that your question is a good and pressing one.
He’s posting one rule a day, and some of the others include: “make the weaker argument strong”, “go narrow”, “use a ‘Russian doll’ structure”, and, of course, “mind the gaps,” among others. You can find links to all the posts in the series so far here.
Good rule, but wouldn’t this apply to just about any kind of writing? That is, is there a reason to think this rule is specific to philosophy?
It might apply to most kinds of expository writing.
One kind of expository writing that might be excluded, though, is the scientific journal article. Such an article doesn’t paradigmatically rely on “trying to get the reader to feel” some “tension or puzzlement.” The scientific journal article might contextualize its guiding question by indicating its significance to the (sub(-sub)((-sub) . . .))) discipline. But I can’t remember coming across a single scientific journal article whose author took it upon herself to make readers feel a tension or puzzlement.
I take philosophical writing — and perhaps a few other kinds of expository writing — to be writing that paradigmatically invites the reader to think along with the author, to follow the author on her trains of thought. To ask the reader to think along with her and to see what she sees, the author might try to induce a felt tension or puzzlement in the reader.
This is quite different from reporting experimental setups and results, an exercise in which an author’s trying to induce a felt tension seems beside the point.
Just a thought.
Interesting and plausible, but it seems like an overly romantic view of what we do? It seems to better describe writing in a rhetoric or communications program and not so much philosophy.
For instance, I don’t recall any of my professors ever describe philosophical writing in those terms. And I’d be hard pressed to describe most philosophical papers in those terms, as if the author intended or were trying to make us feel (as opposed to trying to be right, etc.)
Certainly, philosophers care about persuasion, but that work seems to fall mainly on laying out a careful argument (in analytic philosophy, at least), i.e., more about logic and less about prose. And Continental philosophy also uses its own jargon that doesn’t help a reader to follow along, if that’s the intention.
Anyway, even if persuasion is the goal, I don’t know if one needs to have a framing question in order to write persuasively (though it likely helps with any writing, incl. reporting on scientific results).
An overly romantic view, no; a romantic view, yes, and I’ll own the romanticism. But let me clarify the view.
I took it as given, obvious, and thus not even worth stating in my original comment that the author of philosophical writing attempts to rationally persuade the reader of a thesis, view, picture, or way of conceptualizing or seeing things. If the author isn’t attempting to rationally persuade — to appeal to the reader’s reasonability in appreciating the epistemic goodness of the view or way of seeing — the author isn’t attempting philosophy.
Thus, on my view, if the author of a bit of philosophical writing intends to induce a feeling of tension or puzzlement in the reader’s bones — and note that I’m not talking about feelings in general — then that can only be as an intended means to the goal of rationally persuading the reader, not the whole aim. One reason to try to induce such a feeling is to pique the reader’s rational receptivity to or sympathy for the argumentative moves.
But my point is this. While a reader’s feeling puzzlement in one’s bones and a reader’s being rationally convinced are different things, they’re neither opposed nor competing in philosophy, since the former, if present, is so only as a means to the latter. So to admit the presence, if not the importance, of the former in a bit of writing is not yet to claim that that bit of writing is rhetoric or communications.
As to whether there needs to be a framing question: I don’t know either. But I’ll confess that I’m partial to the view that what makes reasoning reasoning is it’s being structured by a question, implicit or explicit. Both arguments and explanations are answers to (different kinds of) questions, with premises and explanantia gaining relevance as premises and explanantia in virtue of their role in answering the (different kinds of) questions they answer.
Why would continental philosophers be writing if they didn’t intend to lead readers to thought?
Perhaps you find these texts hard to follow. Does that make it necessarily the fault of the author? Or maybe you find it hard to follow simply because you lack the right training or background?
Some philosophy is jargon, fine, and that applies across the board. Sometimes it just seems that way because you don’t know the specialty well enough.
Sometimes texts are difficult to follow, not because they are jargon, but because they are written in order to break you out of your old conceptual pictures. Heidegger understood that. So did Wittgenstein.
It’s 2026. Let’s read each other with a little grace and not be so crudely and ignorantly sectarian.
Not sure why you’re so defensive, as I was pointing out the obvious in philosophical writing across the board (as you also noted). I said/implied that analytic philosophy, like Continental philosophy, can also be indecipherable. No one disputes this.
Where’s that grace you mentioned?