How to Choose the Topic for Philosophy Essay
What do the topic for a philosophy essay look like? There are often two essential types of philosophy essay topics. They are “issue- or problem-focused” problems and “text-focused” problems. The topics of the first type are straighter about a specific philosophical issue, with no reference to any specific philosopher’s text, for example, what is scientific means? or is freewill euthanasia morally admissible?
Text-focused problems ask you to think about some specific philosopher’s writing on a particular issue, for instance, discuss critically David Hume’s number of causation in his outstanding A Treatise of Human Nature or was Wittgenstein right when said that “the word’s meaning is its usage in the language”, in his famous Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 43?
There is one more type of topic for a philosophy essay, which introduces a statement and proposes you to think about it, where this statement is an unattributed or “made up” quote, for instance, with no belief in God, any person cannot be moral and discuss it. Actually, this type is a variation of the problem-focused topic.
If you are proposed to discuss such statement referring to some particular text or philosopher, this problem becomes more text-focused, for example, with no belief in God, any person cannot be moral and discuss it with reference to Inventing Right and Wrong, the J. L. Mackie’s Ethics.
Seldom, a topic represents an unattributed statement, yet the statement is a quotation from a specific philosopher you have been studying or a good paraphrasing of their thoughts and ideas.