我在牛津大学哲学中心的Common Room里看到一本Philosophy: Study Guide,是伦敦大学给学生的哲学学习指南,主要是指导学生读书特别是写作的。非常有价值。如果哪个学生按照要求做了,一定很快就会成材。当然,也正因为如此,并不容易做到。但无论如何,在黑暗中自己摸索,不如秉烛夜游,良有以也。
最后,论证、论点这个问题是比较复杂的,不能一概而论。但无论如何,你都要保持同情之理解,批判之态度。Dong‘t just read: think。
2、写哲学文章:Peter Lipton说,风格是箭矢之羽,而非帽子上的羽毛。所以写作要
避免粗劣的文字,要我手写我口,用自己的话,还要让自己的文章念得出口。
要设身处地为读者着想。
要善于编排文章的结构
要有原创性
3、文献书名的引用注释规范。这就不说了。
4、剽窃(plagiarism)。剽窃的后果很严重。还举了个例子:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
这是剽窃。
Marx and Engels noted that the history of all hitherto existing society had been the history of class struggles. Society as a whole was more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. They observed that proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains. They had a world to win.
这仍是剽窃。
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1973 edn., p. 40) noted that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles‘. They argued that society was ‘more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat‘ (p. 41). ‘Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory‘ were ‘organised like soldiers ... slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State‘ (p. 52). They concluded that ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win‘ (p. 96).
这不算剽窃,可要是整篇文章都这样,说明你并没有理解这些观点,也就得不到好分数了。
In one of the most famous first sentences ever written, Marx and Engels (1973 edn., p 40) began The Communist Manifesto thus: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.‘ They went on to exemplify this claim by showing how the structure of society had, in their view, developed into two interdependent but antagonistic classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The latter comprised factory operatives, who had been reduced to no more than slave labour; but as they became concentrated geographically, in the great factory towns of the industrial revolution, so they had the opportunity to organise themselves politically. Hence, the authors‘ conclusion that a communist revolution was not only desirable, but possible, leading them to issue their equally famous final exhortation (p. 96): ‘WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!‘
这也许不是什么深刻的评论,但至少说明我尝试过!
5、哲学的一般性著作和系列。这些基础读本是有参考价值的:
Routledge Arguments of The Philosophers.
Oxford Readings in Philosophy.
The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries.
Cambridge Companions.
Blackwell Companions to Philosophy.
Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks.
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards. Eight Volumes.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig.
How does language relate to reality? How is it that words can be about things or refer to things? Referring expressions or singular terms, expressions which pick out a particular object, are normally divided into three categories: proper names (‘Julius Caesar‘, ‘Rome‘), descriptions (‘the conqueror of Gaul‘) and demonstratives (‘this‘, ‘that‘, ‘that city‘, ‘this emperor‘). Names and descriptions need to be treated separately. (Demonstratives are treated in the philosophy of language section of this Guide.) The standard reading for this topic is contained in the anthologies edited by Martinich and Moore mentioned above; there is an excellent introductory essay in sections 1 & 2 of Mark Sainsbury, ‘Philosophical Logic‘, in A. C. Grayling, ed., Philosophy. There are short versions of writings by Mill and Frege, with commentary, in Chapter One of Reading Philosophy of Language, eds. J. Hornsby and G. Longworth (Oxford: Blackwell forthcoming). Frege‘s classic theory of sense and reference is an essential theme. Frege thought that there are two aspects to the meaning of any term: its reference (what it applies to in the world) and its sense (the way in which the term presents its reference). So the two terms ‘Julius Caesar‘ and ‘the Roman conqueror of Gaul‘ have the same reference but different senses. See Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference‘, in the Frege Reader, reprinted in Moore and in Martinich. See also Michael Dummett, ‘Frege‘s Distinction Between Sense and Reference‘, in Moore and in Dummett‘s Truth and Other Enigmas, (London: Duckworth, 1978). For discussion, see Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), chapter 1; Gregory McCulloch, The Game of the Name, chapters 1&5; David Bell, ‘Reference and Sense: an Epitome‘, in C. Wright, ed., Frege: Tradition and Influence, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) and ‘How “Russellian” was Frege?‘, Mind 99 (1990): 267-277; and Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, (London: Duckworth, 1981) chapters 1, 5 & 6. For more on Frege see the section Philosophies of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein in this guide.