Writing sample topics

[isostheneia]

Hi folks.

 

I'm wondering what kinds of papers/topics other people are using for their writing samples, just because it seems interesting to know how other applicants are approaching this all-important aspect of applications.

 

Is your sample on one of your primary areas of interest? Does it fall more on the side of reviewing a debate, or introducing a new argument? Is it on historical or contemporary issues? I'd love to hear whatever you're willing to share, understanding that some folks might not want to be too specific for sake of anonymity. Also, I'd be interested to hear what people who applied in previous years used as their writing samples.

 

Personally, I'm submitting a version of my BA thesis. Part of it is reviewing the positions in and stakes of a debate concerning Hegel, and part of it is suggesting a new interpretation which tries to bring out the best of both sides. One of the biggest struggles I've had is to avoid using too much "Hegelese," so hopefully adcoms find it clear enough.

[jjb919]

Mine is still in the research and vague formulation stage, but it is a significantly reworked and streamlined version of my MA thesis.

 

I am going to attempt to argue for the idea that in instances of extreme violence such as torture, the harms brought against the body and the harms brought against the victim's agency or dignity are not distinct kinds of harm. Relying on the work of feminist philosophers and those working on embodied cognition, I will try to argue that the body is itself a moral object or boundary.

[isostheneia]

Cool stuff, sounds interesting. Are there people who specifically argue against that position? Or is it more that others are implicitly committed to denying your claim? In any case, spelling out the reasons in favor of the body as a moral boundary seems fruitful.

[jjb919]

While no one I have come across so far specifically argues against that position, this is because modern philosophy has been committed to the idea that our moral standing that is connected to our subjectivity or agency is something transcendental or non-material. It has been taken for granted that mind, subjectivity, agency, etc. is distinct from physicality and the body. While there is no specific philosopher I am arguing against, I think of myself as joining camps that are attempting to buck the trend of the way traditional moral philosophy has been done.

 

While embodied cognitivists have argues against the mind/body dichotomy, by and large they do not talk about the moral dimensions of the body (Mark Johnson has discussed morality in the context of embodied cognition, but his focus seems more on how the body gives rise to complex and abstract metaphors of conceptualization which would include or lead to moral thought, rather than looking at the body as a moral object in its own right). While feminist philosophers have worked on this subject in the most depth and breadth, much of the literature has been focused on the body as an inherently vulnerable and intersubjective thing that calls for moral attention and caring. But many feminist philosophers, despite this, still seem to adhere, at least in part, to the idea that what is really horrible about torture, or what is really horrible about rape, is not the physical violence brought against the vulnerable body, but the fact that this violation destroys the victim's agency. While the body is implicated in the destruction of agency, it is not what is central to the inherent wrongness of torture and rape. In other words, the logic of agency-harming wins out over the logic of body-harming. This would seem to be understandable; many rapes that are traumatizing do not involve physical assault, and there are forms of torture that do not impinge on the body (psychological torture, for instance). I want to take these arguments a step further and bring them together.

 

Anyway, I'm still outlining the paper and thinking about how to bring all the parts together. Hopefully it will come out well written and interesting.

[overoverover]

My sample is very much in my main area of interest.  It's on the semantics of generic sentences, e.g. "Birds fly", "Ravens are black," "Dogs have four legs." I start by giving some pretty thorough counterexamples to a kind-of-new, kind-of-popular view, then sketch a new semantics w/ motivations from some psychology stuff. It doesn't attempt to survey all of the literature—though I'd like to expand it with that in mind after this process is over.  My only worry about my sample is that, if you were to read it without knowing that just as many philosophers have written about generics as linguists, you might not realize that I am in fact a philosopher—basically, some people might think I'm 'not doing philosophy.'

 

I'm a graduate student transferring from a PhD program due to my advisor leaving, so my situation is a bit different. Basically, when I found out in April-ish that I'd no longer have an adviser at my institution, I started writing one of my term papers with the idea of using it as a sample (I already had some half-baked ideas and I knew the literature fairly well). I wrote it, got a ton of comments from various profs, and then revised all summer. I found that writing a sample with the intent of using it as a sample was really helpful. I knew from the beginning I'd be writing for a broad audience, but also that I didn't want to sacrifice depth or detail. It's a hard genre, but it's easier when you have it in mind the whole time. 

 

BTW: There's an older thread from August/September about this, in case you'd like to see more answers.

 

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

My sample is very much in my main area of interest.  It's on the semantics of generic sentences, e.g. "Birds fly", "Ravens are black," "Dogs have four legs." I start by giving some pretty thorough counterexamples to a kind-of-new, kind-of-popular view, then sketch a new semantics w/ motivations from some psychology stuff. It doesn't attempt to survey all of the literature—though I'd like to expand it with that in mind after this process is over.  My only worry about my sample is that, if you were to read it without knowing that just as many philosophers have written about generics as linguists, you might not realize that I am in fact a philosopher—basically, some people might think I'm 'not doing philosophy.'

 

I'm a graduate student transferring from a PhD program due to my advisor leaving, so my situation is a bit different. Basically, when I found out in April-ish that I'd no longer have an adviser at my institution, I started writing one of my term papers with the idea of using it as a sample (I already had some half-baked ideas and I knew the literature fairly well). I wrote it, got a ton of comments from various profs, and then revised all summer. I found that writing a sample with the intent of using it as a sample was really helpful. I knew from the beginning I'd be writing for a broad audience, but also that I didn't want to sacrifice depth or detail. It's a hard genre, but it's easier when you have it in mind the whole time. 

 

BTW: There's an older thread from August/September about this, in case you'd like to see more answers.

 

That's a genuinely horrible situation you are in- my god, does that happen often?!

[Monadology]

I know someone that more or less happened to in their first year. It's probably not super common, but I definitely recommend trying to get a feel for the odds of appealing faculty leaving if you are accepted somewhere (within the bounds of tact, of course). It's not exactly predictable, but for instance in my case I heard that a faculty of interest recently turned down an offer from a prestigious program, which indicates that said faculty was pretty happy at the program and planning to stay. I also know of someone who asked a few of the faculty they were interested in, and got some positive answers (as well as some "I'm happy here but I might take a good offer if it came along, so who knows" type answers).

Edited December 13, 2014 by Monadology

[overoverover]

That's a genuinely horrible situation you are in- my god, does that happen often?!

It happens, but I don't know how often. The only other person I know of who has been in a similar situation was, coincidentally, my old advisor.  Luckily, the potential horrors were mitigated due to pretty much unanimous support from my current institution's faculty—not only were they all sympathetic to my situation, but they were willing to give lots of advice, too. 

Just a quick glance at Leiter Reports can give you a sense of how fluid the profession is. Faculty leave all the time. If this had happened to me a little later in my program (I'm only a second year, so this was about as early as it could've happened), there's a chance I would've been stuck.  The best thing you can do is go to a department with a few faculty in your AOI—that's the only real safety mechanism. 

Edited December 13, 2014 by overoverover

[reixis]

My writing sample is on philosophy of mind/perception. I try to argue for a primitivist and realist theory of secondary qualities. I first discuss why secondary qualities are considered less real than primary qualities and then argue that the reasons supporting this ontological distinction are weak. I propose instead a dual-aspect view of primary and secondary qualities in which both have specific aspects, but in which neither is ontologically prior to the other. In the end, I discuss cases of hallucinations and illusions to show how my approach helps understanding a few intricate philosophical problems of the nature of perceptual consciousness.

[Infinite Zest]

Without getting into the specifics, my sample is a shortened version of my senior honors thesis. I've spent a little over a year working on it (mostly with a well known philosopher). I've also gotten feedback from a few other professors, a couple graduate students, and a lot of philosophy majors.

 

The paper topic is pretty related to my primary research interests. I've tried to fill the paper with as much original argumentation as possible; for me, this means pointing out flaws in the reasoning of others, putting forward a couple of solutions to dilemmas in the literature, making sure my points were not assumptive, considering objections, and staying coherent throughout the paper. I also took the time to break down arguments into a series of premises and showed problems with certain premises, strengths with others, etc.

[Infinite Zest]

Without getting into the specifics, my sample is a shortened version of my senior honors thesis. I've spent a little over a year working on it (mostly with a well known philosopher). I've also gotten feedback from a few other professors, a couple graduate students, and a lot of philosophy majors.

 

The paper topic is pretty related to my primary research interests. I've tried to fill the paper with as much original argumentation as possible; for me, this means pointing out flaws in the reasoning of others, putting forward a couple of solutions to dilemmas in the literature, making sure my points were not assumptive, considering objections, and staying coherent throughout the paper. I also took the time to break down arguments into a series of premises and showed problems with certain premises, strengths with others, etc.

 

Also, completely contemporary. The most "historical" source that I used was from 1970.

[Infinite Zest]

Also, completely contemporary. The most "historical" source that I used was from 1970.

 

And this is all the history of philosophy that I want or need.

[overoverover]

Also, completely contemporary. The most "historical" source that I used was from 1970.

 

I can beat that! My oldest source was from 1980! 

[overoverover]

Without getting into the specifics, my sample is a shortened version of my senior honors thesis. I've spent a little over a year working on it (mostly with a well known philosopher). I've also gotten feedback from a few other professors, a couple graduate students, and a lot of philosophy majors.

 

The paper topic is pretty related to my primary research interests. I've tried to fill the paper with as much original argumentation as possible; for me, this means pointing out flaws in the reasoning of others, putting forward a couple of solutions to dilemmas in the literature, making sure my points were not assumptive, considering objections, and staying coherent throughout the paper. I also took the time to break down arguments into a series of premises and showed problems with certain premises, strengths with others, etc.

 

That's similar to the strategy I followed, though a bit modified. Basically, I took a semantic theory and showed that some intuitively false sentences were predicted as true by it, thus providing a range of counterexamples. Then I tried to generalize the objection and point out what in general the theory was getting wrong, and my proposed semantics tries to avoid making the same mistakes (at the cost of having to 'explain away' some of the purported data). 

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

My writing sample is on philosophy of mind/perception. I try to argue for a primitivist and realist theory of secondary qualities. I first discuss why secondary qualities are considered less real than primary qualities and then argue that the reasons supporting this ontological distinction are weak. I propose instead a dual-aspect view of primary and secondary qualities in which both have specific aspects, but in which neither is ontologically prior to the other. In the end, I discuss cases of hallucinations and illusions to show how my approach helps understanding a few intricate philosophical problems of the nature of perceptual consciousness.

That sounds like a truly fascinating paper!

[reixis]

That sounds like a truly fascinating paper!

Thanks. It is actually a part of my senior thesis composed of three chapters. Luckily, I wrote each chapter as individual papers, so I didn’t have much trouble detaching it from the rest. I was not sure whether to send the actual sample or one constituted by the third chapter of my thesis (which roughly discuss how this dual-aspect view of qualities relates to the empirical search for the neural correlates of consciousness), but given that I received more positive feedback on the first one, I decided to go with it.

Edited December 13, 2014 by reixis

[philstudent1991]

^ A thought: a senior thesis is an obvious choice for a writing sample, since hopefully it is representative of your best, most organized and most in-depth work. But, they will almost universally be too long to submit in full as a writing sample, so you are left with chopping it up in such a way that you can still have a quality paper. This runs a risk of making the paper awkward and of compromising the flow of things. So, if you have a VERY good paper for another class that is of a more reasonable length, I would CONSIDER using this paper instead. If your senior thesis is your best work and you think you can truncate it without losing any quality, then great. But if not, remember you have other options.

 

EDIT: This is aimed at applicants in general, not the commenter above in particular. I was just indicating that I was building on what he was saying.

Edited December 13, 2014 by philstudent1991

[reixis]

^ A thought: a senior thesis is an obvious choice for a writing sample, since hopefully it is representative of your best, most organized and most in-depth work. But, they will almost universally be too long to submit in full as a writing sample, so you are left with chopping it up in such a way that you can still have a quality paper. This runs a risk of making the paper awkward and of compromising the flow of things. So, if you have a VERY good paper for another class that is of a more reasonable length, I would CONSIDER using this paper instead. If your senior thesis is your best work and you think you can truncate it without losing any quality, then great. But if not, remember you have other options.

 

EDIT: This is aimed at applicants in general, not the commenter above in particular. I was just indicating that I was building on what he was saying.

 

Thanks for the advice. Actually, I wrote each chapter separately and at different times, so that is not much of a problem in my case. I asked my advisor whether she thought it to be a good idea to rewrite all of them in a monolithic text or to maintain the paper format and write an introduction indicating how each paper relates to the others. Her take was that the second option was better since all the papers dwell on very related topics, but each of them could stand on their own. She said that this could save me some time as I wouldn’t have to rewrite each chapter if I wanted to use only a part of my thesis in the future. It is true that by going this way you lose in the breadth of your work, but for practical purposes, I thought it was a price worth paying since it’s only a senior thesis.

[ineedwine]

Hi folks.

 

I'm wondering what kinds of papers/topics other people are using for their writing samples, just because it seems interesting to know how other applicants are approaching this all-important aspect of applications.

 

Is your sample on one of your primary areas of interest? Does it fall more on the side of reviewing a debate, or introducing a new argument? Is it on historical or contemporary issues? I'd love to hear whatever you're willing to share, understanding that some folks might not want to be too specific for sake of anonymity. Also, I'd be interested to hear what people who applied in previous years used as their writing samples.

 

Personally, I'm submitting a version of my BA thesis. Part of it is reviewing the positions in and stakes of a debate concerning Hegel, and part of it is suggesting a new interpretation which tries to bring out the best of both sides. One of the biggest struggles I've had is to avoid using too much "Hegelese," so hopefully adcoms find it clear enough.

Probably late to this thread, but my writing sample is a re-write of my senior paper and is on the topic of art forms and alienation in Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin. That paper also sparked the formation of my areas of interest, so it is very much within them. In fact, if I get accepted I plan to write my thesis/dissertation on a topic somewhere in that area.