Why? Argumentation in Theory and Practice

Seminarbeschreibung

Like children, scholarly work is driven by why-questions—and by giving answers to these questions. More than that: The structure and content of academic texts should answer why-questions: it should give arguments for the concepts used or discarded, the positions defended or attacked, for the interpretations advanced or undermined. The same holds true of essays, term papers and virtually any text students are asked to write at the university. However, it is surprisingly difficult to give good–sound, easy to understand—arguments. It is even harder to come up with a structure for texts that supports the arguments given in it.

This class therefore aims to help students with recognizing, reconstructing and crafting arguments, from the miniscule detail in a sentence to the overall structure of a whole text. It offers a mixture of (a lot of) exercises and (some) theoretical foundations.

Allgemeine Literatur zur Vorbereitung

Harvard Writing Center (n.d.): Strategies for Essay Writing, https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/strategies-essay-writing.

Lee, Siu-Fan (2017): Logic. A Complete Introduction. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Ernest (2009 [2000]): Meaning and Argument. An Introduction to Logic Through Language. 2. ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kane, Robert (ed.) (2002): The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford University Press.

Watson, Gary (ed.) (1982): Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Voraussetzungen

There are no requirements, all welcome.

Leistungsnachweise

Active participation in class, fulfillment of three small tasks detailled in the syllabus.