Explication of a Passage of French-Born Philosopher René Descartes

Follow the instructions in uploaded files. The passage options are at the end of the file “assignment sheet”. Contact me immediately if there is any questions or concerns. Thanks

Assignment One Overview: Explication of a Passage

Your task in this assignment is to explicate a passage from a primary text. This involves demonstrating that you have comprehension of the passage and can communicate that comprehension to another reader. You are not being asked, here, to evaluate the arguments offered by the philosopher; nor are you being asked to offer an argument of your own. These tasks will come later. Rather, you are being asked to demonstrate your ability to read, understand, and discuss difficult original texts.

Submission Details:

Your paper should be approximately 1000-1200 words in length as indicated on the syllabus. It must be word-processed in a 12-point serif font (Palatino, e.g.; Times is very dense and best avoided), double spaced, with 1-inch margins. The weighting of the paper is 35% of your final grade. There will be an opportunity to re-submit a revised paper to the instructor. This may or may not result in any change to your paper grade. Please do not assume

that a revision/resubmission will result in a higher grade. DO NOT include a cover page on your submitted paper. At the top left-hand corner of your first page include your NAME, STUDENT NUMBER, and the

COURSE CODE

NB: It is your responsibility to keep a copy of your paper. Your paper is due on FEBRUARY 9 by 11:59pm via Quercus. There are no extensions. If you have medical issues that prevent you from submitting on time, you must arrange to submit relevant documents and/or register with Accessibility Services for accommodation.

Late assignments are subject to penalty unless accompanied by proper documentation (e.g., a doctor’s note from U of T clinic). The penalties are as follows (stated on the syllabus): 10% the first day, 5% every day thereafter. Weekends count as one day. Any assignments that are more than ten days late will not be accepted.

Assignment Expectations:

The purpose of an explication is to present a clearly explained version of the material included in the passage, i.e., what is most important and what it means. You are expected to do so in an unbiased and philosophically charitable manner. ‘Charitable’ here means what Donald Davidson and other philosophers mean, namely, that you approach the text with an expectation of understanding that optimizes the possibility of understanding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity) This means explicating the given arguments with an assumption that they make sense, and that you will provide the strongest possible version of them to another reader. This process does not assume necessary future agreement, but it does assume the possibility thereof.

This may challenge your own pre-existing ideas – a good thing!

For this, you are expected to:

First, go through the material (readings, lecture notes, etc.) concerning the issue that the passage addresses with a view of extracting the positions involved, the arguments given, specific concepts used, and any objections or replies, etc. In short, familiarize yourself with the topic and make sure you understand it.

Second, spend some time with the passage! Begin to sort out the specific information that is relevant to accomplishing the tasks set out above. The most difficult part of writing an explication is determining what content needs to be included to make your explication clear and complete, and what content can be left out so as to ensure concision and that the length requirement is met.

Third, write out your explication in clear and unfussy language, using complete sentences, and making sure to define or clarify any terms and concepts specific to the debate or issue in question. This may take several drafts and revisions.

Assignment Tips and Resources:

1. Do not yourself take a position or express your thoughts regarding the issue. Your own views on the topic should not be apparent in an explication.

2. Be sure to keep your explication well organized (part of this means NO having two solid pages of prose; break it up into proper paragraphs). Draft an outline of your plan of attack in creating the explication.

3. Do not go too much over or under the word limit. If your first pass at the explication lies significantly below the minimum word count indicated above, then you are not explaining things in enough detail. Alternatively, if your first pass at the explication lies significantly above the word limit, then you have not successfully sorted out the more relevant from the less relevant information. (You will not be able to explain every aspect of the issue; you will have to decide what to keep and what to set aside).

4. Use your own words. An explication, especially of this length, does not need to involve a lot of quotations. If you have more than two or three short quotations in your explication, go back and replace them with an explanation of the idea in

your own words.

5. When writing your first draft, after consideration, try not to look at the passage for a moment. Close all books, set all notes/readings/etc. aside, and then explain the positions as you understand them in a kind of mental dialogue. Maybe take a

walk while doing this! The exercise will ensure that you are processing your understanding, not simply replicating the language of the passage.

6. Do not take yourself to be writing an explication for the TA or instructor; that is, do not assume your reader knows what specific concepts or terms mean. Be sure to explain any concepts or terms that are relevant to the topic, how they fit into the author’s meaning, and why they matter to the author.

7. No secondary sources are necessary for this assignment. Indeed, they ought to be avoided. The answers to what the passage means lie in the passage itself. If the passage is unclear or perhaps even self-contradictory, you should address that and explain why it might be so. You are permitted to refer to other passages or in the same work, or by the same author, but be careful not to lose close contact with the target passage. 

8. Refer to posted online resources if in doubt, or consult the TAs during their posted office hours.

Assignment Passage Options (choose ONE ONLY of the following quotations as the subject of your explication):

Descartes One:

“Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would they proceed? Would they not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast their eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those they saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.”

 Descartes Two:

“But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.”

Descartes Three:

What do I see other than hats and coats, which could be covering automata? But I judge that they are people.

 Heidegger One:

“Meanwhile humankind, precisely as the group so threatened, exalts itself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything humankind encounters exists only insofar as it is their construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though humankind everywhere and always encounters only itself... In truth, however, precisely nowhere does humankind today any longer encounter itself, i.e., our essence. Humankind stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that we do not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that we fail to see ourselves as the ones spoken to, and hence also fail in every way to hear in what respect we ek-sists, from out of our essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only ourselves.”

Heidegger Two:

“Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral.”

 Heidegger Three:

“[T]he instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring humankind into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as means. We will, as we say, ‘get’ technology ‘spiritually in hand’. We will master it. The will to mastery therefore becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”