Research Preparation in Philosophy I

PHIL 501 trains you to do philosophy the way analytic philosophers actually do it: reading canonical papers closely, reconstructing their arguments formally, and figuring out where they hold up and where they break. The weekly rhythm is twelve short essays plus a longer term paper, built around seminar discussions of texts in language, metaphysics, epistemology, and mind drawn from the Martinich and Sosa anthology. As a spring-of-senior-year requirement, it's the methodological bridge into graduate-level research — less about learning new doctrines than about acquiring the craft of valid inference, clear writing, and disciplined argument that the rest of your thesis work will lean on.