Research Preparation in Philosophy II

The second half of the philosophy research sequence shifts from theoretical to practical philosophy, working through analytic treatments of metaethics, normative ethics, aesthetics, and political theory by reading the canonical papers directly rather than through textbook summaries. Each week you produce a short paper on the assigned readings and defend it in seminar, so the real training is in reconstructing arguments, drawing the distinctions that matter (normative vs. descriptive, evaluative vs. factual), and writing about them clearly. It rounds out the methodological grounding expected before serious thesis work, pairing the formal-philosophy skills built earlier with the harder problem of applying theory to actual ethical and political judgment.