INSIGHT PAPER
ASSIGNMENT OVERVIEW
General Instructions
We have been making our way through Plato’s Republic during the past three weeks of this course. Within the sections of the Republic that we have covered, Plato has put forth arguments on a number of topics: a few examples are the nature of justice, the qualities of a good political ruler, the reasons for having censorship in a society, and why injustice is not (in fact) more profitable than justice. Now that our reading of the Republic has come to an end, the time has arrived for you to demonstrate what you have learned through your engagement with Plato’s various ideas and arguments.
The purpose of this “insight paper” is to provide you with the opportunity to share and explain an insight that you think the Republic has provided you with. You are NOT required to agree with any particular argument from the Republic. You can gain important insights from encountering ideas and arguments that you disagree with. Furthermore, do not assume that this paper will be easier to complete if you state your agreement with Plato on some point. Regardless of whether you ultimately agree or disagree with Plato’s thought, you will need to explain why the material under discussion provided you with a new idea, introduced you to a new line of thought, prompted you to think more deeply about a view you held, or something of the like. Note that because this is a personal paper, it will be very difficult to write it without the use of the personal pronoun “I”. While personal pronouns are frowned upon for some kinds of papers, it is entirely appropriate for this paper assignment.
Your insight paper should be at least 1000 words , so plan your writing time accordingly.
Formatting and Citation Information
Your papers should be double-spaced, use Times New Roman 12-point font, and have 1-inch margins. You must provide in-text citations for the Republic in this paper You should also provide a works cited page. Please use MLA formatting for your citations. If you haven’t already visited the Purdue OWL website, you can learn more about the MLA citation style here:
MLA Formatting and Style Guide – Purdue OWL® – Purdue University
On the subject of formatting: make sure you include separate paragraphs in your assignment . I’m sure you have encountered giant, run-on sentences before that are difficult to follow. The same goes for “run-on paragraphs”. Having a giant block of text that is not differentiated into distinct paragraphs will make it more difficult for you to convey a coherent narrative to your reader.
Your insight paper is due on February 25 th by 11:59pm. Note that we are happy to discuss your assignment with you before the deadline during office hours, but we will not review papers over email.
Use of AI Assistance to Generate Writing
Do not use ChatGPT or another AI writing tool to complete this assignment. Doing so violates the Academic Honor Policy on plagiarism and will result in an automatic zero for your paper along with a record of the violation in your student file. Even if you aren’t confident about your writing, it would be better to get some points for a paper that falls short than to lose them all because you try to take an easy way out. Getting a zero on this assignment means that the maximum you could get in the course for your final grade would be an 80%, whereas getting an F (50%) on the paper would mean that the maximum grade you could get in the course for your final grade would be 90%, which would leave you in considerably better shape. I have run my own assignments through ChatGPT, slightly adjusting how I frame the prompt in order to see the various ways that ChatGPT will respond to my assignment instructions, so I am familiar with what an AI generated insight paper looks like.
PHASES OF THE PAPER
A successful insight paper will have five phases through which the discussion unfolds.
Phase One: Introduction
The introduction for your insight paper should have two components. First, you need to indicate the main claim that you are advancing in your paper. For this paper, that will be a succinct statement or two of the insight you are claiming you received. Second, your introduction should contain what I like to refer to as a “road map”. The road map lets your reader know where you are going to be taking them in the paper. For this paper, that should involve a brief statement about the context you will be providing, followed by an indication of what idea(s) from the Republic you will explain, followed by a preview of what insight you gained from this idea.
If the subject of our insight paper was Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes), the component parts of the introduction might look like this:
Main Claim: René Descartes’ makes the argument that a person cannot be certain they are not dreaming, which rules out certain classes of belief as candidates for knowledge. Descartes’ argument has prompted me to examine my own views about what counts as knowledge in more depth than I had before.
Road Map: My discussion proceeds as follows. First, I will explain how my understanding of knowledge was pretty loose prior to this class. Second, I provide an overview of Descartes’ argument that a person cannot know with certainty they aren’t dreaming at any given moment.
Finally, I will explain why this particular argument got me thinking about the importance of having more definitive criteria for knowing something than I previously had.
Phase Two: Background Context
Writing a successful insight paper will require you to contextualize your encounter with the Republic for your reader. Providing some background information about your thoughts and experiences is necessary to provide context for the insight you’re claiming to have achieved. If your reader knows nothing about what your thoughts or beliefs were prior to reading the Republic, they will have nothing to contrast your “post-insight” view with.
Because the insight paper is a personal paper by design, you will need to find your own boundaries for what you feel comfortable sharing. We talked about the importance of moderation in Ancient Greek thought, and moderation is important to keep in mind here as well. You want to aim to provide enough context to situate your reading of the Republic, but do not want to get sidetracked in sharing experiences, prior thoughts, etc. that are not directly relevant to the ideas in the Republic that you plan to discuss.
Phase Three: Exposition of the Republic
In order to make the case that something from the Republic helped to furnish you with an insight, you’ll need to demonstrate to your reader that you adequately grasp the idea in question. If you want to claim something about Plato’s argument for censorship, for instance, you need to illustrate that you understand his argument for censorship. If you misrepresent the argument that you are supposed to be gaining an insight from, this will undermine your claim for having arrived at an insight form the text.
Here’s a tip: pretend you are going to show your exposition to a friend, roommate, family member, etc. You want to make sure you say enough about Plato’s position that someone outside of this class could follow your paper without getting lost if you showed it to them.
Phase Four: The Insight
This is the section of the paper where you make the case that your thinking has shown an improvement in some fashion relative to how it was described in phase 2. If you were prompted to rethink your concept of justice, for example, indicate why you came to believe after reading the Republic that your former conception of justice was inadequate, and explain what you have gained now that you have revised your conception. Do not skimp on this part of the paper! Just stating that you had an insight after reading the material is not enough. You need to show, not just tell.
Phase Five: Conclusion
After you have defended your position that you gained an insight from the course material, your paper should have at least a minimal conclusion. It does not need to be something grandiose. A brief recap of what you believe yourself to have shown in the paper and a forward-looking comment will be sufficient. For example, where might you see your thinking go from here?
SOME MISTAKES TO AVOID
Merely stating that a change in your views has occurred
For a change in perspective to qualify as an insight, there should be something to commend that shift in your thought. If you merely state that your views on justice changed after reading the Republic, but do not indicate why you think that shift in perspective is a gain for you, then you have not demonstrated reflective engagement with the reading.
Merely stating that your views have stayed the same
The opposite kind of problem from the previous example. The fact that you continue to have the same conclusion about some issue or topic after reading the Republic is not itself an insight. By contrast, if you can explain why after reading the Republic you now have better grounds for a position you hold than you did earlier, then you’re talking about an insight. Maybe Plato had a more compelling argument than you did and you want to adopt his argument moving forward. Maybe thinking about why you disagreed with Plato really pushed you to get clearer about the reasoning behind your own position.
Basing your paper off the lecture slides and not the Republic itself
The lectures in this class (and the lecture slides by extension) are a supplement designed to help you understand the philosophical texts we cover. They are not a replacement for reading the texts altogether. You will need to explicitly engage with passages from the Republic when writing your paper.
Becoming too focused on trying to show that Plato is wrong about something
This particular assignment is not an impersonal, argumentative paper. The paper is ultimately about your insight. Discussing what you understand to be weaknesses in Plato’s thought is very much encouraged when you can demonstrate why reflecting on those weaknesses helped to drive your insight. But if you lose sight of how your own thinking has developed in the paper and you focus too exclusively on criticizing views Plato held that you think are absurd, you will get off track and the cohesiveness of your paper will suffer.
Padding out your paper
1000 words is a guideline that lets you know roughly how much you will need to say in order to adequately complete the assignment. That means roughly 1000 words of relevant material. If you think you have finished your assignment but you are sitting at 700 words, do not add a bunch of fluff into your paper in order to get up to the word count. As philosophers, we are good at spotting irrelevant padding that does nothing to advance the main claim of the paper and merely takes up space. If you think you have finished the assignment but are sitting at 700 words, that should tell you that you have not finished the assignment; you need to flesh out the relevant phases of the paper more adequately and further elaborate on your main points.
EXAMPLES OF POOR TOPICS FOR INSIGHT PAPERS
Example #1
Reading through the Republic, I came to realize that the average person today is smarter than socalled geniuses of the past.
Why is this poor?
Example #1 takes an uncharitable view of the arguments in the Republic and foregrounds criticism of Socrates or Plato as people rather than criticism of their arguments. The Republic contains a number of arguments, some of which are stronger than others. Trying to make a sweeping generalization about Socrates or Plato based off one or two bad arguments that one finds to be faulty will if anything make oneself look ignorant, which is not something one would want to be doing in a paper that is supposed to be demonstrating an insight.
Example #2
After reading the Republic, I’ve come to think that Reductio ad Absurdum is a powerful form of argument.
Why is this poor?
Example #2 does not actually focus on content within the Republic. The focus is rather on a style of argument that is not itself a topic of discussion within the Republic. Indeed, the name Reductio ad Absurdum is not itself even in the Republic. A student could write a paper using Example #2 as their main idea without actually engaging with any ideas in the Republic in a substantial way. They could just summarize how Socrates constantly gets people to change their views using this argumentative style without ever evaluating any of the views (or the reasoning supporting them). Whatever your insight is for this paper, it should pertain to the content of the arguments in the Republic, not merely their style.
Example #3
After reading the Republic, I have a newfound appreciation for how hard it is to understand philosophy.
Why is this poor?
Example #3 is focused on what the person does not understand (e.g., philosophy) rather than identifying a philosophical conception, argument, etc. that they have learned about and do understand.
EXAMPLES OF GOOD TOPICS FOR INSIGHT PAPERS
The following examples of good topics for insight papers pertain to Descartes’ Meditations, which we are not encountering until week ten of this course. I did not make these examples pertain to the Republic because I did not want my examples to overlap with the insights people select for their paper. Additionally, because we have not yet encountered Descartes in this course, the following examples also serve another purpose beyond illustrating appropriate ways to frame your insights. They are examples of how to frame an insight gained from a reading that your audience may not have read themselves, since you will need to (equally) be able to convey your insight from reading Plato’s Republic in such a way that someone who had not read the Republic could understand what you are trying to communicate.
Example #1
René Descartes’ arguments to rule out certain classes of belief as candidates for knowledge, on the grounds that it is possible to doubt those beliefs, caused me to examine my own views about what counts as “knowledge” in more depth than I had before.
Example #2
I’m not a religious person, and so I’ve just assumed that the mind is just the brain as opposed to something like the soul. Descartes makes the argument that we can know our minds exist even if we don’t know whether we have a brain and that the mind must therefore be distinct from the brain. I haven’t been convinced by his argument, but it’s pushed me to think more carefully about why exactly I think the mind and the brain are identical.
Example #3
I’ve been fairly religious since childhood, and so I’ve always believed that there has to be more to the mind than just the brain. Reading Descartes demonstrated that, even setting aside religious considerations, there are reasons to think the mind and brain are not identical. Because his argument strikes me as compelling, I’m now able to offer reasons for thinking the mind is separate from the brain that could convince people who don’t already share my religious beliefs.