William Blattner

Professor of Philosophy

General Guidelines for Submitting Papers in Philosophy 20

updated: Feb., 2010

1. Papers must be printed in the standard fashion: one inch margins, double spacing, twelve point font.
2. Put your name, the number of the question you are answering, the number of your section, and your section leader's name on the front of the first page.
3. Give your paper a real title (not "Essay 1"). I discourage separate title pages, unless your TA requests one for reasons of his or her own.
4. Number your pages.
5. You do not need a separate bibliography.
6. Format for references. Note: this is a change of policy for my Introduction to Philosophy course.
• Many of the citations for this course will be drawn from the Reader. The Reader has only "soft" publication data: it has an ISBN that the publisher and the bookstore use for ordering, but beyond that it doesn't really have an author, etc. So, you may refer to the Reader simply as "Reader" in citations.
• You should make it clear which author you're referring to, however, and you should know the name of the text you're citing. So:
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, as in Reader, p. x.
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,^* as in Reader, p. x.
• I give full bibliographic information for the supplementary passage from Aquinas posted for the course. Follow that information. Its format is a little different, since it's drawn from a translation of a part of Aquinas's Summa that has traditionally been referred to as The Treatise on Happiness.
• In general, in papers in the humanities subsequent citations to the same text may be shortened:
  • If you're citing the same text you cited in the immediately previous note, you may write: "Ibid., p. x"
  • If you're citing a text you cited in a previous note, but not the immediately previous note, you may write: "Aristotle, p. x."
  • [The old-fashioned, but now deprecated, way to do this was to write: "Aristotle, op. cit., p. x." "Op. cit." means "opus citatum," or "work cited." That is now considered redundant.]
  • Finally, after the first citation to a text in a note you may switch to inline citations, thus: "blah, blah, blah (Aristotle, p. x.)."

^* The articulation of Aquinas's Summa into First, Second, and Third Parts, and within the Second Part, into the First Part of the Second Part and the Second Part of the Second Part, is confusing, to say the least. Strictly speaking, it is not necessary to cite the part, subpart, question, or article from the Summa, if the citation is otherwise unambiguous. Page references to the Reader make the citations unambiguous, and so there is no need to cite the part, subpart, question, or article. If you are using any other source for Aquinas than the Reader, you must give a full and thorough citation, with publication data.