The Final Paper is due in lecture on December 2
nd on 8-10 double-spaced, single-sided, Times New Roman 12-point font, MS Word default line-length (whew!) pages.
It is open topic, and must treat one of the following alternatives:
- three primary course texts
- two primary course texts and one class handout.
Equal focus does
not have to be given to the three texts that you chose: one or two may dominate. If you are searching about for a thesis, you will find that the Evaluative Response can serve (as if so designed by a wise and benevolent authority) as basis for a thesis paragraph.
Regarding the deadline, if you should find it a challenge for some personal reason, you may apply for an extension
with type-written justification handed in at lecture on and only on November 25
th.
Suppose that [an ordinary day-labourer] meets with a modern philosopher, and wants to be informed, what smell in plants is. The philosopher tells him, that there is no smell in plants, nor in any thing but in the mind: that it is impossible there can be smell but in a mind; and that all this hath been demonstrated by modern philosophy. The plain man will, no doubt, be apt to think him merry: but if he finds that he is serious, his next conclusion will be, that he is mad; or that philosophy, like magic, puts men into a new world, and gives them different faculties from common men. And thus philosophy and common sense are set at variance. But who is to blame for it? In my opinion the philosopher is to blame. For if he means by smell what the rest of mankind most commonly mean, he is certainly mad. But if he puts a different meaning upon the word, without observing it himself, or giving warning to others, he abuses language, and disgraces philosophy, without doing any service to truth: as if a man should exchange the meaning of the words daughter and cow, and then endeavour to prove to his plain neighbour, that his cow is his daughter, and his daughter his cow.
