How to write philosophy.

The session

What it covered

Most students are never taught how to write philosophy. You get told to "make an argument" and then left to work out what that means on your own. This workshop was our answer to that.

Professor Fricker spent an hour on how to write philosophically: what makes an argument your own, and how to get it onto the page clearly. There was time at the end for questions.

If you're planning to enter the essay competition (deadline 15 December), our introductory resources are the best place to start.

Your speaker

Professor Lizzie Fricker

Lizzie Fricker taught philosophy at Oxford for nearly thirty years. She was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Magdalen College from 1989 to 2017, and she is now an Emeritus Fellow of the college. She studied at Oxford too: a first in Philosophy and Economics, a BPhil with distinction, and a DPhil in 1986.

Her research is mostly about testimony. The question sounds simple. When can you know something just because someone told you? Most of what you know, from historical dates to the day you were born, you only know second hand. Fricker has written more than 30 papers on this problem. Her best known, "Against Gullibility" (1994), argues that we shouldn't trust what we're told by default, and that we need some reason to think the speaker is reliable. It was reprinted in Epistemology: An Anthology (2008), and philosophers working on testimony still argue with it today.

At Oxford she also taught epistemology, philosophy of mind and Wittgenstein's later philosophy. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame from 2017 to 2020, and has given visiting lectures at Northwestern University and Saint Louis University.