The purpose of this assignment is to help you continue to hone your skills of arguing points in writing, and to provide a creative outlet for understanding your own self in the process of developing your arguments. You will do this via one of the essay topics below. Like the last essay, this essay will provide a creative outlet to find your own voice and to express critical thinking skills built around the varied works we've been reading in class. You will also practice the art of argumentation by precisely stating a stance and defending it with evidence in a clear, easy-to-follow manner.

Timeline

• Brainstorming exercise due Friday 10/18
• First draft due Friday 10/25
• Paper meetings week of 10/28
• Final draft due Friday 11/8

Audience

Ursinus College's academic/intellectual community, including your fellow students, instructors, mentors, etc. You'll want to strike a balance between being thought provoking and exacting, but also accessible to people outside of our class but in our community who may not have read the works you're citing.

Format

• Approximately 1200-1500 words. You may format your paper any way you want with whatever spacing you want (I personally use Overleaf to craft PDF documents in LaTeX, though most people probably prefer Microsoft Word). But regardless, in addition to the text, you should include
  • Your name
  • The title of the paper (you do not need a title page)
  • The date

Writing Goals

• Taking a stance with a clear thesis statement and well-organized, easy-to-follow text
• Lively, distinctive, original voice
• Appropriate and frequent references to text, including passages we haven't explicitly discussed in class, and perhaps new passages that you find on your own
• Thoughtful, provocative, creative, nuanced interpretations of your textual references

Other Tips

• Analysis and interpretation should be two of your main goals here. You should strive to translate what a particular author is saying into your own words in a clear manner and in a way that supports your message. Explore the logical implications of the authors' statements, as well as any ambiguity, hidden assumptions, unexpected consequences, or connections to other texts.
• You may need to re-read some of the sources you're using many times. This is completely normal! Just make sure you leave yourself time to do it properly
• Be sure to introduce quotations in a way that flows. For instance, "according to Mills, "[quotation]"" (page #), as opposed to just plopping a sentence in the middle of text without a clear attribution. You may also want to orient that quote in the context of the larger work, such as "after Douglass escaped slavery and got to know other active abolitionists, he honed is perspective on Christianity in America, saying ["quotation"]". Be sure your quotes are relevant to the larger point you're making, and that they are characteristic of the work you are citing!

Evaluation

We'll be splitting the paper grade into several categories, where you'll be graded on a 10 point scale on each category. Point assignments can be interpreted as follows

9-10	Exemplary; exceeds the goal; a model example for future students
8	Very good; met the goal fully
7	Met the goal minimally
6	Just barely acceptable, but fell short of the mark and needs improvement
0-5	Unsatisfactory; does not meet goal

Below are the categories to which points are assigned

Category	Goal
Main Idea / Thesis Statement	The main idea is clear, concise, debatable, specific, and interesting, and is expressed via a precise thesis statement.
Creativity / Making It Your Own	Takes a unique, creative approach with a lively, original voice
Textual references	Carefully chosen, frequent, detailed, skillfully integrated references to the texts. Selects several passages that were not discussed in class.
Interpretation of Texts	Student shows interpretations of the text that are creative, nuanced, thought provoking, and/or just plain provocative.
Organization	Each paragraph has clear topic sentences, the document flows from idea to idea and paragraph to paragraph, and the reader avoids "getting lost"
Sentence Level	Sentences should be clear, with varied diction, and edited/polished without grammar and spelling mistakes.
Revisions	There is evidence that the student made an earnest, good faith attempt to address comments from me and/or the writing fellow in their final revision.
Bonus Points (+0.5)	Includes an informative and entertaining title

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Essay Topics (Choose One!)

Below are some essay topics from which you can choose. The focus is on our more recent texts:

• Sappho
• Plato's Euthyphro
• Bostelmann's Apertures And Borderscapes
• Genesis
• Confucious Analects

If, in addition to the essay topics below, there's something else that stirred you up in class pertaining to these texts, let me know and we can discuss an alternative essay topic that you craft yourself!

Sacred Texts

Before we dove into Genesis, we had an interesting discussion in class about what makes a sacred text, and if we should approach a text differently if it is sacred. In this essay topic, you will dive more deeply into this question:

Define a sacred text. Examine whether your definition applies to Genesis. Then, choose a text other than Genesis from our above list and argue whether it is or isn't sacred according to your definition, drawing evidence from the text to support your assessment. Finally, draw conclusions based on your analysis of both texts. If relevant, in light of your theory, explain if we should approach Genesis differently from your chosen text.

Plato's "Confucious Dilemma"

We've now encountered two texts on moral philosophy: one with Plato's Euthyphro, which examines meta-ethical questions about the nature of piety, and one with virtue ethics in the form of the annalects of Confucious.

In this topic, you will try to put these two theories into contact with each other. What if Socrates had run into Confucious instead of Euthyphro? Pick an appropriate length chunk of the dialogue and re-imagine it with Plato and Confucious in dialouge with each other. Possible things to consider include (but are not limited to!):

• Who would Confucious be bringing to trial, and why? What would Socrates have to say about this?
• How would Confucious define piety to Socrates? Be sure to cite relevant annalects.
• How would Socrates respond to and challenge Confucious's definitions of piety? Be sure to cite relevant sections of Euthyphro.

This is very different from a conventional essay, as you'll be writing in a dialogue style that mirror's Plato's Euthyphro. But it is no less challenging intellectually, and it will require you to do a deep dive into both texts. Do your best to retain the style of speaking for both Confucious and Socrates as they speak to each other. Be creative, and have fun with this!

Conferred vs Intrinsic Value

We talked in class about the two horns of the Euthyphro dilemma: is "the pious" pious because it is intrinsically so, or because the Gods say it is so and therefore "confer" a pious status? Socrates shows how trying to latch on to either one leads to contradictory circular logic. However, it is worth digging into each one a bit more in its own right to see if there truly are "good/right/virtuous" actions/concepts/values in either category. Pick a text other than Euthyphro and summarize what that text has to say about what is "good." Does the text describe things that are intrinsically good, or are they only good because of the relationships of the characters to them, the composition of society, or something else?

The annalects of Confucious are all about this, so that would be a natural choice. However, you could also write a quite interesting (and possibly more original) essay about what Sappho, Bostelmann, or Genesis have to say about "the good" and whether it's intrinsic or conferrred.

MPAA Ratings of Our Texts

We discussed book banning in class. People were on the same page about full on book bans being a bad idea in general, but there were some interesting thoughts about the age appropriateness of different texts, which could perhaps be thought of as "mild, age-appropriate censorship." Given this, pick two texts out of the list that would get at least a PG-13 rating, and justify your choice with specific citations. Then, carefully argue how we should approach these texts in mixed company given their rating.

Things to consider include (but are not limited to):

• Is it possible to sanitize these texts for younger audience without losing their meaning? If so, how would you do it? If not, why not?
• In the melting pot that is the US, could there be a large disagreement on the ratings of one of the texts you chose? Why?
• Does specific trauma, religious upbringing, etc make certain texts more difficult to handle for certain groups of people? How should we handle that?
• Does something being a religious text or "dogma" make this exercise irrelevant? Why or why not?

The above is a lot to chew on, so you probably want to pick one or two things to focus on at most in your essay, and argue them well.