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As will become evident, when you start reading below, there is a series of very particular directions for writing this essay, near the end of the course. Understand that these directions are designed to a) give you the opportunity to answer the question asked in a manner specific to the academic discipline of philosophy, and b) to thereby demonstrate the degree to which you have understood both the content of the course material, and the three main ideas that define the procedure used and expected in academic philosophy, the principles of charity and burden of proof, and the formal standard of soundness in deductive argument. Since writing this final essay is a kind of culmination of the course, it is appropriate here to indicate the noted directions, even though you won’t write and turn in the essay until near the end of the course. If p, the

n q. But p. So, q. If p, the q. But not-q. So, not-p. Recall that when expressing argument forms in this fashion, the “p” and the “q” range over grammatically whole or stand-alone propositions (expressed as sentence-tokens in English). Perhaps the main challenge here will be to make sure that once you establish precisely what the p is, and what the q, you plug in the very same proposition, when that same letter or variable appears elsewhere in the argument. If you fail to do so, though you may think your argument is valid, it will really be invalid. This is an invalid form (think of the equivalent error, with respect to ): If p, then q. But r [where r looks superficially like p, but is really different than p]. So, q. These are also invalid forms, superficially resembling and : If p then q. But q. So, p. and If p then q. But not-p. So, not q.