Word: essay
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...might be accepted. It is rarely “accepted;” we aren’t here to accept or reject—we’re here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxical your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course—and we all like to be called “assistants,” not “graders”—you may be able to ferret...
...discussion of the various methods whereby the crafty student attempts to show the grader that he knows a lot more than he actually does, the vague generality is the key device. A generality is a vague statement that means nothing by itself, but when placed in an essay on a specific subject very well might mean something to the grader. The true master of a generality is the man who can write a 10-page essay, which means nothing at all to him, and have it mean a great deal to anyone who reads it. The generality writer banks...
...take the typical example, “Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme.” The question is asked, “Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?” Our hero replies by opening his essay with, “David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If these be the spirit of the age in which he lived, then he was representative...
...mention them because I took classes on related subjects in semesters past, and in reading the articles I recalled what a professor had argued or the slide of a particular building--in short, what I had learned, not just to be regurgitated on a test or in an essay, but what I had really absorbed in the class. In that I am in the process of stockpiling for that first, more artificial measure of comprehension, it jarred me a bit to see real learning at work, two years after the fact...
...know about the world derives only from our sensory perceptions and that anything else we might think exists--ranging from physical objects to metaphysical beliefs--is merely a mental construct that may help predict our perceptions but cannot be known as objectively true; in Boston. His seminal 1951 essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and 1960 book Word and Object built upon the works of such logical positivists as Rudolf Carnap and A.J. Ayer to place him just a notch below Wittgenstein in the pantheon of great 20th century analytic philosophers...