The paper (approximately 8-10 pages long) is due by Tues., June 9th. Please e-mail to me (abestone@ucsc.edu) in PDF, MSWord, LATEX, plain text, HTML, or RTF).
There are no assigned or suggested topics. You are
encouraged to discuss ideas for a topic with me. In general a good
topic should be interpretative--you should try to say something
original about what Kant actually means in some passage, how some
argument is actually supposed to work, why a certain topic is
important to Kant, etc. (You should not write a paper that is
just a summary of what Kant says somewhere.)
A good way to think of a specific topic for a paper
like this is to try and find a problem about Kant's text that needs
solving--something that doesn't seem to make sense, or something that
seems wrong or unfair or offensive or irrelevant. (This could be
something that strikes you personally as wrong, or you could find a
problem about Kant elsewhere, for example in one of the recommended
secondary texts listed on the syllabus.) Then try your best to solve
the problem: explain what Kant is thinking that would make this
apparently wrong thing seem right, at least from his point of
view. This is just a suggestion as to how to go about this, however;
there are also other ways of coming up with interesting topics.
You can cite Kant using the A- and/or B-edition page
numbers. If you use any outside material, you must of course make it
clear exactly what you are using and how. If you paraphrase another
author's ideas in your own words, you must indicate that via a
footnote. If you directly quote from another author, you must use a
footnote and you must mark the direct quotation as such (using
quotation marks or, for long quotes, setting the off as block
quotes). Also, it should be clear that your paper was written for this
course.1
There's no need for a separate bibliography or title
page.