Paper 1 Topic

• Three to four pages.
• Four pages maximum, two pages minimum.
• Your essay goal: an interesting and clearly stated thesis with elaboration and support.
• Assume your audience is other classmates who have read and studied the same material as you have.
• Try to evoke ideas in your reader - see if you can "make the lightbulb come on" for your reader - an "aha" experience for your reader. Look for textual connections, relationships , insights.
• Use specific examples from the fragments and testimonies to support your claims.
• Make sure your thesis is clear, focused and can be supported with specific evidence from the texts.
• Make sure you can verbally articulate your essential idea to others in a clear and succinct way.
• Be sure you clearly articule your thesis in the first paragraph. One sentence in your introductory paragraph should encapsulate the essence of your thesis idea. Often this is the last sentence of the first paragraph.
• Write with clarity. Simplify, shorten, and focus.
• Check your spelling and word use. Watch for its vs it's. Watch for then vs than. Make sure your words properly articulate what you mean. If you are unsure, look up a word to sharpen your understanding of its meaning.
• Make sure each paragraph contributes one (and only one) key idea in support or elaboration of your thesis.
• Check to make sure each sentence in your paper is clearly constructed and conveys meaning in support of the idea in the paragraph.

A framework for interpretation

• Roochnik p 7- Historical dialectic and an organizing narrative. Flaws and all.
  • Each thinker will be conceived as responding to, and is in some sense shaped by, a previous one.
  • A progression of more comprehensive and complex ideas leading to Aristotle. (Plato for us).

• Matter vs Form - major distinct themes (Guthrie)
  • Ionians - Natural Philosophy based on materialistic ontology of matter.
  • Pythagoreans (Italian peninsula)- Mystical/Spiritual cults with reality in an abstract ontology of form.

• Being vs becoming - ontological dualism (Roochnik & others)

• Problems of Motion (Guthrie & others)
  • All is in flux. All is becomming and there is no being.
  • All is one and there is only being. Motion is an illusion, becomming is an illusion. Only reason and not senses can inform us of the the truth. We cannot trust our senses.

• Empiricism vs Rationalism as the basis for knowing

• The Mathematical Order of Nature
  • This is for us to fill in. What is the dialectical narrative we call The Mathematical Order of Nature