If you grade enough papers, you will find some consistent pitfalls, especially in the writing of students who are coming to philosophy for the first time. I wrote up the following tips a couple of years ago when I was a teaching assistant for an introductory philosophy class at Yale led by Daniel Greco called ‘Problems in Philosophy’. The tips were intended, then, for college students, many of them right out of high school, and most of whom had never written a philosophy paper before. So the focus is on clarity and mastering the basics. With that in mind, I hope you will find these tips helpful for teaching or writing in philosophy (or any other relevant field or discipline).

I criticize Brian Earp's ‘Some Writing Tips for Philosophy’. Earp's article is useful for someone who wishes to do well in analytic philosophy as currently practised but it also casts doubt on why such analytic philosophy would be of interest to someone who wants to learn something new. In addition to its good tips, Earp's article contains two bad tips which, if followed, will tend to produce a paper that says next to nothing. I list the two faulty tips, show how the practices of great philosophers and scientists contradict them, then set out some contrary good tips for philosophers who aim to write a paper that makes a contribution to our knowledge.

If you ask people ‘What does a philosopher look like?’, their first response is often an image of an elderly man with a beard. This image can be explained by looking at philosophy's history, which has been dominated by a very select group of men. Yet, in recent years it has become obvious that the history of philosophy is not as monochrome as is often assumed. In this article, I consider how the inclusion of different voices in the history of philosophy should impel us to rethink the ways in which the history of philosophy is told.

Philosophers and others often believe that a language used to talk about usage in a particular language should not be mixed with use of that language itself. I argue below that this opinion is mistaken.

Frederick (2021, see the preceding article) offers a critique of my writing tips aimed at undergraduate students coming to philosophy – and in many cases, essay writing – for the first time (Earp, 2021, in this volume) Frederick claims that most of my tips are good tips but characterizes two of them as bad tips, as follows:

As our technology rapidly advances, designer babies and other bioethical issues are fast becoming possible. Instead of solely being considered in economic terms, or in terms of accuracy and desirability, ethical questions should also be asked such as ‘is this a good thing to do?’. This article considers whether moral people would ‘design’ and genetically engineer their babies and applies the moral theories of virtue ethics, deontology and utilitarianism to help guide our ethical decision-making in relation to this complex issue. Even if we can do something, we should pause and consider whether or not we should.

In this article I explore Mary Midgley's meta-philosophy: her view of the purpose of philosophy and its corresponding methodology. After some biographical information and historical context, I consider Midgley's answer to the question ‘why do we need philosophy?’

In this article I consider the impact of euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide on the way we live and the relationships we have. I argue that embracing the practice of assisted dying is a deficient form of care that will erode the respectful and responsible human bonds that hold us all well in community.

This article centres on two distinct but intersecting questions: (1) does it matter if we cannot definitively answer the question ‘what is philosophy?’ and (2) do philosophers exhibit bias? The article will answer ‘yes’ to both questions for the following reasons. First because the uncertainty has allowed some answers to dominate. Second, because the answers necessarily demonstrate biases, and these have led to a lack of diversity in the discipline. Following this, the article will consider why philosophers have been slow or reluctant to accept that bias plays a role in what we do. This lack of recognition has, I suggest, limited opportunity for diverse approaches, methods, and standpoints to flourish. The discipline has suffered as a result, and so too have diverse philosophers. Many fields in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) meanwhile have sought to tackle the lack of diversity head on, and philosophers would do well to heed their examples.

This is my impersonation of a philosopher working from home, which aims at making lively a few worthy philosophical questions. The old is new again, as each generation confronts its own challenges and demons, in its own context.

Despite some important progress over the past decade, academic philosophy remains a male-dominated discipline. This raises questions about how established philosophers can best support and advise female students and junior academics in philosophy. We need to avoid encouraging them to adopt a fatalistic attitude to their success (‘Philosophy is sexist, I'll never make it’), while also avoiding encouraging them to believe that their success lies in their own hands and that therefore it must be their own fault if they don't succeed. I argue that we can do this by reflecting on what success in a misogynistic culture looks like, and by guiding young female philosophers to distinguish between the changes that it is possible for them, as individuals, to make, and those that require action by many individuals.

We often hear that certain mental disorders are disorders of the brain, but it is not clear what this claim amounts to. Does it mean that they are like classic brain diseases such as brain cancer? I argue that this is not the case for most mental disorders. Neither does the claim that all mental disorders are brain disorders follow from a materialist world-view. The only plausible way of understanding mental disorders as brain disorders is a fairly modest one, where we label brain differences we find in mental illness as pathological based on their link to mental dysfunction. How many mental disorders will turn out to be brain disorders on this understanding is an empirical question.

This article is a critical response to a short book by John C. Lennox entitled Where is God in a Coronavirus World? in which he rejects atheism as a world-view equipped to deal with an event such as the coronavirus crisis and makes a case for the Christian outlook as the best way to meet such a crisis. The aim of this article is not to affirm or deny theism, but to examine critically the key arguments put forward for Christianity and against atheism by Lennox. Because of the centrality of the appeal to free will by Lennox in his article, some time is spent considering the free will response to the problem of evil, in which some close examination of the Bible is undertaken. The article finishes by outlining a personal, humanistic, secular response to the coronavirus crisis, and addresses solace and hope, two things Lennox denies atheism can provide.

In the late 1970s the big bang model of cosmology was widely accepted and interpreted as implying the universe had a beginning. At the end of that decade William Lane Craig revived an argument for God known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) based on this scientific consensus. Furthermore, he linked the big bang to the supposed biblical concept of creation ex nihilo found in Genesis. I shall critique Craig's position as expressed in a more recent update and argue that contemporary cosmology no longer understands the big bang as the ultimate beginning, seriously undermining the KCA. I will further contend that book of Genesis should not be understood as describing creation ex nihilo anyway.

Anne Conway (1631–79) produced only one short treatise – The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy – but addressed key problems in the philosophy of religion which are still much discussed today. The most significant of these are the problem of religious diversity and the problem of evil. Although the sources of her ideas may be found in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the work of the Cambridge Platonists and the Quaker George Keith, among others, she offers her own unorthodox solutions to these problems. The idea of Christ as an indwelling mediator of the divine who assists us in our moral endeavours is designed to appeal to those of all religions and none, while her claim that God created creatures knowing that they would eventually be redeemed, and that suffering promotes moral development which leads to redemption offers a novel response to the problem of evil. Conway's work is also important for its influence on the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and some have argued that it prefigures, at least in outline, the field theory of modern physics.