The second paper must concern the topic, ‘What is knowing? How does a person ar

The second paper must concern the topic, ‘What is knowing? How does a person arrive at full philosophical knowing?’ Address the course material as part of your response.
The papers need to be at least 1,500 words each. Quotations do not count toward the minimum word-count. There are essentially no ‘maximum’ limits for word-count. With this paper, I would advise that you avoid sceptical theses, e.g. ‘humans cannot know.’ Such negative attempts do not seem to lead to a good result at an introductory level. –Before getting into limits on what we can know, first try just to show how knowing is possible in the first place. Further I would warn students against the tendency to focus on material outside of the course. Focus on the course-material in constructing your answer and use outside material sparingly and only to help develop your approach. Do not give more credence or attention to, e.g., encyclopedia accounts of ‘the analysis of knowledge’ than is appropriate.
1. Make sure you have a strong thesis statement. Place your thesis statement in the first paragraph of your paper. Please make it the first sentence. Use ‘and,’ commands and semi-colons, etc., to fit all the thesis ideas into one, grammatical-sentence.
2. Make sure your paper is organised around the thesis-statement, working to support it. So, e.g., if you say, ‘Descartes is correct about knowledge,’ do not just describe Descartes’ ideas but show why they are correct (as claimed).
3. Make the thesis specific, not ‘Socrates helps us with thinking,’ but instead ‘Socrates helps us with our thinking by offering his method of questioning to find contradictions, and to seek definitions; in particular, Socrates’ approach is beneficial in raising the idea, to know x, one must able to define x – this idea gives us a goal for our attempts at knowing.’ Try to discuss one or more of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, or Kant in the thesis and paper. Kant may, however, be difficult as a main focus.
4. Include numerous references, with page numbers. Try to use quotations. Try to reference your textbook. When your paper needs an in-text reference: give a quotation with a page-number. Then follow this up with a paraphrase of what you think the quotation means. Ideally, supply both the quotation and the paraphrase…. It is indeed very, very important to use primary sources, and to use secondary sources from outside our classroom only to clarify primary sources. (Obviously, then, there is more freedom when it comes to secondary sources, from within the classroom….)
5. You have to use MLA style.
6. Work on displaying your knowledge of Philosophy.
7. Remember that there are two questions here that you need to answer. You do not need to give equal attention to both questions, but you do need to address both in your papers. Students have a tendency to totally neglected the issue of ‘philosophical knowing’ or to approach it in a short, ad hoc, and erroneous manner.