General Guidelines
By “Response Paper”, I mean a brief argumentative essay responding directly to issues raised by course readings. Usually response papers work best when framed either as a disagreement with, or an expansion of, the original author’s ideas. So, for instance, here are two ways one might respond to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:
While Plato argues convincingly that we have no direct access to the material world, his cave metaphor ultimately fails. In particular, I will argue that there is simply no way that the captive observers could be adequately fed without coming to understand that the world has 3 dimensions and that they are imprisoned within it. This has important consequences for any version of Idealism that seeks to ground itself in Plato’s work.
or
One puzzling aspect of Plato’s remarkably successful and almost wholly convincing account of the Cave has to do with the manner in which a captive observer would escape and bring the news of an extenral world to his or her fellow prisoners. In this paper, drawing on the work of David Copperfield and Harry Houdini, I will outline the precise steps required to effect such an escape. I’ll show how a more precise understanding radically deepens our understanding of the human predicament and has broad consequences for a theory of underlying reality and the relationship between the world of Forms and the world of mere phenomena.
A response paper has several important components:
- Understanding of the Text
- The paper should show familiarity with the source text and present a reasonable interpretations of one or more of its arguments
- Point of Departure
- Your paper should make it quite clear where your own thinking departs from that of the original author
- Compelling Argument
- Your main points should be well-supported with evidence from the text and elsewhere, and with argumentative tissue that connects the evidence to your claims.
It’s also important to attend to spelling, grammar, etc., but these are less crucial than the above.
Questions
Question 1
On p. 7 of his magesterial An Infinity of Nations, Michael Witgen tells us that
The truth of Anishinaabe power and independence is revealed in various Anishinaabe encounters with officials and missionaries recorded by men such as Schoolcraft, Allen, and Boutwell. These men, however, could not comprehend the Native New World that the Anishinaabeg had crated for themselves in the two centuries since their first encounter with the peoples of the Old World.
How does Witgen’s account of the rise of Anishinaabe power around the Great Lakes change your view of the American expansion into the West in the 18th and 19th centuries? Do you have any reservations about this new narrative? What are they?
Question 2
…[T]the Columbia River Indians, having validated their rights to catch a fish that has been at the center of their common life for millennia, find the fish gone. They have demonstrated their new power and standing by helping to force the issue on the decline of the issue. They have the legal standing to demand that the Columbia’s salmon be saved. They are left to savor the bitterness of a promise broken even in its keeping. Saving the salmon means, at least for now, barring most fishing on the river. Half of nothing is nothing.
Explain in more detail the nature of this double-bind or bitter irony in which Native inhabitants of the Columbia River Basin find themselves. As above: what would have to be different in order for this situation to change?
Question 3
There is no easy way to disentangle the natural and cultural here.
What is real is the mixture, and we seem unable to come to terms with this even though we have created it. Mumford’s jeremiad against the megamachine recognizes that we treat nature as if it were literally a machine that can be disassembled and redesigned largely at will, as if its various parts can be assigned different functions with only a technical relation to other parts and functions. But the Columbia is not just a machine. It is an organic machine. Our tendency to break it into parts does not work. For no matter how much we have created many of its spaces and altered its behavior, it is still tied to larger organic cycles beyond our control. (111-12)
What do you think of White’s “organic machine” concept? How well does it describe the Columbia? How broadly applicable is it to other phenomena? Is the right that “there is no easy way to disentangle the natural and cultural here”?