Continental philosophy Life Sciences Essay Research

I need a draft to show the professor before Saturday (July 25). She will provide some feedback which you can further develop in this essay. 650min-800max words. Please read the writing by Derrida in the link below (or one of the writings by Derrida) and the pdf document by Malabou on “what should we do with our brain”.For the two readings, you should focus on the parts which was mentioned in the two lecture notes I uploaded. The requirement and instructions are very clear in the c09assignment document. If you have any questions please ask me immediately! Thanks.



https://web(dot)stanford(dot)edu/class/history34q/readings/Derrida/Differance.html



Hi, I need a rough draft before 2:30pm Friday EST to discuss with the professor. Please send me anything you finished before this time, many thanks.

Instructions for Critical Summary #1 

*The purpose of this exercise is to help you develop the skills you need to write a compelling essay at the end of term. What is a compelling essay? I’ll get back to this below, and it’s something we’ll continue to talk about over the course of the term.

Background:

Often philosophy assignments prompt students to defend a position on a certain topic: what matters is their ability to (1) explain the ideas and arguments in the texts related to their prompt and to (2) erect a sensible, strong defense of their position. Sometimes philosophy assignments focus on evaluating arguments. Although I think these skills are important, I’m asking you to do something slightly different. We’re going to focus on posing compelling philosophical questions and interpreting texts in novel ways.

The philosophical texts which we continue to read, the philosophical ideas we continue to engage with, are not those which are ‘incontrovertible’ or ‘simply right.’ They have ‘captivated’ us for other reasons. What is involved in the production ofinteresting/intellectually stimulating work, and how can we ourselves learn to produce this kind of work? What can we achieve, philosophically, when, instead of focusing on ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness,’ we focus on the complexity of the texts and ideas we’re studying and try to do justice to/interrogate/say something about that complexity instead? What can we achieve when, instead of subjecting texts to easy critiques (e.g., ‘the ‘history’ of morality Nietzsche provided us with was inaccurate’; ‘when Lacan was talking about the ‘real,’ he wasn’t saying anything there is empirical evidence for’), we think with them, and see where their ideas can take us? These are questions we’re going to keep in mind as we move towards the final essay. My hope for you is that, at the end of term, in your final assignment, you will be able to synthesize the course material in a way which is interesting (to both me and you) and advance an original and non-reductive thesis. Don’t be intimidated by this! I’m here to support you in your growth along the way.

The assignment:

It becomes easier to write essays that are of interest to your readers once you yourself have learned how to find points of interest in the literature you’re engaging with. This critical summary assignmentis designed to help you achieve this kind of intellectual depth. It is also designed to help you place different texts/thinkers in dialogue and make connections between texts; these skills are especially important for continental philosophers.       

I want you to use both the material we’ve covered on Malabou and the material we’ve covered on Derrida to pose a critical question (either about Malabou’ work or about Derrida’s). You DON’T have to answer the question. That is, there’s no pressure to provide a clear and (potentially) simplistic response to it. You do have to motivate the question, though: It should be possible for me to appreciate how the question is the result of a collision between your brain and the texts we’re reading. The assignment should give me a sense that you’ve engaged with the course material. It should also help you get somewhere new, intellectually, somewhere you weren’t before undertaking this exercise. It should also surprise me to a certain extent (i.e., it shouldn’t just repeat things I’ve said in lecture, or things we talked about as a group, though you can certainly use things we’ve talked about and lecture content for inspiration). In short, it should be a question worthposing.

The exercise should be between 650 and 700 words; if it’s a tiny bit longer (e.g., 100 words), that’s okay. It is worth 25% of your grade. You can single space or double space, whatever you prefer. Do submit the assignment as a Word document(sometimes students submit ‘pages’ documents, and I can’t read these on my computer). It is due by midnight on July 18^th and I will return it to you before the drop date. You will be able to submit the assignment through Quercus (see our ‘assignments’ page).

***I will not be providing comments in the margins of the assignments; instead, I will provide a note about what you’ve done well and what you can improve at the very end of the assignment, along with a grade.   

Specific Instructions:        

Think about what you’ve learned about Malabou and Derrida. Pick an idea from Malabou’s What Should We Do with Our Brain? and an idea from Derrida’s work (anything we’ve looked at) and articulate how you see them relating to each other. Explain each idea in as much detail as possible. Either use Derrida to pose a critical question about Malabou, or use Malabou to pose a critical question about Derrida. Specific questions are preferable to vague ones. What do you find yourself wondering about, now that you’ve thought about Malabou and Derrida in relation to one another? Try to use the texts to pose no more than one critical question; at most, you might pose two related questions. Do state your question(s) in question form.

*You might think about some of the following questions to get started: 

What would one thinker say to the other? Is there anything that would trouble one thinker about what the other has said? Is there a sense in which what one thinker has said could push what the other has said further? There might be points of resonance between Malabou and Derrida’s ideas—is there any sense in which these are philosophically relevant? If there are seemingly irresolvable differences between what each is saying, these differences might lend themselves to a question as well. Is there anything philosophically interesting about transformation that these thinkers bring into sight for us when read together?

You will be evaluated on:

>Your thoughtfulness, rigor, and creativity

>Your ability to accurately explain the ideas you’ve chosen to focus on and to explain ideas in as much detail as is reasonable, given the word limit

>The presence of in-text citations: Whenever you paraphrase ideas or refer to something in the texts we’ve looked at, indicate the page or pages the ideas are found on in parentheses at the end of your sentence. If it’s not obvious which text you’re including page numbers for, then include the author’s name and an abbreviated version of the title. For instance, you could cite Malabou’s What Should We Do With our Brain at the end of a sentence like this:

We encountered the idea that our actual concrete capacities might depend on our cultural narratives about these capacities (Malabou WSWD, 11).

‘WSWD’ is just an abbreviation for the title of the text. When you’re abbreviating, just use a few letters from a work’s title. Derrida’s “Teleology and Architectonic” (in Rogues) could become TA.

>Your writing style (please be as clear as possible and organize your response in a sensible way)