Crafting a Thesis

In an undergraduate philosophy paper, we most often want students to argue for or against a certain view.

What’s a thesis?

A thesis clearly and concisely states

the position you are taking (“I argue that love is not a longing for unification with one’s missing half, as Aristophanes jokingly suggests in Plato’s Symposium, . . .”), as well as
your reason for taking that position (“. . . because true love has to be forged, not found.”).

Here’s an example in context, with the thesis in bold:

A crucial step in [the feminist] movement has been the recognition that the preferences of both men and women are in some respects distorted by a legacy of injustice and hierarchy. Such a recognition, I shall argue, is not intrinsically undemocratic: indeed, when appropriately constrained, it is at the heart of the most profound liberal-democratic thought in both the Utilitarian and the Kantian traditions. Understanding this is important not just because it helps us read the past correctly but, above all, because it helps us choose directions for the future.¹

📌 The thesis is not a road map

A road map tells the reader what to expect in each part of the paper:

In the first section, I will . . . . Then, I will . . . . Finally, I will . . . .

This is not a thesis; it serves a different function. A road map sometimes follows the thesis, but it is not the thesis itself.

What’s a good thesis?

One common mistake is a thesis that’s overbroad or overambitious:

In this essay, I will suggest that utilitarianism is the correct moral theory on the grounds that it is the most intuitive.

It’s just not the kind of thing you can defend in a short paper.

The flip side of the mistake is to argue for something that’s too obviously true/false:

Bravery is a virtue, and so I argue that we should be brave.

In other words, a good thesis should be just narrow enough to be arguable.

It should carve out a genuine/non-trivial question that is also answerable within the space you have.
It should offer a more or less original (as one of my undergraduate professors likes to say, newsworthy to your classmates) answer to that question in a way that extends our discussions.
It should also be well focused, clearly stated, and easily identifiable.

Notes

Martha Nussbaum, “American Women: Preferences, Feminism, Democracy,” in Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 132 (my emphasis). ↩