| Philosophy 43811 Second Paper -- Due Wednesday, March 30 The paper will be 6-7 pages in length, double spaced and in an
11-point
or 12-point proportional font. |
| The second assignment is easy to state and perhaps a bit harder to execute. By the time this assignment is due, you should have read all of Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. (This will put you a day or two ahead of the class schedule.) For the assignment, you are to read in addition Bertrand Russell's 'classic' essay, "Why I am not a Christian." In it Russell goes into some detail about why he is not a Christian. At first, it may seem that much of Russell's essay does not engage Chesterton. For instance, Russell spends a good part of his paper criticizing the arguments for God's existence. But that just raises the issue: Why doesn't Chesterton's apologetics concentrate on such arguments? Is it incumbent upon the Christian apologist to do so? Why or why not? In addition, some of the arguments are in the end more directly related to Chestertonian themes than are others. In other sections, Russell makes arguments that you should be able to connect directly to various arguments made by Chesterton. In any case, your assignment is to write an intelligent essay replying to Russell from Chesterton's perspective. (Please be careful to give references to the sections of Chesterton's works you are drawing from.) There is no one canonical way to carry out this assignment, and I expect that the papers will vary quite a bit from one another. But it is imperative that you put the two thinkers in dialogue with one another. In other words, I don't want a paper that basically says, "Russell asserts p and Chesterton asserts q," where p and q are not connected with one another. |