Response Paper II
Due: Friday, May 8, by midnight, to CourseWorks > Assignments
Format: 4–6 pages, double spaced
Assignment: Limiting yourself to the texts we’ve read so far, please argue for/against a specific answer to one of the following questions:
- If determinism is true, do we have free will?
- “Today’s best artificial intelligence (AI) models sail through the Turing test” (Elizabeth Gibney, for Nature News). Do they?
- “Existentialism is not so much an atheism in the sense that it would exhaust itself attempting to demonstrate the nonexistence of God; rather, it affirms that even if God were to exist, it would make no difference” (Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” p. 53). Would it not?
- What does Beauvoir mean when she argues that “[s]o not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity” (The Second Sex, p. 3)?
The best papers will
- focus on a single aspect of an answer that the student is genuinely interested in;
- clearly state and vigorously defend an arguable thesis;
- be accessible to a typical undergraduate student who has not taken our class;
- have an opinion and speak in the student’s own voice; and
- go beyond our discussions in a way insightful to the rest of the class.