Responding to Your Peers: Paper 2

Identify one or more of your peers or a peer group and describe how they respond, either implicitly (in the way they live) or explicitly (in conversation with you or public
statements), to one or more of the course questions. (You will likely find that focusing on one, or at most two, of the questions helps to keep the paper manageable.) Do the same for the readings from one course unit; then put the two responses (your peer’s and the readings’) in dialogue. Draw out resonances, overlaps, subtle differences in emphasis, significant disagreements, and the like.

Course Questions

1. To whom or what are we responsible for living our lives a certain way?
2. What is a human being and what is their place in the world?
3. What does it mean for life:
   —to feel good? (And does it matter? Might the life worth living be miserable?)
   —to go well? What is important in terms of life’s circumstances?
   —to be led well? What do we need to do in order to lead a life worth living?
4. What is the role of suffering in a good life? How should we respond to suffering, our own and others’?
5. What should we do when we fail to live a good life?

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How do I focus the paper?

Remember, the paper is relatively short for the number of ideas you may have. Your primary goal for the paper should be “descriptive”—that is, simply a careful analysis of your peer’s and the readings’ responses to your chosen course question(s). You may find it helpful to gather a few more ideas than you need and then to look for interesting points of back and forth to help you choose which ones to include.

As you make observations and select evidence, consider questions such as:

• What beliefs might underly your peer’s and the reading’s respective responses to the question(s)?
• What do the respective responses to the question(s) imply about a fitting or worthy way of life? How coherently do these beliefs seem to fit together?
• Where are there divergences between the respective responses? What might account for differences?
• Where are the overlaps? How wide and deep do they go?
• Finally, putting your peers and authors into dialogue can go deeper than compare and contrast. Try imaging that they are all sitting around your seminar table talking about their ideas. Are there any new ideas or questions that emerge for you as you imagine them together? (You could even try structuring your paper as a dialogue where each party speaks in its own voice.)