Hey guys! I saw a post a few days ago on X about how the French write these big philosophy essays when they graduate, and I was like “Wow, that must be scary”, and then I thought “Hey, there’s no way the French are all smarter than me, why can’t I do that”, and so, I have decided that I will practice writing French-style dissertations. A big thing about these dissertations is that it’s not just talking about a theme, it’s responding to a question. According to Claude and Assistance Scolaire Personnalisee1, there’s a few different parts to a dissertation, namely:

  • Introduction,
  • Development,
  • Conclusion. The introduction serves to present the tension in a question and “state that tension as a precise question” (taken from claude). To practice this, I had Claude give me a prompt, namely “Is observing enough to know?” This was my response (I used around 10-15 minutes to write this):

The obvious answer is yes: to know something is to know that it exists, or is true, and observing something tells you that a thing exists. However, this is not the full picture, as we almost never have the full picture. Consider the sun. From initial observation, it seems obvious that it is moving, and that the Earth is still. However, we know this not to be the case; in fact, it is the Earth’s rotation that makes it seem like the sun is moving with respect to a certain point. This seems like a mark against observation as knowing, but it is, in fact, not: the reason we know that the Earth rotates, is by even more observation. Observation in the limit is knowledge, however we can never know when we have exhausted the supply of observations to make.

Problematique: How much observation is required to say one truly knows something?

Claude pointed out a few flaws, the biggest one being that I stated a different question from the one asked and I resolved the tension in the introduction (“Observation in the limit is knowledge”). My goal for the next four weeks is to use 15-30 minutes every day to practice this. This is the plan stolen from Claude:

  • Week 1 — problématique only. One bac prompt/day. Write just the problematization paragraph (~15 min), then self-grade on the rubric below (~5 min). Goal: stop resolving early; find the categorical tension.
  • Week 2 — problématique + three-part plan skeleton (one line justifying each part). Tests whether the tension you opened actually generates a progressive plan.
  • Week 3 — write one full partie with a real reference/example. This is where your knowledge gap bites, so pair each day with one Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on that prompt’s central notion — read it after drafting, to see what you missed.
  • Week 4 — one full dissertation (weekend), and re-attempt a Week-1 prompt cold. The re-attempt is the point: it tells you whether the corrected move became automatic or you just understood it once.

And gave me the following resources to read:

I will be posting these here on this blog. If you have any comments on my writing, please reach out to me at krishna@amitav.net; I crave criticism.

  1. For various reasons, I know how to read French, I do not know of any similar resources that are not in French, but I’m sure that there do exist some. ↩︎