Your essay should integrate passages from the texts referred to, along with your own account of the meaning and significance of these passages. It might help to think of your task as explaining the texts to someone who hasn’t read them. Try to make your essay a coherent whole, with a clear, interesting thesis and argument. Any material you cite other than the Hackett collection needs to be put in quotes and footnoted. This is especially important with any secondary material you might use. If you are referring to the anthology assigned for the course, however, you may simply give the page number in parentheses (though of course quotes still require quotation marks).
PROMPT: In Lisbon in 1755 an earthquake caused a bell tower to fall on an orphanage, killing a number of young children. Briefly explain how this illustrates the problem of evil. Then explain Leibniz’s answer to this problem, including his argument for that answer. Do you find his argument convincing? Why or why not?
Since the pdf of the Hacket collection isn’t organized to make it easy to find the page number, I put the page number in the word file. You can see the word file to quote them.
You have to make lots of direct references to the
text I provided. This is a requirement of the assignment.
text I provided. This is a requirement of the assignment.