I find that students have a very difficult time doing a summary. The results may vary, but all will be interesting. Ask the students to create their own summaries of the piece (alone or in groups). Ask the students to not look at the summary in advance. Assign a short piece that has an online summary. Second, if your class is small enough, or divided into small sections, you can create an illuminating assignment. You can talk up the useful purposes of summaries. First, it might be useful to think over whether (if a student is going to do the reading) summaries might actually be helpful, especially for dense and jargon-rich texts. Others are welcome to submit their own summaries on the site, and critical feedback on the summaries is welcome. You can follow Philosophy Summaries on Facebook to receive updates about new entries.įor what it’s worth, I think it is useful to confront the Sparknotes phenomenon up front by incorporating it into class. That way you can quickly get or recall the general gist of a book, then drill down to find particular parts that might be of interest.įor an example, here’s his entry on Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics. On the website, these are hierarchically organized – you can “expand” or “zoom into” a book to see its chapters, and so on.

As I read a book, I write a brief summary of what each section is arguing or doing, then use these to summarize each chapter and then the whole book. Philosophy books are usually divided into chapters, which are divided into sections. It features “hierarchical summaries” of philosophy texts with an interface that allows you to drill down into the summaries of each section. Alexander Dietz, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, has been working on a project called Philosophy Summaries.

Philosophy 100 readings spark notea