English 103
Research Paper Assignment
If you scroll down, you will see a list of many men and women who are considered to be some of the worlds greatest philosophers and critical thinkers. On May 23, 2021, I will email you and ask you about whom you will be doing your research paper.
Your task, in eight to ten pages (that does not include your works cited page), is to choose an individual from the list and write a paper about his or her life. Most importantly, please identify his or her contributions to the world of philosophy and critical thinking; that is, what did your chosen individual do, think, say, or write that changed the way we, as humans, view the world around us. You must use at least eight different cited sources, and you may not cite to an Internet source; that means that you may not directly use a .com, .edu, .gov, .net, .org, or .whatever source. You may, however, use the Internet to access Santa Ana Colleges librarys database for books, articles, journals, etc. (You can use any library database to complete your research. I suggested Santa Ana Colleges library because you, as a student of Santa Ana College, can access it from home or work for free.) If you use the librarys database, make sure that you properly cite your sources.
The final draft of your paper will be due on Sunday, June 6, 2021, at 11:59 P.M. This research paper is worth 20% of your final grade, and you will be graded not only on content but on your grammar, punctuation, and proper MLA format regarding parenthetical citation and the works cited page. Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to ask me.
Deal breakers: Deal breakers are items in a research paper that I dislike immensely, and if I see even one of them in your research paper, the research paper will automatically receive a zero. I wont even finish reading the research paper. In this research paper, there ten deal breakers to be aware of:
1. If any part of your research paper is plagiarized, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
2. More than ten of one or a combination of the following: run-ons, comma-splices, or fragments. If you have any more than ten of these types of errors in your research paper, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
3. If your research paper does not have a thesis, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
4. If you do not meet the page length requirement (make sure that you have one inch margins, that everything is double-spaced, that you use Times New Roman 12-point font, and that you submit the research paper as a Word document, not a Google document), you will receive a zero on this assignment.
5. If you do not have a works cited page, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
6. If you do not have parenthetical citations, you will receive a zero on thisassignment.
7. If you do not properly document your research paper, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
8. If you do not document your research paper following MLA Style rules, you will receive a zero on this assignment. You may not use any other documentation rules including but not limited to APA Style, Chicago Style, CSE Style, etc.
9. If you do not have at least eight different cited sources, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
10. If you cite to a source that is not permitted, you will receive a zero on this assignment.
Potential Research Paper Topics
Elizabeth Anscombe
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine of Hippo
Marcus Aurelius
A.J. Ayer
Francis Bacon
Gabino Barreda
Jeremy Bentham
George Berkeley
Mary McLeod Bethune
Ann Bradstreet
Edmund Burke
Albert Camus
Cesar Chavez
Noam Chomsky
Confucius
Richard Dawkins
Jacques Derridas
Ren Descartes
John Dewey
Charles Dodgson
Frederick Douglass
W.E.B. Du Bois
Emile Durkheim
W. Emerson
Epicurus
Michel Foucault
Sigmund Freud
Siddhartha Gautama
George W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Thomas Hobbes
David Hume
Edmund Husserl
William James
Carl Gustoav Jung
Immanuel Kant
Sren Kierkegaard
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gottfried Leibniz
John Locke
Niccol Machiavelli
Malcolm X
Karl Marx
John Stuart Mill
Muhammad
Isaac Newton
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Orwell
Thomas Paine
Blaise Pascal
Octavio Paz
Charles Sanders Peirce
Plato
Karl Popper
Hilary Putnam
Ayn Rand
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Bertrand Russell
Carl Sagan
Jean-Paul Sartre
Arthur Schopenhauer
Socrates
Baruch Spinoza
Susan Stebbing
Judith Thomson
Lao-Tzu
Sun-Tzu
Jos Vasconcelos
Voltaire
Booker T. Washington
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Cornel West
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft
Hector Zagal
