Structure of Philosophical Discourse

Kyle Lucas is a Instructor of Writing at Ferris State University, Michigan, USA. He received his PhD in English from Purdue University in 2022.Sarah Lucas is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at Purdue University, Indiana, USA, and a Full-Time Lecturer in Philosophy at Ferris State University, Michigan, USA.

"Philosophers do not have very developed vocabularies for talking about the structure of philosophical writing, which does philosophy students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels a disservice. This work is part of the solution. Philosophers tend to lean on argument forms to describe writing, which rarely capture the global structure of a philosophy paper. By clearly distinguishing between the macro- and micro-structure within philosophical writing, the work goes a long way towards making visible the structure of papers in the central journals of analytic philosophy and will make an excellent resource for students and teachers of philosophy."Christopher Yeomans, Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University"In this comprehensive, groundbreaking, lucid, and very readable book, the authors employ both theoretical and empirical means to develop a clear and detailed description of philosophical discourse, working from and adding to the ESP research tradition, and, in the process, contributing new and productive insights into genre and move analysis."Tony Silva, Professor Emeritus of English, Purdue University

• ContentsAcknowledgementsChapter 1: Introduction1.1 English for Specific Purposes, genre, and move analysis1.2 Research space and motivation1.3 Innovating genre and move analysis1.4 Outline of remaining chaptersChapter 2: Genre across research traditions2.1 ESP genre theory and Swales’ framework2.2 Situating ESP genre theory: A comparative analysis2.3 Criticisms and recent changes in the ESP tradition2.4 The need for further theorizing Chapter 3: A cognitive theory of genre3.1 A definition of genre3.2 Genre frames3.3 Illocutionary and perlocutionary frame elements3.4 Prototypicality effects in text classification3.5 The basic level3.6 ConclusionChapter 4: Introduction to move analysis4.1 Move analysis overview4.2 Building a corpus for move analysis4.3 Analyzing the corpus4.4 Refining move analysis4.5 ConclusionChapter 5: What move analysis has revealed about academic writing5.1 What move analysis has revealed about research article sections5.2 What move analysis has revealed about writing across the disciplines 5.3 New horizons for move analysis and linguistic analysis 5.4 ConclusionChapter 6: Writing in philosophy6.1 Move analysis studies of philosophical writing6.2 Other forms of research on philosophical writing6.3 ConclusionChapter 7: The corpus of philosophical research articles7.1 The discipline of philosophy7.2 Overview of the philosophical research article corpus7.3 Situational analysis of corpus7.4 Representativeness of the corpus7.5 Methodological framework: Move analysis and communicative functions7.6 ConclusionChapter 8: The macro-structure of philosophical discourse8.1 The purpose and macro-structure of philosophy research articles8.2 Macro-structures: Sequences and cycles8.3 Discussion8.4 ConclusionChapter 9: The micro-structure of philosophical discourse9.1 Moves and steps in the introduction9.2 Moves and steps in the body of the work9.3 Argumentative strategies9.4 Moves and steps in the conclusion9.5 ConclusionChapter 10: Additional aspects of philosophical discourse10.1 Overview of systemic functions10.2 Footnotes10.3 Key systemic functions10.4 ConclusionChapter 11: Conclusion11.1 Notable findings11.2 Broader significance 11.3 Limitations and future research Appendix: Corpus of research articlesIndex