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The final for Debate class will be your presentation of a personal philosophy to the class, in written and oral form. Please review this assignment sheet and spend some time refining and developing your argument.

The most important things to keep in mind are to be original, provocative, and honest. Write a philosophical position that is something you really believe, whether it’s about human nature or the nature of the universe.

Think of the Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called on his readers to write a philosophy of their own:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also…. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Good luck!