By way of your understanding of Nietzsche, explain the relationship (if any) between morality and the meaning of
life. Does belief in moral truth make life more meaningful? Or does an inquiry into the history of competing
moralities show that life is likely meaningless?
The goal of a reflection paper is to present your own considered and clearly articulated beliefs alongside your
understanding of the philosophical material we have read in the course. To that end, please be sure it is always clear
whose views are being expressed—yours or one of the authors whose works are included in our textbook. Be sure to
address yourself not only to an answer to the question, but also to providing your reader with an account of why you
believe your answer to be correct. What are your reasons for taking one position or another? On what basis do you say the
things you say about the readings? In order to justify the claims in your paper to your reader, when discussing material
from the textbook you must offer substantiation for your claims with quotations from the text. Quotations are
absolutely required; papers that do not use direct quotations to support the claims they make about the readings in
the textbook will receive a failing grade.
Please do not consult any sources or resources other than our textbook. (This includes the scholarly introductions to each
thinker and the footnotes in each chapter by the textbook’s editor.) Any paper that quotes from any other source will
receive a substantial grade penalty; any paper which can be shown to be reliant upon any other source without citation
will receive a failing grade and its author will be subject to the appropriate disciplinary procedures, detailed in the UHD
Academic Honesty Policy (or in the UHD Student Handbook).
The paper should be 3 pages long, typed and double-spaced. Use an 11- or 12-point font with reasonable margins.
Citations should be in either the MLA or Chicago Manual of Style formats (information on both of which is available on
the UHD Library website, under the heading, “Citing Sources”), and as such must give full bibliographical information
for the text in either a “works cited” (MLA) or bibliographical footnotes (Chicago). Quotations should be set off from the
rest of the paper (typically by quotation marks), and you should cite the page numbers in the text where the quoted
passage appears. The paper is worth 15% of your grade for the course, and is to be submitted online via Blackboard
by 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, June 14. Late papers will not be accepted unless you have arranged an extension with me
before the stated due date and time.
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