Beyond Argument: The Creative Craft of Philosophy Writing (guest post)

“I want to talk about the part of philosophy writing that comes after the argument part: the bit where you work on expressing your idea clearly, delicately, even personally. I want to talk about the very specific work involved in infusing your writing with energy and life.”

In the following guest post, C. Thi Nguyen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, talks about the craft of writing philosophy that’s not just good philosophy, but good writing.

Professor Nguyen knows what he’s talking about. His 2020 book, Games: Agency as Art, not only won accolades like the American Philosophical Association’s biennial book prize; it also sold roughly 10 times as well as most similarly-categorized philosophy books. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, is being published by Penguin next January.

In any craft, Nguyen says, “You try out stuff, feel the vibe of the result, and try out something new.” Below, he shares some suggestions about what you might want to try out. Others are welcome to share their own suggestions in the comments.

You can follow Nguyen on Bluesky at @add-hawk.bksy.social.

This is the seventh contribution to the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (As with the others, it will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.)

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Beyond Argument: The Creative Craft of Philosophy Writing
by C. Thi Nguyen

I want to talk about the part of philosophy writing that comes after the argument part: the bit where you work on expressing your idea clearly, delicately, even personally. I want to talk about the very specific work involved in infusing your writing with energy and life.

I came into this stuff a bit oddly. I was originally supposed to be a creative writer, not a philosopher. I took a bunch of creative writing classes in college. (I have three drafted novels sitting somewhere on my hard-drive.) I was a sorta journalist for years too, writing food reviews and the occasional article for the LA Times. That world—let’s call it Writing World—constantly pounds into you the importance of style and emotional energy. You pay attention to the mood of your writing, the propulsiveness, the personality it conveys. You study the structure and timing of sentences, the rhythmic build and release of intensity. You care about how a piece of writing breathes—how it layers different emotional temperatures to achieve a mood

Writing World, especially the creative writing part, is particularly obsessed with finding your own voice—with developing a distinctive and expressive style. A lot of the exercises that you get in creative writing classes involve first imitating somebody else’s voice, to see how they did it, and then stealing bits and pieces and adapting them to find your own. So I slowly built my own voice—one that felt right to me, one that had the right mix of warm and spikey and humane.

Philosophy grad school mostly beat that out of me. Any time I wrote something that had what sounded like a human voice, in this style that I’d carefully developed in creative writing workshops, somebody would tell me that it sounded unprofessional and unrigorous. In order to survive, I developed something I called “robot voice”—a specific style, consciously emptied of any human personality or mood. My mentors approved and pronounced me adequately professionalized.

I think I would have stayed that way except for one particular mentor: the philosopher Elijah Millgram, who spontaneously adopted me as a sort of apprentice while I was struggling in my early junior faculty years. He would look at my drafts, and point out the few moments where the human voice leaked out (which were also usually where I was floating the nuttiest idea), and say, “This part—this is the best part. Why isn’t more of it like this?” And I would tell him about robot voice, and professionalization, and how I felt like Philosophy World and Writing World were opposites. And he said: “Well, you can certainly be human in your philosophy writing, but you have to earn it, and you have to get the signaling right.”

Millgram himself is this delightfully weird, woolly writer, who somehow manages to get incredibly distinctively voiced stuff published as professional philosophy. (My favorite writing of his is the hysterically provocative “On Being Bored Out of Your Mind”.) Millgram suggested I study how Bernard Williams had done it—to revisit Williams and analyze him as a stylist and a creative writer. Millgram used the same term that my creative writing teachers did: he said to watch how Williams’ writing breathed. It had a rhythm; it shifted between the rigorous argumentative bits and the more gestural, humane bits. And it signaled those shifts with subtle shifts of tone. I went back and studied my other favorite philosophical stylists, Annette Baier, and watched how she pulled off her lovely alternation between rigorous argument and humane illumination, how her stretches of tight analysis which would open up into wonderfully wild suggestive gestures at larger unknowns.

And this triggered in my brain a reminder of my creative writing classes, of the hundreds of exercises I’d done in Writing World about making my writing breathe and come alive.

One thing I can say now, years later, as somebody that has finally managed to write a few bits of philosophy that I am actually proud of—as philosophy and as creative writing—that I think this stuff is deeply learnable. This is not ineffable magic. I know how to do it, mostly because I’ve been taught. It’s a discipline, there are exercises, and these skills are taught around the world—in thousands of journalism classes and creative writing classes. It’s a very specific kind of work—a kind of skilled labor that doesn’t, I think, get taught very often in philosophy programs, but is well-worn in other disciplines. You can do the exercises, and you can take the classes, if you’re interested in this kind of thing. But you have to adapt them a bit to make them work in philosophy world.

So let me talk about some bits of that work. I don’t think there’s any way to extract some complete set of general principles. Like a lot of artisanal crafts, the skills of creative writing involves the accumulation of thousands of particles of particular awareness and experience. You try out stuff, feel the vibe of the result, and try out something new. And I don’t expect every academic philosopher—or even most—to be interested. But for the handful that might be, maybe the best thing I can do is to describe the labor of this kind of craft—or, at least the way that I’ve hacked out for myself.

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One of the basic exercises I learned from any artistic craft I’ve studied—writing, painting, music—is to try radical variations in approach.

One of my favorite creative writing workshop exercises was this: imagine a simple story, say an argument between a married couple, breaking out in a coffeeshop. A story takes a handful of pages. Tell it in the first way that first occurs to you. Now try telling it in different ways— tons of them. Tell it from the third person perspective. Tell it from the perspective of one member of the arguing couple. Now tell it from the other’s. Now tell it from the perspective of their child, watching fearfully. Now tell it from the perspective of an annoyed stranger, overhearing. Now try the perspective of the shop cat, because why not? Now tell it back to front. Now tell it as a flashback. Now try a hard start in the middle, and then jump back.

Now change styles. Write it with every detail of physical movement and vocal tone explicitly described. Write it again, with all that stuff left out, and just focus on the dialogue—leave the sensory details entirely implicit. Write it again even more elliptically, skipping between a few moments, leaving the rest of the action for the reader to fill on.

Try imitative variations. Write it like Garcia Marquez might have done it. Now write it like Virginia Woolf would have. Now try doing it as a Shakespearean comedy. Now try writing it like Kafka would have written it, or Borges, or Austen, or Baldwin, or Vonnegut. Write it like a light comedy, like deepest tragedy, like a postmodern experiment. Write it as a haiku.

Journalists are especially adept at subtle structural variations. They don’t radically change style voices as much as fiction writers and personal essayists. They often work inside a narrower tonal range, and go about their craft subtly, by playing with the framing and structure and ordering of incident. They do a lot of work varying the lead. “What’s the hook?”, is the first question an editor asks. I’ve sat around with other journalists, brainstorming dozens of alternate openings for a given article, and imagining the different possible sequences that will unfold from them. Start political, start human interest, start with a news item, start with an economic impact. Even with a simple restaurant review, you could start with the succulent texture of the soft tofu, or the charmingly abrupt nature of the service, or the minimalism of the menu, or a funny backstory for the chef. Each start suggests a different tone, and the succession of incidents that followed created its own feel. Every piece of writing is a mood mixtape.

You can do the same thing with philosophy writing. Try framing the thing as a question, or as an argument. Try starting it from a case study, or starting from the larger philosophical context. For a lot of the things I’ve written, I get the argument down first, and then I try dozens of different outlines of different framings and orderings, and then take the best few into rough draft, to see how they feel. This is utterly normal work for creative writing, a process I’d been lead through in many a writing workshop.

And a lot of the times, it’s not obvious from the outset which is best. You have to try different framings and let them breathe for a while, try actually writing them and futzing with them and see how they might flow. And then re-read them and pay attention to how they feel. Pay attention to how they make you feel. If a piece of your own writing bores you, makes your exhausted and anxious, and you find yourself miserable re-reading it—how the hell will it make other people feel?

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Every stylistic choice conveys a tone. Some of those choices are about surface style—whether your sentence writing is lyrical, abrupt, oozing with emotional descriptors, or cold and minimal. But some of those choices are structural. When you jump wildly between details, you convey chaos, or energy, or movement. When you leave a lot implicit, you convey, among other things, a deep trust in the reader.

Journalistic style I’ve found really useful, for adapting to professional philosophy writing. There’s usually less space for the more overtly artsy literary flair in journalism. But there are a constant range of subtler creative-writing-type choices, about pacing and structure, about the mood of an example. Their are little subtle choices of tone—stern, encouraging, inviting, suggestive, hectoring—that quietly enliven the reading experience.

One thing I learned from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s remarkable writing manual, Several Short Sentences about Writing, is that most academic writing is so anxious about making every intellectual transition explicit, that it constantly conveys a tone of anxious, hectoring distrust. Klingenborg says that, in most academic writing, the reader is placed on guardrails, and sternly instructed how to move at each moment, how precisely to think. They must not be permitted room to move in any unexpected ways.

Some of contemporary professional analytic philosophy’s writing style certainly arises from analytic philosophy’s interest in rigor. But we have plenty of historical examples of rigor and depth, without that tone. (Go back and read Hume, as a stylist.) I suspect the modern style has evolved in response to the context of peer review, where our relationship to our audience is one of absolute distrust—where we are right to presume that our audience is hostile, uncharitable, and needling. Our rigid style makes sense in that context, but locks us into one particular emotional tone.

When I was gathering advice for the popular book I’m writing right now, I got to pester the wonderful writer Sam Anderson. He told me what he thought was the single most important piece of advice for a writer: trust your reader. Your reader, he said, is smart, sympathetic, and hoping to find out something interesting. So many readers are in it out of love and curiosity. They are willing to go pretty far with you, and try pretty hard for you, if you don’t betray them. Trust your reader to follow you. They will be thrilled if to be given that trust, to follow your leap to an interesting connection.

This is very specific advice, for a very specific context. (Anderson is a writer of literary non-fiction; his audience is mostly entirely voluntary.) And it is poor advice for dealing with hostile peer reviewers. But, hopefully, peer reviewers are not our only readers. I like to hope that at least some of our future readers are in it out of love, and will read in a mood of curiosity and charity.

One basic exercise I like here is: if any sentence (or paragraph) drags in any way, try cutting it out. See if things make sense without it, if the reader can still follow without it. Sometimes you’ll make a cut, and find that it destroys the sense of the whole thing. But sometimes you’ll make a cut and find that the thing still holds together, but it also feels livelier, more energetic, less anxious.

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One question in the background is: what are we even doing here? What’s the point?

This has been especially on my mind for popular philosophy writing. I’ve just finished up two years hyper-focused on my first philosophy book intended for a larger audience. And I have been trying to figure out what I want to do—to imagine a reader who rarely reads, if ever, reads philosophy, and what I want to impart in this one encounter.

The standard answer, the answer I’ve been trained to give, is that philosophy offers an argument. It starts from a premise that everybody accepts, and then walks its readers through a set of unavoidable, inescapable steps, and locks them into a conclusion that they must accept. And I’ve been starting to think: arguments are great sometimes, but they aren’t the only thing.

Here’s other things philosophy can do—in popular work, in the classroom, and even in “proper” academic work. You can give a conceptual tool. You can offer an alternate framing. You can offer a conceptual distinction, that might offer a little finer-grained resolution. Maybe the right question to start, especially with work oriented towards popular audiences and towards teaching, is not what’s the argument, but rather: what tool do you want to give your readers? And argument is one kind of tool, but not the only one.

Reliably, one of the most impactful moments in any of my epistemology or intro classes is when I give students Miranda Fricker’s discussion of hermeneutical injustice, and walk them through her main example: of the invention of the term “sexual harassment”, and how it helped people understand, and communicate, their own experiences, in a way they couldn’t before. Students get shocked in the classroom; I’ve had students start crying. Students will tell me, over the next few months, that the concept of hermeneutical injustice helps them understand all sorts of quiet things they’ve experienced—of failing to have the right language, and then running into the right language that crystallizes and clarifies a part of their experiences, that makes them feel un-alone. This isn’t an argument; it’s a name, a category—one that sticks in their head and rattles around and slowly, over time, helps them sort through their own experience. And I’ve come to think that the concept of “hermeneutical injustice” is sort of conceptual gateway drug for a whole way of seeing—a way into noticing how a lot of the furniture of our lives, like words, might be less innocuous, and more politically charged, then one might have thought.

The whole reason I’m here, rambling about philosophy writing, is almost certainly because of a popular essay I once wrote for Aeon on the nature of echo chambers. That piece has succeeded beyond my wildest imaginings. It went viral on social media, it seems to be regularly taught in intro classes. I still get fan-mail about it, years later.

And here’s the important thing about that piece: it has no arguments. There are zero things in it that look like what I was taught philosophy had to be: a premise, and locked-downs steps to a conclusion. All there is, is a single conceptual distinction: between filter bubbles, which block the flow of information, and echo chambers, which manipulate trust. And then the article takes that distinction for a walk, applies it to a few cases, and then offers a single zoomed-out framing, pointing out something that should be utterly obvious—that we are constantly trusting each other all the time—and then pointing out how dangerous it is to manipulate that trust.^⁠

There are no arguments, but there is a tool that a reader can take away and apply, which might change what they see in the world around them, and how they frame it. And I think that offer, in itself, has its own tone. An argument tries to force somebody along a given track. It works by foreclosing options, cutting off the space of possible moves. But a piece of writing that just gives somebody a concept—like “hermeneutical injustice”—is more open-ended. It says: take this tool, this way of looking at the world, and then go run around the world with it, and see what you can do.