Student Papers

During your studies, you write a lot of papers that are forgotten in a drawer or on your hard drive after you have received your grade and/or ECTS. Yet these papers provide valuable information to improve oneself, but also to give other students an insight into other papers. How can you improve your own writing if you never read other people's work?

That's why we want to give students a platform to upload, read and comment on their work. The whole thing is meant to be a kind of archive without any competitive pressure. Of course, the rights remain with the respective authors of the works.

Of course, we follow our mission statement and do not impose any conditions on you, be it in terms of form, length or quality.

When we talk to former or current philosophy students about our idea of publishing qualification papers on the portal, we often encounter two sets of concerns, which will be briefly addressed here: "not good enough" and "plagiarism".

The dominant feeling among many philosophers towards earlier work seems to be one of shame. The work that was submitted under great time pressure was not really finished at the time, would have to be supplemented, was less good, detailed, careful than originally planned, ... Many then plan to take the matter up again later, to work it out, to turn it into something bigger, better, less embarrassing. To this we say: we feel the same way, that is completely normal, very probably even a good sign. But publish it anyway - that will help them to work on it later.

An opposing concern relates to authors' rights: isn't there a danger of ideas, work and text being stolen when publishing, isn't intellectual property being given away, even squandered? The opposite is the case: the text is already out there, stored and available on hard drives, email accounts, folders and files; but as long as it is not really public, it cannot be registered and processed by the (nowadays routinely used) plagiarism detection software. Publication on the portal, under a CC-BY licence that leaves all rights with the authors, secures the intellectual property.

In the medium term, we would like to offer an automatic mask here, but for now, just send your work to info@philosophie.ch - please add when you submitted the work and at which university and in which programme. You are also welcome to tell us who supervised (or did not supervise) your work and how many ECTS and what grade you received for it.

Thank you very much!