And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, The Sentence Machiavelli on Republicanism.

When you teach philosophy for a living, there are certain things you find yourself telling students over and over. Try to write shorter sentences, avoid

jargon, work on transitions between paragraphs. Maybe this point would be clearer if you

illustrated it using a giraffe as an example.

One of the most common pieces of advice I give is that students should

address a tightly focused question. This is true even in a doctoral thesis.

Almost every graduate student I've ever supervised

wound up narrowing their project from their original conception. They might start out

wanting to look at theories of free will in all of ancient philosophy and wind up writing about the use of a single Greek term in early stoicism.

This is one reason why people outside the academic world think that specialists are in an ivory tower arguing over angels

dancing on the heads of increasingly small pins rather than tackling big and

urgent questions that face all of humankind which true enough, but also not without good reason.

Doing the history of philosophy properly means lavishing exquisite attention on the details of

text and arguments in order to yield insights that have escaped previous readers.

If you're trying to do it all, chances are that you'll wind up doing nothing.

For this reason, I frequently tell students who are writing seminar term papers, so this would be say a 10 or 15 page essay,

that if they can give me a really good interpretation of just one sentence in a philosophical work that would be job done.

In this respect and maybe some others as well, the way I usually proceed here on the

podcast is rather misleading. I typically range widely over an author's works the that are the bread and butter of actual research, the kind of research I do in my day job, as it were.

Again, this is not without good reason. Goodness knows is taking me long enough for me to make

progress through the history of philosophy without trying to do it one sentence at a time.

But as you know, in this podcast series I have a tradition of doing something special every 50 episodes.

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