Philosophy is probably the most mysterious subject that a student will confront in their first years in college. Most students have had no exposure to philosophy in high school nor do they have a clue about what the word 'philosophy' means or what a philosophical problem or question looks like. And on top of all this, the beginning student will usually be asked to write a term paper on a philosophical topic, thereby adding anxiety to the mystery. 

Laurence Houlgate's Understanding Philosophy removes the mystery and softens the anxiety in three parts. Part I introduces and clarifies the nature of philosophical problems and the methods that philosophers use to solve them. The mystery usually disappears at this point when students learn that the methods of philosophy are no more than the application of familiar rules of analytic reasoning.

 Part II explains the wide difference between philosophical and scientific problems by giving examples of each, followed by a discussion of how these problems are solved within the confines of the discipline. This helps to sharpen the ideas already expressed in Part I. 

Part III of the book explains how to organize and write a philosophy term paper in seven steps. Several examples of term paper topics are suggested, and a sample paper is presented and dissected using the seven-step formula. 

Understanding Philosophy serves as a companion to the existing Smart Student's Guides to the Philosophical Classics series. Examples from each of the eight books in the series are discussed so that students can see that conceptual analysis and reasoning governed by the rules of logic are the only methods used by the great philosophers to solve the problems of philosophy.