Format

• Part A: Knowledge (Multiple Choice) 25 marks

• Part B: Knowledge (Matching) 10 marks

• Part C: Application/ Communication (Long Answer)  24 marks/15 marks

  • Choose 3 out of 6 questions to answer.

• Part D: Thinking/Communication (Sight Passage with questions)  20/10

Unit 1: Introduction to Philosophy

• Philosophy, autonomy

  • Philosophy: the love of wisdom

  • Autonomy: the freedom of being able to decide for yourself what you will believe in by using your own reasoning

  • Recommended reading: Page 4 of textbook

• Socrates, Plato, Allegory of the Cave

  • Recommended watch for Allegory of the Cave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA

  • Plato: student of socrates, preached “doing philosophy”, said philosophy is an activity, teacher to Aristotle, performed in an intimate environment with trust, wrote Euthyphro The Republic The Apology and Crito

  • Socrates: came up with the socratic method, considered the father of philosophy, questioned conventional beliefs in Athens on a quest for wisdom, left no writings of his own

• 3 Branches of Philosophy

  • Epistemology: looks at the extent and realiability of our knowledge, truth, and logic, and whether knowledge is possible.

  • Metaphysics: looks at the ultimate characteristics of reality of existence.

  • Ethics: asks about our moral obligations and moral virtues; our moral principles; what is morally good; and the morality of behaviours, social policies, and social institutions.

• Pre-Socratics

  • Thales: presocratic, made of water,

  • Anaximander: presocratic, reality was boundless

  • Anaximenes: presocratic, air is the source of things,

  • Empedocles: presocratic, matter was made up of the 4 elements

  • Heraclitus: presocratic, reality is changing

  • Democritus: western materialism, everything consists of atoms and empty space

  • Pythagoras: influential math thinker, believed everything derived from numbers

  • Xenophanes: presocratic, suggested one god who was not anthropomorphic, or a god who did not imitate human qualities.

  • Parmenides: presocratic, change is an illusion, founded Eleatic school

  • Zeno of Elea: presocratic with Parmenides, change is an illusion

  • Gail Stenstad: feminist philosopher, anarchic thinking

  • Victor Frankl: a Jewish philosopher who saw humans as ultimately free beings

  • Mohandas Gandhi: jain philosopher, knowledge predates senses

Unit 2: Views on Human Nature

• Selfish View: believed that humans are basically self-interested and act on survival.

• Selfish View: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes and Moritz Schlick

• Western Religious View: humans are made in the image and likeness of God.

• Western Religious View: St. Augustin of Hippo & St. Thomas Aquinas

• Rationalist View: we see ourselves as reasoning, free, moral beings who have an immaterial soul.

• Rationalist View: Plato, Aristotle

• Materialist View: only the material body exists

• Materialist View: Hooves, Schlick, Ninian Smart

• Existential View: there is no God to determine our nature, so humans have no purpose or nature except the one they make themselves.

• Existential View: Sartre

• No-Self View: gets rid of the self all together, holds that nothing in the universe, not even the self remains the same

• No-Self View: Hume, Buddha

• Darwinian View: said that some creatures have random variations that can be inherited by offspring, and those with advantageous variations survive and pass them on.

• Dualism: we can think of the self without a body, so it is not a body; we cannot think of the self without thinking, which is not a material act.

• Dualism: Descartes

• Feminist View: claims that emotions, desires & reason are equal, says that the traditional rationalistic view and Plato’s theories are sexist

• Scientific View: said the mind is a computer following a program that generates certain outputs when given certain inputs

• Scientific View: Alan Turing

Unit 3: Metaphysics

• Plato and the theory of forms

  • Recommended watch for the Theory of Forms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgotDFs6cdE

• Materialism (Hobbes): the view that matter is the ultimate constituent of reality.

• Idealism (Berkeley): holds that reality consists of minds and their ideas.

• The God Question: Theism, Pantheism, Panentheism, Deism

  • Theism: there is God

  • Pantheism: everything is God

  • Panentheism: everything is God but God is still his his own entity

  • Deism: God is transcendent but no imminent

• Ontological Arguments/Objections

  • Anselm’s ontological proof:

    • (1) God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived

    • (2) than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist in reality and not merely in the mind

    • (3) so God exists in reality

  • Objections to ontological argument: existence is not property or a part of the concept of a thing.

• Teleological Arguments/Objections

  • Teleological: proof of God through design

  • Paley’s Argument of Design:

    • (1) If we find an artifact, like a watch, that is designed to achieve a purpose, we can conclude it was made by an intelligent being.

    • (2) But things we find in nature, especially living things and their parts, are designed to achieve a purpose.

      (3) So, by analogy, we can conclude they were made by an intelligent being, and this is God.

  • Objections to the design argument: for all we know nature and living are made by a non-intelligent mechanisms, Darwin’s natural selection

• Aquinas’ Five Ways (proofs), objections

  • Aquinas’s cosmological proof:

    • (1) Some things move.

    • (2) What moves must be moved by another moving thing, which must be moved by another moving thing, and so on.

    • (3) This series of moving movers cannot be infinite, for then their motion would have no origin.

    • (4) The origin of their motion cannot be moving, for then it would have to be moved by another.

    • (5) This unmoving origin of motion is God.

  • Criticism to Aquinas’ proof: can be disapproved by Newton, it is possible for the series of movers and causes in the universe to be infinite.

• Recommended reading: Problem of evil & God’s Nature ↴

  • If there was god, there would be no evil, but there is evil

  • God only produces good, evil is the absence of God

  • In order for God’s creation to be finite, it must contain evil

  • Evil is necessary for good

  • God is omnipotent and can produce good without evil

  • Human freedom which is good itself, is the cause of evil but this does not explain the evil humans do not produce

• Atheism, Agnosticism, Mysticism

  • Atheism: there is no God

  • Agnosticism: no commitment to God or to no God

  • Mysticism: the direct experience of a religious reality, involve the feelings of dependence, mystery, terror, and bliss.

• Religious Experience: Many believe in God not on the basis of rational proofs but because of a direct personal experience of the divine. These claims of the divine are ineffable and noetic.

• Will to Believe: it is legitimate (not wrong) to choose on the basis of our “passional nature,” even without sufficient evidence in support of the option we choose.

Unit 4: Ethics

• Ethical Absolutism: is the view that there is one and only one correct set of moral standards that everyone should follow everywhere and always.

• Ethical relativism: argues that because societies differ in the moral standards they accept, it follows that there is no single correct set of moral standards everyone should adopt; instead, people should follow the standards that their own society accepts.

• Consequentialist ethical theories: hold that a morally right action is one that produces more good and fewer bad consequences than any other action.

  • Ethical egoism: claims that a morally right action is one that produces more good and fewer bad consequences for oneself than any other action.

  • Hedonist egoists: such as Epicurus claim that good consequences are those that produce pleasure for oneself, whereas bad consequences are those that produce pain.

  • Utilitarianism: claims that a morally right action is one that produces more good and fewer bad consequences for everyone than any other action.

  • Act utilitarianism: claims that the right action is the one that itself produces more pleasure and less pain for everyone than any other action.

  • Rule utilitarianism: is supposed to not have the wrong implications that act utilitarianism does.

• Non-Consequentialist theories: claim that whether an act is right or wrong depends on factors other than or in addition to the non-moral value of relevant consequences.

  • Divine command theory: is a nonconsequentialist theory that says the morally right action is the one that God commands for example, in scripture.

  • Natural law ethics: says that human nature has certain natural tendencies and that morally right actions are those that follow these natural tendencies.

  • Aquinas’s principle of double effect: says that when an action has both a good and a bad effect—it produces one good but destroys another

• Means and ends, Categorical Imperative

  • Kant’s first categorical imperative: says that to be a morally good person I must never do something unless it is what I believe everyone ought to do.

  • Kant’s second categorical imperative: Every human being is an end in himself. we should always treat people as ends in themselves and not use them as means to achieve our own goals.

• Aristotle’s theory of virtue: says humans will achieve happiness only by fulfilling their specific purpose, which is to exercise their reason, and to do so in an excellent or virtuous way.

• Buddhism: considers volitional actions as supremely important because they contribute to a person’s karma, which then determines a person’s future. Also considers morality and wisdom to be closely related.

• Feminist Ethics: claims that moral development in women moves through

  • (1) a level in which they are overly devoted to caring for themselves,

  • (2) a level in which they are overly devoted to caring for others

  • (3) a level in which they balance caring for others and for themselves.

• Feminist Ethics: Gilligan

• Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham

• Friedrich Nietzsche: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods?”

• Mary Wollstonecraft: “I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that [the] virtues [of men and women] should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard?”

Unit 5: Social and Political Philosophy

• Justice: includes both retributive , which looks at how fair punishments are, and distributive , which looks at how fairly society distributes benefits and burdens.

  • Justice as merit: holds that benefits and burdens should be distributed unequally according to people’s ability, effort, achievement, or social status.

  • Justice as strict equality: holds that everyone should have equal shares of society’s benefits and burdens.

  • Egalitarians: say there are no relevant differences among people, so all should be treated equally.

  • Justice as moderate egalitarianism: holds that political rights and economic opportunities should be distributed equally but that all other economic benefits and burdens should be distributed according to the relevant differences among people.

  • Justice as social utility: holds that benefits and burdens should be distributed so as to maximize social benefits and minimize social harms.

  • Socialist justice: holds that burdens should be distributed by ability and benefits by need.

  • Justice in the welfare liberalism: of Rawls requires equal liberty in society’s political institutions, equal opportunity for desirable jobs and positions, and the difference principle, which says economic inequalities are just only if they produce benefits for the least advantaged.

  • Justice in the classical liberalism: of Nozick holds that equality and maximum liberty are just in the political arena but that economic goods should be distributed as people freely choose to distribute what they make or are given

• Social Contract: Rawls

• Social Contract: argues that a just government is one we would choose to live under if we chose without knowing whether we would be rich or poor, black or white, and so forth. “Veil of Ignorance”.

• General Will: Rousseau

• General Will: argued that without government, people’s property and security are at risk. But government is justified only if it is consistent with human freedom and autonomy. For obeying this, the citizen is obeying himself and so is free and autonomous.

• Freedom: society in general and government in particular must grant each individual the freedom to believe what she wishes, the freedom to live as she wishes, and the freedom to associate with whomever she wishes, so long as she harms no one in the process. It is wrong for society or government to interfere in the life of an adult, even if it does so for the adult’s own good.

• Communitarian Critique: argue that social contract theory mistakenly ignores Aristotle’s and Hegel’s claim that government is not an artificial construct but is a natural outgrowth of our social nature. it is necessary for full human development and is the source of the culture and tradition that make us who we are.

• Just War: would condemn terrorism because it is usually violence that is not authorized by a legitimate authority. It would approve the use of violence against terrorists only if it adheres to the nine principles of just war.

  • jus ad bellum: justice when approaching war

  • jus in bello: justice when in war