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AQA AS Philosophy PLY1,2,3: Friday 10th June

Hi all,

So who's getting ready for these exams? What modules are they doing? I'm doing ToK, philosophy of religion and Plato.

We can use this thread to share advice and discuss the exams once we've done them.

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Reply 1

emit.

same mods as you and im not looking forward to it. it's annoyingly between RS (thursday) and economics (friday afternoon).

Reply 2

thefish_uk

emit.

same mods as you and im not looking forward to it. it's annoyingly between RS (thursday) and economics (friday afternoon).

Yup I'm doing physics so I have to have lunchtime supervision too.

Attachment is a table with the topics of Module 1 papers since 2001. Can we guess what might be this year? Hmmmm....

possibleQs.gif13.5KB

Reply 3

emit.

no idea but hopefully no phenomenalism. can you explain what it is i never understood it :s

Reply 4

DaftPunk

Would they set a part c question on naive realism?

Reply 5

thefish_uk

emit.

no idea but hopefully no phenomenalism. can you explain what it is i never understood it :s

Basically, Mill said that like in idealism, the material world doesn't exist. Existence is the potential to be perceived. Ayer said that everything can be described as a series of sense experiences (eg. an apple is a smooth, round feeling, the appearance of being red and round, the taste of sweetness and what we take to be apple etc). It is indeed a bit confusing - if you have to argue against it you can say stuff like it's silly to say that but reject the real world and representative realism might be better, and ask what difference does that mean the real world and dreams have.

Reply 6

thefish_uk

DaftPunk

Would they set a part c question on naive realism?

Don't know. It looks like the pattern is a theory of justification and a theory of perception each year. Looking at it, I'd expect to see something like coherentism perhaps as a change from rationalism/empiricism, and maybe some kind of realism? I really don't know.

Reply 7

pedy1986

thefish_uk

coherentism?

For the question on phenomanalism;

You have to ensure you make the distinction between classical and linguistic. In classical, like thefish_uk said matter is said to merely be a 'permenant possiblity of sensation'. Linguistic phenomnalism is trying to look at what we mean when we say 'table' - that is a brown experience extending over...etc etc - the reason we say table is that to actually describe what we mean is too long winded.

The objections to classical are obvious - counter-intuative, makes no difference, but the main objection is that what exactly do we mean by a permenant possiblity of experience? What cause that? Surely it suggests a real world does exist?!

The main objection to linguistic phenomenalism is that the language that is claimed to can deduce matter to is parsatic on the real world existing. For instance, consider a cat on a mat - the lingustic phenomnealist would describe these in terms of experience and then say 'on' that mat experience is this cat experience. Where exactly does the experience of 'on' come from - is is parastic on the spatial world which they then reject.

Reply 8

Charlieee

Really Really not looking forward to philosophy tomorrow! I feel as though I can't remember any of the theory of knowledge stuff or religious language and other philosophy of religion topics. Plato's ok i think

Reply 9

thefish_uk

corey

We looked at Mill and Ayer - basically covering Classical and Linguistic under one topic.

Good stuff though, thanks very much :smile:

Reply 10

thefish_uk

We looked at Mill and Ayer - basically covering Classical and Linguistic under one topic.

Good stuff though, thanks very much :smile:

OK, so nobody's gonna come on here and discuss how it went? :rolleyes:

Reply 11

Charlieee

Mine went so much better than i thought it would! :biggrin:

I was hoping that I would get a question on Naive Realism, as I thought I knew that quite well, and I did!
It was strange though, because I thought Plato was going to be the easiest, but in some ways I found it quite hard because I couldn't think of that much to say!
That was my last exam! I've got a week off and I start A2! No more Philosophy! :biggrin:

Reply 12

Neitzhschezehcz

DaftPunk

Would they set a part c question on naive realism?

Funny, because that's what they did.

I feel like a fool with epistemology. I did Q1 instead of the much easier Q2. Q1 had a c question that was really oddly phrased. I wasn't sure what to talk about so I just talked about forms of skepticism then attacked solipsism, etc.

Unit 3 Sartre went well though.

Reply 13

thefish_uk

I did Q1 for epistemology... for the (c) question I basically talked about foundatinalism and scepticism at first, then showed what happened to Descartes when he went looking for infallible knowledge and said how useless it was and slagged off his argument a bit too, so I said it was unreasonable to expect that from knowledge and suggested a coherentist approach.

Philosophy of religion... Q4, teleological argument, I was well prepared for that.

Plato... I thought the question was great, better than some of the past ones (eg. about the simile of the ship, how can you write an essay about that?) and I mentioned plenty of stuff.

Reply 14

emit.

did u mention the similie of the ship in part C of plato? i used that as the basis for platos arugment and assessed that in my answer. i wasnt good with the first few questions on plato :frown:

and i think i knew too much for the teleological one. o well im dropping it now.

Reply 15

Neitzhschezehcz

Yeah with 1 c I started off by talking about Pyhrro and Agrippa's Trillema, Descartes' search for certainty and the cogito, Putnam and 'brains-in-vats', Humean and Russelian scepticism, then concluded that if certainty is impossible then there's no impossibility of doubt and thus knowledge becomes a meaningless term so it should be updated anyway. But I have a feeling I was barking up the wrong tree, going through the scepticism motions rather than answering the question specifically.

Reply 16

serah

thefish_uk-

That's what I took question C on ToK to mean. I just went on and on about global scepticism - Descartes, G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein's response to him, Hilary Putnam and vats, etc.

I actually thought both PLY1 and PLY2 were very good this year. I was having a minor freakout about Philosophy of Religion, but religious experience + cosmological + teleological was very managable indeed and I managed to fill the entire booklet.

Out of interest, what were the Plato questions? I did that unit last year and got something ridiculously high without even revising, as the 24 mark question was 'assess Plato's theory of forms'. Easy easy easy! :wink:

Overall, I think I did well enough to get an A - maybe that will make up for my dodgy synoptic essay on Nietzsche and Marx... :s-smilie:

Reply 17

DaftPunk

The naive realism one threw me I didn't expect it, especially as so many philosophers seem to dismiss it out of hand. I really didn't think there was much to write about for that one.

Reply 18

Charlieee

DaftPunk

The naive realism one threw me I didn't expect it, especially as so many philosophers seem to dismiss it out of hand. I really didn't think there was much to write about for that one.

I thought there were alot of arguments you could say against it, but not many for naive realism. All I put was that naive realism is good because it is a sort of 'common sense' and this is easy to discuss and get around in everyday society.
I did question 1 on philosophy of religion and i thought that was ok.

Reply 19

Mishael

I couldn't have been luckier for the first two papers, the questions were on just what I had revised. :biggrin:

Cosmological and teleological arguments - excellent! I liked the naive realism question too because it was the one thing I really know well about theory of knowledge. :p:

I think I kind of went into a general criticism of realism though, dunno how well that'll be received...

I don't think I did very well on the set texts though - Descartes. I didn't revise it thoroughly enough and I'm pretty sure I started rambling...