AQA Philosophy A2 June 2013

That would be awesome! thanks! and yeah, those notes are great too though they seem to cover a lot more detail than the textbooks, which tend to waffle on about a few select points :L




how are you finding mind?

sorry i did all my reason & experience notes handwritten :/ the value of art ones can be found here....

http://getrevising.co.uk/resources/value_of_art_philosophy_aqa_as_complete_revision_notes

and yes if you could give me her details that would be great :-) how much does she cost roughly if you don't mind me asking

hey can I have a look at one of the essays she marked for you too please? I think revision is going okay but essay writing is not in my favour atm

I'm also doing philosophy of mind, there is so much to learn, wish i had done a different topic, though i prefer it to epistemology and metaphysics which is the other one i am doing for PHIL 3

oh yikes, yeah i've heard that mind and epistemology/metaphysics are the two hardest ones! to be honest i still dont quite understand what biological naturalism is on about. personally i find that a lot of the theories seem too similar or overlap, so you cant really pick them apart easily. what's your unit 4 topic?

I did my Unit 3 (Political Philosophy and Philosophy of the Mind) and Unit 4 (Plato) last year, but I got a U in Plato so I'm retaking it in June!

Oh really? that explains why i'm finding it so hard. i roughly understand it but i definitely couldn't write an essay on it, at most a paragraph. I think your right though, that in philosophy of mind they all do overlap, but thats also a good thing because if you get a question that talks about say biological naturalism, it means you can talk about other theories as well so we wouldn't have nothing to write! I'm doing descartes, you ?

Do you mind me asking why you think you got a U?

I answered the wrong question!

CRITIQUE #1 – MOORE’S OPEN QUESTION PROBLEM: Moore suggested that although there may be some relation between natural properties and moral properties, they are not identical. The attempt to equate goodness to any natural property is a naturalistic fallacy; goodness is unanalysable and cannot be defined in terms of anything else, similarly to how you cannot define a colour in any other terms. You have to experience it for yourself to understand what it is, but goodness is a non-natural property, yet part of reality.

Moore’s main argument was that it is a fallacy to identify goodness with a natural property – if goodness was happiness for example, it would not make sense to ask ‘is it good to make people happy?’ as this would be like asking ‘does what make people happy make people happy?’, which makes no sense. But, ‘is it good to make people happy?’ is a real question – so goodness cannot be happiness, or any other property. It is simply self-defining.

He advocated intuitionism, the belief that we intuitively know what good and bad are. They are indefinable but we know what they are instinctively. It could be argued that there would be no disagreements if we all have the same definitions; however Moore believed that we all differ in our beliefs about what brings about good, and conflicts arise as a result.

RESPONSE TO MOORE: The naturalistic fallacy is not a real fallacy; take for example the property of water being the property of H2O. According to Moore, as ‘is water H2O?’ would not make sense, water is an unanalysable property. But this is not right, as water is H2O.

Moore’s argument confuses concepts and properties, two different concepts can pick out the same property in the world. The concept ‘goodness’ is a different concept from ‘happiness’ but perhaps they both point to the same property. Although we may doubt this for other reasons, the point is the open question argument does not show that they are different things.

CRITIQUE #2 – HUME’S IS-OUGHT PROBLEM: Whatever facts you get together to support your moral judgement (i.e. the action will cause happiness), you cannot logically infer the judgement (it is morally right) – Hume said that this ought expresses some new relation which is inconceivable, you cannot deduce a new relation from things which are entirely different of it. Therefore, there is no moral truth – the gap occurs as morality is not a matter of fact, but a matter of attitudes that we take to the facts. SYNOPSIS: If something is neither relation of ideas or matter of fact, it should be committed to the flames as it is useless to us (e.g. attitude-influenced values such as Justin Bieber is a good singer).

ahhhh sucks :-( you re-applying to uni this year or are you already there?

Right, there's a lot of posts in this topic so I'm not going to quote anybody but I am going to post various things which may help some people, I am also doing Political Philosophy and Moral Philosophy for PHIL3 and Mill's On Liberty for PHIL4. Here are my notes on the naturalistic fallacy for the person who asked:



This is different to Hume's 'is-ought' gap, which I understand as:



If anybody needs any notes on specific AS topics please do not hesitate to ask, I got 72/100 on PHIL1 doing R+E and Why Should I Be Moral? (in a completely non-arrogant way I was expecting higher) and 95/100 on PHIL2 doing The Value of Art and Free Will/Determinism.

Nice to see some other people doing AQA A2 Philosophy, seems to be a bit of an unpopular subject, I wonder why. Sorry if this post is really long, hope you can find what you need! Note that these are my detailed notes, I don't go in to the exam remembering all of that, I convert typed notes into handwritten ones which are shortened (effectively trigger words).

Is anybody who is doing moral philosophy able to explain Hume's 'morality as relation/internal' approach? I understand the is-ought gap but the theory as a whole boggles my mind.

hey, would it be possible for you to send me your notes on why should i be moral? it would help me so much.. mine are awful. I cant help you with the moral philosophy unfortunately, though im doing political philosophy and mill so feel free to ask if you need anything for those topics

I'm doing Mill which is decent. do you think you could explain to me a bit about about biological naturalism? i literally have no idea what the textbook is on about and how it fits with the rest of the topic! that's true. but i still find its so easy to get them all confused

Not sure if they'll be of any use as they were done ages ago back when I sat PHIL1 for the first time but they may come in handy. Let me know what you think of them. I am also doing Mill, how are you finding it?

sure, we are going over it in class in the next few days so ill give you the notes outlining the basics

thanks! i like Mill, its pretty straightforward and i dont think the questions can get too unpredictable. how about you?

I quite like Mill also, you can near enough write about everything for whatever the question is with a different focus as it seems with Mill like nearly everything is relevant to every question.

agreed. and those moral notes were really helpful, thanks! why should i be moral is definitely the topic im finding hardest across both AS and A2, i cant seem to get my head around how to structure an essay about kant or hume or whether self interest is irrelevant to morality i really hope kant doesnt come up and they give us something nice and simple like 'does it pay to be moral'