The OFFICIAL AQA AS Philosophy May 2013 Exams Thread. (Units 1&2)

I'm sitting Phil 2 on Friday, (Knowledge of the external world & Free will and determinism) anyone have any idea of what questions could come up?!


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Inductive is a rule based on experience; if I throw a ball in the air ten times and it always comes back down, I make the inductive ruling that it will always hit the floor, but I cannot always be certain it will hit the ground, no matter how many times I throw it, because something might change, such as the laws of gravity. I used Russell's turkey to illustrate the problem of inductive thinking. I then talked about Deductive thinking, where you apply a rule based on what you see. "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal" and that I could deductively say that my teacher will take off a mark for every grammar mistake I make, therefore I can deductively say that if I make five grammar mistakes, I will lose five marks. That's the basic jist of the answer I gave.

ok perfect, thanks so much

I'm doing those too, I reckon for knowledge of the external world we might get a 30 on Idealism and a 15 on sense data, but this is only a hunch looking at past questions and the order they come in.... I haven't started revision yet

What did people put for the R&E 30 Mark today? [We have an innate grasp of the way the world is, discuss] Mine was brief and slightly rushed, and I think I messed up... I just want to check my response against other peoples;
I talked about conceptual schemes and how we have them innately, blah blah
I think talked about the empiricists views on tabula rasa, and how we have nothing innate, and there isn't one thing that everyone in the world knows (including children and 'idiots') and all that jazz
and then I put about the rationalist criticism for this, and talked about experience as a 'trigger' and referred to language and such...
Is this along the right lines?

It's a bit similar to what I did, but mine was more about a comparison of Kant and Sapir-Whorf and how the two differed and briefly brought in Locke and Hume's criticisms of innateness as a whole, including children and idiots, etc.

The last 30 mark was "Assess the claim that we do not have direct knowledge of physical objects" and that was from January this year I had an inkling that survival through time would come up on the persons exam today and it did, but don't quote me on these ones as I honestly have no idea, I'm just going to try and revise everything! I haven't got a clue about Free will, It's my weakest topic so I'm hoping I can grasp enough information in time... I'm very nervous to be honest, as I was focusing on Philosophy 1 and now my sciences, and haven't really started Phil2 revision, what about you?

Ah I see! Well I'm hoping for something that involves either idealism or representative realism! And free will is a **** topic, I'd get revising aha! I haven't really bothered with philosophy revision as its only an AS and I've got uni in September so it's the least amount of ucas points!


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How did you find the exam? Do you have any idea how the mark scheme works? (i.e. how many marks out of 90 I would need to get a C?)

I'll start tomorrow haha! Tbh it sounds bad but I will rejoice the day when I never have to do philosophy again, although I have epistemology as a subject next year:'(

I can't remember exactly how many, but my teacher told the class what you needed to get an A for the last exams, and we were shocked at how low it was. So you can get a relatively low mark, and still get a good grade.

At least we are along the same lines :') I don't understand Kant and Sapir-Whorf's views, I kept reading over it but I just wasn't grasping it, I don't know if I'll lose marks or not, I just talked about how Kant says that without a conceptual scheme then we can not categorise the raw sense data we receive, and things like that. I didn't go into it much as I had to rush it due to timing issues...

You never know with Philosophy, do you? It's totally unpredictable. :P

does anyone know whether Mill's justification for tolerance is autonomy-based liberalism or neutral based liberalism?

Here is the jan 2013 paper for unit 2:

Hope This Helps