AQA Philosophy 2009 (New Specification) Revision Notes

did anyone do free will and determinism or knowledge of the external world?

i didnt like the b question for free will and determinism, no idea what you were supposed to write tbh, i just rambled

I did not mention anything about it being a hypothesis but at the end I mentioned it was reasonable as god has not been proved not to exist

Like I said, I think they were looking for a bit of both. Most people in my school did what you did; so I wouldn't worry about it. Remember you only need 50/90 for an A, so there's plenty of room to drop marks

Same as last time, ran out of time - wrote barely over a page for the last thirty marker.

If the whole 50/90 thing is true then I should make it

I hope it is ok

What did you think of the rest

for the part a) i used soul making and how if there was no pain and suffering people would just become selfish as nothing bad would happen to them and used the free will defence and how evil is an avoidable outcome of free will and if god intervened to remove evil we would never be truely free

b) i just did argument from design using Darwinism

for toleration part a) i said to be tolerant you need to have an opinion and if that opinion is disagreeing with the view being tolerted you may offend others that have the belief and to be truely tolerant you mustt tolerate both of the opposing views, which may offend the lifestyle of others if you tolerate the view they oppose to

b) i just mentioned arguments for tolerance: mill and fallibility and crit, pragmatism and crit, mill and social progress and crit, conservatism

Do you think that sounds at least passable?

And I put John Mill instead of John Stuart Mill

I did the whole of the last question in 10 minutes, and scribbled my conclusion down in a minute! I honestly can't remember if it made any sense. And yes, 50/90 is true. 64/90 got you 100% UMS last time.

I did the whole of the last question in 10 minutes, and scribbled my conclusion down in a minute! I honestly can't remember if it made any sense. And yes, 50/90 is true. 64/90 got you 100% UMS last time.


Some of my friends also put the soul making. I think soul-making was the best answer, but I went with two different things. I said that if there was no pain and suffering, there'd be nothing good to compare it to; and I also said that pain can be good, like when you put your hand in a flame, the pain makes you take it out. This is better than feeling no pain and getting your hand burned off!

For the first tolerance question, I only came up with one example. I said that person A is intolerant and doesn't like gay people. I then said that person B is protesting for gay people (I didn't write it in such crude terms ), and that person A gets offended by person B protesting, but person B isn't being intolerant.

And for the second tolerance question, I think I wrote basically the same as you, except that I forgot the argument from fallibilism!

God, the more i think about it, the worse I seem to have done. Just need 35-ish...

And yes, I'm sure about the pass rate. I'm talking about raw marks here, which then get converted into UMS. 50/90 was Jan09's A grade boundary. If you scored 50/90, you'd get 80 UMS.

source: http://store.aqa.org.uk/over/stat_pdf/AQA-GCE-NEW-GDE-BOUND-JAN09.PDF

I am so glad the exam is over
Good luck with your chemistry and economics exam, Kneechuch, and to everyone else with their exams!

I was surprisingly ok with time

How much(ish) did you write?

Was that the one about assessing determinism with fatalism? I saw that question and was like "I can answer that!" even though we haven't studied it, but I didn't really know the first question and felt safer doing the ones I knew.

Well I filled up the answer booklet (8 pages?) and two more additional pages

My handwriting is quite big so for average writing I would just say the answer booklet

That's quite a bit. I went just past the answer booklet but in terms of finishing it all off was nowhere near. Good luck with results though

nah that was the a question, i think ive done fine on that one

the b question was explore the claaim that 'all the choices we make are to do with our genetics' or something along those lines.

It was 'nature', rather than 'genetics'; Sartre denied that humans have any fixed nature. I'm pretty sure that the question basically means 'How plausible is determinism', or 'critically assess determinism'.

I wrote all the critiques of it and then refuted them, also adding why free will and/or randomness is implausible, and then put how determinism is compatible, and possibly necessary, for conventional morality. For a conclusion I added that determinism is unprovable by its very nature, but that the evidence towards it is still overwhelming, and there is no point in denying, especially with a 'ghost in the machine' type argument which is clearly false.

nah that was the a question, i think ive done fine on that one

the b question was explore the claaim that 'all the choices we make are to do with our genetics' or something along those lines.

I was a bit uncertain about that one, too. My memory is appalling, but as far as I can remember I wrote about the libertarian and determinist's ideas of "nature" (I think I wrote on Sartre vs. Marx). Then I wrote about how choice may be an illusion anyway, Ryles "ghost in the machine".

This might sound silly, but do you all have AQA philos in classrooms, like your normal subjects? It's just I've done this course through video conferencing once a week, and was never actually sure whether it was taught as a normal subject!

(Oh, and by the way, hi everyone!)