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Philosophy Fellowship Examination Questions from All Souls College, Summaries of Philosophy

Information and Communications Technology Academy (ICTA)Philosophy

A collection of philosophy questions from the Fellowship Examination at All Souls College, Oxford University. The questions cover a wide range of philosophical topics, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and history of philosophy.

Typology: Summaries

2021/2022

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PHILOSOPHY I
Candidates should answer THREE questions
1. What is phenomenology?
2. What limits can the state impose on the right to procreate?
3. If you know p, then are you entitled to dismiss evidence suggesting p is false?
4. Is belief attempted knowledge?
5. Is logical entailment a transitive relation?
6. Is pain purely representational, and, if so, of what?
7. Is teleosemantics plausible?
8. What are physical laws?
9. Does Moore’s refutation of scepticism succeed?
10. ‘Willing, if it is not to be a sort of wishing, must be the action itself’ (WITTGENSTEIN).
Discuss.
11. Ought there to be a feminist metaphysics?
12. Can we give a counterfactual analysis of causation?
13. Should we try to define art?
14. How do metaphors work?
15. What does following a rule consist in?
16. What is Kant’s transcendental deduction trying to show?
17. Does Nietzsche aim to put forward a consistent philosophical position?
18. Is Wittgenstein’s idea of a ‘language game’ helpful?
19. Are there different ways for a declarative sentence to fail to be true or false?
20. Should scientists search for neural correlates of consciousness?
21. When we have a hallucination, what do we see?
22. Do we have infallible access to (some of) our mental states?
[OVER]
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PHILOSOPHY I

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. What is phenomenology?
  2. What limits can the state impose on the right to procreate?
  3. If you know p , then are you entitled to dismiss evidence suggesting p is false?
  4. Is belief attempted knowledge?
  5. Is logical entailment a transitive relation?
  6. Is pain purely representational, and, if so, of what?
  7. Is teleosemantics plausible?
  8. What are physical laws?
  9. Does Moore’s refutation of scepticism succeed?
  10. ‘Willing, if it is not to be a sort of wishing, must be the action itself’ (W ITTGENSTEIN). Discuss.
  11. Ought there to be a feminist metaphysics?
  12. Can we give a counterfactual analysis of causation?
  13. Should we try to define art?
  14. How do metaphors work?
  15. What does following a rule consist in?
  16. What is Kant’s transcendental deduction trying to show?
  17. Does Nietzsche aim to put forward a consistent philosophical position?
  18. Is Wittgenstein’s idea of a ‘language game’ helpful?
  19. Are there different ways for a declarative sentence to fail to be true or false?
  20. Should scientists search for neural correlates of consciousness?
  21. When we have a hallucination, what do we see?
  22. Do we have infallible access to (some of) our mental states?

[OVER]

  1. ‘Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the mind to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into the argument’ (P LATO). Discuss.
  2. When is blame appropriate?
  3. Can we learn anything from trolley problems?
  4. Do Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems tell us anything about human intelligence?
  5. As democracies crumble, is there any place left for ‘ideal theory’ in political philosophy?
  6. ‘There are then facts, moral truths, about what we ought to do, but that is not because the actions are intrinsically normative. They inherit their normativity from principles that spring from the nature of the will—the principles of practical reasoning’ (KORSGAARD ). Discuss.
  7. Should there be one logic to rule them all?
  8. Do conditionals have truth conditions?
  9. ‘To the extent that the technical issues that fill Anglophone journals result in any comprehensible way from questions of large significance, they do not seem to have reached the stage at which firm answers might be found. Any defence of the idea that philosophy, like particle physics and molecular biology, proceeds by the accumulation of reliable answers to technical questions would have to provide examples of consensus on which larger agreements are built. Yet, as the philosophical questions diminish in size, disagreement and controversy persist, new distinctions are drawn, and yet tinier issues are generated. Decomposition continues downwards, until the interested community becomes too exhausted, too small, or too tired to play the game any further’ (P HILIP K ITCHER ). Discuss.

September 2019 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

  1. Do the sentences ‘John silently robbed the bank’ and ‘John allegedly robbed the bank’ share a logical form?
  2. Are two-system accounts of cognition illuminating?
  3. Given that the names ‘Zeus’ and ‘Wotan’ each lack a reference, how would you account for their differing in meaning?
  4. Is it possible to derive an ought from an is?
  5. Is there a coherent notion of a moral reason?
  6. If it is wrong to do something, is it always wrong to threaten to do it?
  7. ‘It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’ (ANSCOMBE). Discuss.
  8. Is there any non-prudential reason to obey an unjust law?
  9. ‘Frege argued for logicism by trying to reduce arithmetical notions to those already recognized as being logical. A better strategy would have been to argue that the concept of number, because it is universally applicable and governed by topic-neutral rules, is inherently logical even if it is irreducible.’ Discuss.
  10. Is chemistry reducible to physics?
  11. Does teleological explanation have a role in modern biology?
  12. Would an orchestra have performed the Eroica Symphony if they transposed it down a major third?
  13. Is there a cogent argument for the existence of God from the premisses ‘God exists of necessity if He exists at all’ and ‘It is possible that God exists’?
  14. What is race?
  15. If I am free to do something, must it be possible for me not to do it?
  16. ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’ (C AMUS ). Discuss.

September 2019 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

PHILOSOPHY I

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. Are there bad pleasures?
  2. Should hate speech be legal?
  3. Can a professor truly announce that she will give a surprise examination in one of the remaining six seminars of the term?
  4. How should Frege have dealt with Russell’s Paradox?
  5. ‘Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you’ (S ARTRE). Discuss.
  6. Are propositional attitudes well modelled with neighbourhood (S COTT-M ONTAGUE ) semantics?
  7. Is chemistry reducible to physics?
  8. Why does Spinoza’s Ethics have so much metaphysics in it?
  9. What is the relationship between belief and credence?
  10. Does it make sense to say that music expresses emotions? If so, whose emotions?
  11. What is a number?
  12. What is the difference between phronesis and sophia in Aristotle’s ethics?
  13. What is a norm of assertion? Are there any?
  14. What is the relationship between a statue and the marble it is made of?
  15. Is there such a thing as epistemic injustice?
  16. When should a mentally ill person be held responsible for their actions?
  17. Is a Ramsified scientific theory less ontologically committal than the original scientific theory?
  18. Does Kant successfully refute Hume’s skepticism?
  19. Should it be lawful to convict someone for a crime based on purely statistical evidence?
  20. What is the luck-based argument for egalitarianism? Is it good?
  21. What does it mean for a speaker to presuppose something? What does it mean (if anything) for a sentence to presuppose something?

[OVER]

PHILOSOPHY II

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. ‘ “If p, q” together with p entails q.’ Assess.
  2. ‘No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks’ (W OLLSTONECRAFT). Discuss.
  3. If nobody can tell the difference between an original and a copy, is the original or the copy more valuable?
  4. What does generative syntax teach us about the mind?
  5. Are we the causes of our actions?
  6. ‘It may be as Appiah claims that “there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us” (Appiah 1992, 45), if our project inevitably inherits the concept’s complex history; but we might instead ask “race” to do different things than have been asked before’ (HASLANGER ). Discuss.
  7. Does the CPT symmetry of physical laws provide any reason for doubting the objectivity of time’s direction?
  8. Does belief require certainty? Does knowledge?
  9. Is (physical) disability just a social construction?
  10. Which is worse: lying or corroding the true-false distinction?
  11. Is it possible to disagree about whether something is tasty? If so, must one person be incorrect?
  12. If legal obligations are not moral obligations, then do they have normative force?
  13. What are Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship? Is this taxonomy exhaustive?
  14. Was Kant a compatibilist?
  15. Discuss the benefits or drawbacks of Tarski’s definition of semantic consequence as preservation of truth in all models.
  16. Is evolutionary theory fundamentally teleological? If so, is this a problem?
  17. What is gaslighting? Does it shed any light on theories of perception or hallucination?
  18. What does higher-order vagueness tell us about first-order vagueness?
  19. Does subjective experience require self-consciousness?

[OVER]

  1. Does democracy necessarily degenerate into tyranny?
  2. Is there a coherent structuralist account of the complex numbers?
  3. How should we understand scientific claims about probability, for instance in statistical mechanics or climate modeling?
  4. What can an analytic philosopher learn from a continental philosopher?
  5. Is the difference between Yablo’s Paradox and the Liar Paradox important?
  6. Should we be four-dimensionalists or three-dimensionalists?
  7. May institutions use affirmative action in admissions? Should they?
  8. ‘If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through “the eternal feminine,” and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?’ (DE BEAUVOIR ). Discuss.
  9. What is the value of ideal theory in political philosophy?
  10. Where does Berkeley’s idealism go wrong?
  11. At what point does killing a totalitarian leader become justifiable for a citizen?
  12. Do Gödel’s incompleteness results (or Turing’s uncomputable functions) show that the mind is not well modelled as a computer?
  13. Is this a hand I see before me?
  14. ‘Not only our faults, but our most involuntary misfortunes, tend to corrupt our morals’ (HENRY J AMES ). Discuss.
  15. If A has legitimate authority over B, then are A’s reasons for action immediately also B’s?
  16. What is the role of ‘it’ in ‘If a man owns a donkey, he beats it’?
  17. Is it more laudable to do the right thing in accordance with one’s desire or despite one’s desire?
  18. What is imagination?
  19. ‘A kind of question that doesn’t get asked often enough is: what are modal intuitions intuitions of? Consider, for example, the intuition that water is necessarily H 2 O. How do things have to be for it to be right? Or wrong? What’s its “truth maker”, to use the philosophical jargon?’ (F ODOR ). Discuss.

September 2018 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

  1. ‘To believe that P is to be prepared to act as if P , when it matters whether P. ’ Discuss.
  2. If I order a gin and tonic, and unbeknownst to me the bartender serves me paint thinner on ice, do I have any reason to drink it?
  3. Are there non-intentional actions? If so, what distinguishes them from mere bodily movements?
  4. Is there any more reason to doubt the existence of √−1 than to doubt the existence of √2?
  5. Does the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis have a truth-value?
  6. Does a scientific explanation raise the probability of what it explains?
  7. Is quantum non-locality consistent with the Special Theory of Relativity?
  8. How should we individuate biological species?
  9. Is liberalism racist?
  10. Can we be forced to be free?
  11. EITHER Which historical philosopher is most misunderstood? OR Which historical philosopher exercises too much influence?
  12. Did Leibniz believe that this is the best of all possible worlds?
  13. EITHER Was Hume an idealist? OR Was Nietzsche a naturalist?
  14. ‘Transcendental idealism is deeply attractive. Unfortunately, it is also incoherent.’ Discuss.
  15. Does music have meaning?

September 2017 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

PHILOSOPHY II

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. Is any form of relativism coherent?
  2. Is there an example of a successful transcendental argument in philosophy?
  3. Do you have temporal parts?
  4. How radically does the General Theory of Relativity force us to revise our ordinary spatial concepts?
  5. Is scepticism irrefutable?
  6. Is the Given really a myth?
  7. What is it to know how to ride a bike?
  8. Is it time to abandon the distinction between internalism and externalism about epistemic justification?
  9. ‘Ethical claims only answer to other ethical claims.’ Is this true?
  10. Should we be effective altruists?
  11. Can we acquire moral knowledge from testimony?
  12. Are desires inconsistent in the same sense in which beliefs are?
  13. Must adherents of rival logical schools attach different meanings to the logical connectives?
  14. Could convention be the mother of necessity?
  15. Is entailment transitive?
  16. Is knowing a statement’s truth-conditions either necessary or sufficient for knowing what it says?
  17. Suppose that ‘If Hitler invades England, he will win the war’ (said in 1939) lacks a truth-value. Does it follow that ‘If Hitler had invaded England, he would have won the war’ (said in 2017) also lacks a truth-value?
  18. What is the relationship between langue and parole?
  19. What, if anything, unifies surprise, anger, sorrow, disgust, guilt, contempt, amusement and wonder as emotions?

[OVER]

[OVER]

PHILOSOPHY I

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. Should we be eliminativists about race?
  2. Is there moral luck?
  3. Is the de se simply another mode of presentation?
  4. ‘There is no answer to the question, "Why not be cruel?" There is no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible.’ (RICHARD RORTY) Discuss.
  5. What can psychology and/or evolutionary theory teach us about morality?
  6. What’s wrong with blackmail?
  7. Is knowledge first?
  8. What is the most effective form of scepticism?
  9. ‘I know P. Therefore, any evidence against P is misleading and I can disregard it.’ Discuss.
  10. How can we distinguish kitsch from art?
  11. Does the aesthetic value of a work of art relate to the impact it has on our lives?
  12. Does implicit bias have philosophical significance?
  13. How much does diminishing marginal utility help us justify the value of equality?
  14. Do victims have special rights?
  15. Is higher-order vagueness paradoxical?
  16. What is infinity?
  17. How do we best explain epistemic modals?
  18. Do propositions have parts?
  19. Is there such a thing as weak will?
  20. Is introspection a reliable guide to the nature of experience?
  21. What are sounds?
  22. Has research in neuroscience lead to any advances in the philosophy of mind?

September 2016 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

  1. What are the weaknesses of four-dimensionalism?
  2. Can I survive my own death?
  3. ‘The acceptance or rejection of abstract linguistic forms, just as the acceptance or rejection of any other linguistic forms in any branch of science, will finally be decided by their efficiency as instruments, the ratio of the results achieved to the amount and complexity of the efforts required.’ (CARNAP) Discuss.
  4. Did Kant have a metaphysics?
  5. Was Mill an act utilitarian?
  6. What is phenomenology?
  7. Is the concept ‘horse’ an object?
  8. ‘That every will must consider every other will its equal––would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.’ (FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE) Discuss.
  9. ‘What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.’ (HANNAH ARENDT) Discuss.
  10. What is the role of phronesis in Aristotle’s ethics?
  11. ‘On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.’ (HERACLITUS) Discuss.
  12. How does physics inform metaphysics?
  13. Should philosophy be problem orientated?

September 2016 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

  1. What role can chance play in an account of free-will?
  2. Can animals experience freedom?
  3. Does the notion of acquaintance have any role to play in the philosophy of mind?
  4. Can objects be causes?
  5. ‘The study of semantics is no more exhausted by the claims of analyticity than is the metaphysics of identity exhausted by the claims of necessity.’ (KIT FINE) Discuss.
  6. Is Kant’s account of freedom satisfactory?
  7. What is the role of moral education in Kant’s moral philosophy?
  8. What did Hume, Locke and Berkeley agree about?
  9. Was Nietzsche a psychologist?
  10. Compare and evaluate Plato’s and Aquinas’ theories of the soul.
  11. What are the pros and cons of Plato’s view in the Republic on the availability of healthcare?
  12. Is Stoic Ethics an advance over Aristotelian Ethics?
  13. Why is there so much philosophy of physics and biology and so little philosophy of chemistry?
  14. What is the value of the history of philosophy?
  15. Can radically different scientific theories talk about the same entities?

[OVER]

PHILOSOPHY I

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. Does the cosmos as a whole ground the existence of its parts?
  2. Can a conditional analysis of dispositions address the possibility of finks, masks, and mimics?
  3. Should we believe in the ‘moving spotlight’ theory of time?
  4. Is evidence of cosmological fine-tuning evidence for the existence of God?
  5. Are there different kinds of knowledge?
  6. Should we still believe in belief?
  7. Should we be epistemic consequentialists?
  8. How do resolutions stop us succumbing to temptation?
  9. Must pains be painful?
  10. Is there any sense of ‘function’ in which the function of a state of mind is essential to understanding its nature?
  11. What do forms of amnesia teach us about personal identity?
  12. Is the meaning of the word ‘the’ of any particular philosophical significance?
  13. Is there a special category of de se beliefs?
  14. Should we have a theory of reference? If so, what form should it take?
  15. Is moral judgment a hybrid of cognitive and non-cognitive states?
  16. How, if at all, can we distinguish between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ ethical predicates?
  17. Is ‘better than’ transitive?
  18. How, if at all, does intent matter to permissibility?
  19. What, if anything, is morally wrong with speciesism?
  20. What, if anything, is morally wrong with human cloning?
  21. Are principles of justice dependent on facts?
  22. If I believe that individual autonomy is of paramount value, does that make me an anarchist?
  23. What can Aristotle teach us about akrasia?
  24. Is Western philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato?

[OVER]

PHILOSOPHY II

Candidates should answer THREE questions

  1. Must there be a fundamental layer of reality?
  2. What, if anything, is objective probability?
  3. Is it reasonable to doubt that ordinary composite objects exist?
  4. Is there virtue in skepticism?
  5. Is expressivism about epistemic normativity tenable?
  6. Can justification be defeated by higher-order evidence?
  7. EITHER When is the privation of knowledge a form of injustice? OR If knowledge is power, should epistemology be politicized?
  8. Must norms of rationality govern the ascription of propositional attitudes?
  9. What, if anything, do EITHER hallucinations OR illusions OR after-images reveal about perception?
  10. Do we know our own minds better than cognitive scientists do?
  11. What makes manipulated agents unfree?
  12. Why is it appropriate to say ‘I find this tasty’, but not to say ‘I find this red’?
  13. Why is language vague?
  14. EITHER What does philosophy of language have to learn from linguistics? OR What does philosophy of language have to learn from psychology?
  15. Does the reliance on mathematics in science commit scientific realists to mathematical platonism?
  16. Is normativity irreducible?
  17. Should moral philosophers aspire to be ethical experts?
  18. In what sense must a moral theory be action-guiding?
  19. Is the Repugnant Conclusion ‘one of the few genuine, nontrivial theorems of ethics discovered thus far’ [MICHAEL HUEMER]?
  20. What, if anything, is morally wrong with insider trading?
  21. Must doctors always respect do-not-resuscitate orders?
  22. Suppose a foreigner is rightfully convicted of a crime in this country. Is it morally permissible to expel him once his sentence has been served?

October 2015 Fellowship Examination All Souls College

  1. When, if ever, is a wartime political leader under an obligation to authorise acts which are normally illegal in peacetime?
  2. Should prisons be abolished?
  3. Is Aristotle right to claim that the good man’s friend ‘is another self’?
  4. Do contemporary arguments for the harmfulness of death undermine the therapeutic ambitions of Epicureanism?
  5. Is Hume a naturalist or a skeptic?
  6. Is Leibniz an idealist?
  7. What role should critique play in philosophy?
  8. Is the role of Reason ‘to give contingency the form of necessity’ [HEGEL]?
  9. Is Everettian quantum mechanics more parsimonious than the Copenhagen Interpretation or less so?
  10. At what biological level does natural selection act?
  11. How do mechanisms explain?
  12. What makes an object an artwork?
  13. Is there a credible difference between the naked and the nude?
  14. To what extent are philosophical intuitions culturally variable?
  15. Is it a problem if the concept of health is normative?
  16. EITHER How far can individual identity be determined by acts of self-identification? OR Compare and contrast the role of acts of self-identification in the construction of two or more of the following: gender identity, racial identity, religious identity, national identity, sexual orientation.
  17. Is pornography hate speech?
  18. Is it time to rethink the philosophical canon?