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Philosophy A level AQA for Year 13

Easter Revision Course Dates

• Week 1: 30 March – 3 April
• Week 2: 6 April – 10 April
• Week 3: 13 April – 17 April

(Good Friday is 3 April; Easter Monday is 6 April)

Boards

AQA 7172

Length of Course

5 full-day sessions

This course is board-specific for the AQA A level Philosophy specification (7172) and is for A Level Year 13 students only. The course will cover:

Epistemology

• What is knowledge? The distinction between acquaintance knowledge, ability knowledge and propositional knowledge; the nature of definition (including Linda Zagzebski) and how propositional knowledge may be analysed/defined; the tripartite view, issues and responses.
• Perception as a source of knowledge: Direct realism, indirect realism and Berkeley’s idealism.
• Reason as a source of knowledge: Innatism; The intuition and deduction thesis. Empiricist responses to these theories.
• The limits of knowledge: Particular nature of philosophical scepticism; the role/function of philosophical scepticism within epistemology; the distinction between local and global skepticism; Descartes’ sceptical arguments and issues/responses; reliabilism.

Moral philosophy

• Normative ethical theories: The meaning of good, bad, right, wrong within each of the three approaches: Utilitarianism, Kantian deontological ethics, Aristotelian virtue ethics.
• Meta-ethics: The origins of moral principles: reason, emotion/attitudes, or society; the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about ethical language; moral realism, including naturalism and non-naturalism; moral anti-realism, including error theory, emotivism and prescriptivism.
• Applied ethics: Applying the content of normative ethical theories and metaethics to the following issues: stealing; simulated killing (within computer games, plays, films etc); eating animals, telling lies.

Metaphysics of God

• The concept and nature of ‘God’ God’s attributes: God as omniscient, omnipotent, supremely good (omnibenevolent), and the meaning(s) of these divine attributes. Competing views on such a being’s relationship to time, arguments for the incoherence of the concept of God.
• Arguments relating to the existence of God: Ontological arguments, teleological/design arguments, cosmological arguments and the Problem of Evil.
• Religious language: The distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism about religious language, verification/falsification (Ayer) and responses including eschatological verification and the ‘University Debate’.

Metaphysics of mind

• What do we mean by ‘mind’? Features of mental states:
  • All or at least some mental states have phenomenal properties
  • Some, but not all, philosophers use the term ‘qualia’ to refer to these properties, where ‘qualia’ are defined as ‘intrinsic and non-intentional phenomenal properties that are introspectively accessible’
  • All or at least some mental states have intentional properties (ie intentionality).
• Dualist theories: Substance dualism (Descartes). The ‘philosophical zombies’ argument for property dualism (David Chalmers). The ‘knowledge/Mary’ argument for property dualism (Frank Jackson).
• Physicalist theories: Behaviourism, Mind-brain type identity theory, Eliminative materialism and Functionalism. Issues and responses to these theories.