Prescribed philosophical text (Paper 2) practice questions.

In Mill's On Liberty the technical phrase self-regarding conduct marks

• conduct whose effects fall in the first instance on the agent alone
• conduct undertaken from motives of self-interest rather than concern for others
• conduct carried on in private, where no other member of society can observe it
• conduct that damages the agent's own long-term interests and future capacities

Answer: conduct whose effects fall in the first instance on the agent alone

The term is defined by where the effects land, not by the motive, the setting or the prudence of the act, and that is why Mill can call a generous but self-affecting choice self-regarding while a selfish act that injures a neighbour is not.

Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality is built as three treatises. The second takes as its subject

• the contrast between the value judgements coined by the nobles and those coined by the powerless
• the meaning of ascetic ideals for artists, philosophers and priests
• the doctrine of eternal recurrence and the figure who affirms it
• the emergence of guilt and bad conscience out of the debtor and creditor relation

Answer: the emergence of guilt and bad conscience out of the debtor and creditor relation

Knowing which treatise carries which question is what allows a Paper 2 answer to cite the right stretch of text: the noble and slave modes belong to the first treatise, ascetic ideals to the third, and eternal recurrence is not treated in this work at all.

In Plato's Republic IV, Socrates uses the term thumos for

• the harmony among the parts of the soul in which justice is said to consist
• the spirited part of the soul, the seat of anger and of the love of honour
• the appetitive part of the soul, which desires food, drink and money
• the calculating part of the soul, which reasons about what is best overall

Answer: the spirited part of the soul, the seat of anger and of the love of honour

Thumos is introduced as a third thing, distinct from both appetite and reason, precisely because a person can be angry at his own desires; collapsing it into appetite would destroy the three-part division on which the definition of justice depends.

Which sequence gives the order of the six Meditations of Descartes?

• the thinking self; doubt; the essence of matter; God; error; mind and body distinct
• God; doubt; the thinking self; the essence of matter; error; mind and body are distinct
• doubt; the thinking self; God; error; the essence of matter; mind and body distinct
• doubt; God; the thinking self; error; mind and body distinct; the essence of matter

Answer: doubt; the thinking self; God; error; the essence of matter; mind and body distinct

The order is the argument: nothing can be rebuilt until the meditator has a first certainty, and material things cannot be readmitted until a non-deceiving God has been established, so citing a claim from the wrong meditation usually reverses a dependence.

In the wax passage of Descartes' Second Meditation, every sensible quality of the wax alters when it is held near the fire, yet the same wax remains. Which assumption, left unstated, does the argument need in order to reach its conclusion?

• That the imagination can run through the indefinitely many shapes the wax might take
• That the wax retains at least one sensible quality throughout the change
• That a non-deceiving God guarantees whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived
• That the senses and the imagination deliver nothing but the qualities that changed

Answer: That the senses and the imagination deliver nothing but the qualities that changed

Without that assumption the persistence of the wax could itself be something the senses report, and the step to an inspection of the mind would not go through. The passage settles which faculty grasps a body, not whether bodies exist, a question Descartes only reaches in Meditation VI.

In the second treatise of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, the cause of the emergence of a practice and its later usefulness are said to lie worlds apart. The inference drawn is that

• a present function cannot be read back as the purpose for which a practice arose
• a practice whose function has changed has thereby lost every meaning it once had
• the historian should record origins and refuse to describe any later uses at all
• punishment has served the single purpose of deterrence throughout its whole history

Answer: a present function cannot be read back as the purpose for which a practice arose

This is the methodological core of the genealogical approach: the same practice is repeatedly reinterpreted by whatever power seizes it, so an inference from current utility to original purpose is an error of reasoning, not merely a gap in the record.