Philosophy Revision — AQA Education A-Level
Complete AQA Education A-Level Philosophy specification revision resources. Tailored syllabus coverage with topic breakdowns, quizzes, and practice questions.
Specification Topics
Top Exam Board Tips
- In essays, ensure each theory is presented with precise technical definitions before evaluating. Use diagrams to illustrate the differing claims about the relationship between perceiver, perception, and object.
- When discussing the argument from illusion, distinguish between the kind of illusion that challenges direct realism and the more radical challenge of hallucination.
- For high marks, engage with the philosophical responses to problems; for example, evaluate how direct realists might appeal to disjunctivism to handle hallucination.
- Always define key terms (e.g., a priori, innate, intuition, deduction) at the start of your essay to establish a clear conceptual framework and meet assessment objective criteria for knowledge and understanding.
- When evaluating innate knowledge, explicitly consider classical criticisms such as Locke's argument from universal consent or the lack of empirical evidence for innate ideas, and balance them with rationalist rejoinders.
- Structure your evaluation around philosophical criteria like clarity and coherence, comparing rationalist explanations with empiricist alternatives and concluding with a justified judgement on the strength of the intuition and deduction thesis.
- When explaining the tripartite definition, always incorporate a concrete example (e.g., knowing that Paris is the capital of France) to illustrate how the belief, truth, and justification conditions are each satisfied.
- In essays, use precise epistemological terminology: refer to 'justification' rather than vague terms like 'proof' or 'evidence', and clarify whether your examples involve a priori or a posteriori justification.
- Always define technical terms like 'scepticism', 'closure principle', and 'foundationalism' clearly to demonstrate precise understanding.
- Structure essays to first explain the sceptical challenge, then detail Descartes' approach, and finally evaluate responses, ensuring each section directly addresses the question.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Confusing direct realism with naive realism, failing to recognise that direct realism involves direct perception without an intermediary like sense-data.
- Mischaracterising idealism as solipsism, when Berkeleyan idealism is typically intersubjective due to God's perception.
- Assuming indirect realism inevitably leads to scepticism, overlooking that some indirect realists (e.g., Locke) hold we can have knowledge of primary qualities.
- Confusing rationalism with idealism: some students mistakenly assume that rationalism entails that the mind creates reality, rather than focusing on the source of knowledge.
- Misinterpreting innate knowledge as fully-formed conscious ideas from birth, rather than potentialities or dispositions that are triggered by experience (as per Leibniz's analogy of veined marble).
- Assuming that deductive reasoning always yields certain knowledge without scrutinising the truth of the initial premises, thereby overlooking the problem of infinite regress or the need for intuitive foundations.
- Confusing a priori knowledge with innate knowledge, failing to recognize that a priori propositions can be known independently of experience without necessarily being inborn.
- Treating 'belief' as equivalent to 'knowledge', overlooking that a belief must also be true and justified to qualify as knowledge.
Key Terminology & Definitions
- Direct realism
- Indirect realism
- Idealism
- Representative realism
- Phenomenalism
- Rationalism vs empiricism
- Innate knowledge
- Intuition and deduction
- Tabula rasa
- Propositional knowledge
- A priori/a posteriori distinction
- Justified true belief
- Scepticism
- Cartesian doubt
- Brain in a vat