100+ Free IB Philosophy SL Practice Questions

Core Theme: Being Human

Personal identity (Locke memory criterion, Hume bundle theory of self, Parfit reductionist view of persons, Buddhist anatta no-self doctrine); mind-body problem (Descartes substance dualism, materialism/physicalism, functionalism, Chalmers philosophical zombies); free will vs determinism (hard determinism, libertarianism, Hume/Frankfurt compatibilism); consciousness (Chalmers hard problem, Jackson's Mary's Room knowledge argument, qualia); nature vs nurture; human nature theories (Hobbes brutish state of nature in Leviathan, Rousseau noble savage, Aristotle zoon politikon, Marx species-being and alienation, Sartre 'existence precedes essence'); what is a person? (Boethius, Locke psychological continuity, Singer); rationality; embodiment (Merleau-Ponty phenomenology of perception)

Ethics (most common optional theme)

Meta-ethics: cognitivism vs non-cognitivism; ethical naturalism vs non-naturalism (Moore's open-question argument, naturalistic fallacy); error theory (Mackie argument from queerness); emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson), prescriptivism (Hare). Normative ethics: consequentialism (Bentham hedonic calculus, Mill higher/lower pleasures, Singer preference utilitarianism); deontology (Kant Categorical Imperative — universal law, humanity as end-in-itself, kingdom of ends); virtue ethics (Aristotle eudaimonia, doctrine of the mean, phronesis; Anscombe/MacIntyre revival; Plato cardinal virtues). Applied ethics: euthanasia, animal rights (Singer, Regan), environmental ethics (Naess deep ecology), business ethics, lying, justice

Paper 2: Prescribed Philosophical Text

One of 11 prescribed texts: Plato Republic, Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, Locke Second Treatise of Government, Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Mill On Liberty, Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals, Sartre Existentialism is a Humanism, Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity, Confucius Analects, Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching. Students must know key arguments, technical vocabulary, philosophical significance, and standard scholarly criticisms

Other Optional Themes (representative content)

Epistemology: Plato's tripartite JTB account of knowledge (Theaetetus), Gettier counterexamples, Russell's chicken on induction, scepticism (Descartes' evil demon, Putnam's brain-in-a-vat), rationalism (Descartes' cogito) vs empiricism (Hume's impressions and ideas, Locke's tabula rasa), perception (direct realism, indirect/representative realism, Berkeley's idealism), theories of truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist). Philosophy of religion: ontological argument (Anselm), cosmological (Aquinas Five Ways), teleological/design (Paley), moral (Kant); problem of evil (Hume, Mackie's logical version, Hick's soul-making theodicy); religious language (Wittgenstein language games, Ayer verificationism). Aesthetics: beauty subjective (Hume) vs objective (Kant), Plato's mimesis vs Aristotle's catharsis, definitions of art (Tolstoy expression, Bell significant form, Danto and the institutional theory). Political philosophy: social contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), justice (Rawls' veil of ignorance vs Nozick's libertarianism), democracy, Berlin's two concepts of liberty (positive vs negative)

Philosophical method and skills

Constructing arguments (premises, conclusion; valid vs sound, deductive vs inductive); identifying informal fallacies (straw man, ad hominem, slippery slope, appeal to authority, circular reasoning/begging the question, false dichotomy, equivocation); close analysis of a philosophical text; relating philosophical claims to concrete cases; structure of philosophical writing (clear thesis, body with argument and counter-argument, evaluation, conclusion); engagement with IB command terms (analyse, evaluate, justify, discuss, compare and contrast)