SECTION A Plato, Meno
1. EITHER: Does Plato’s Meno answer the question it first poses?
OR: If virtue is taught, does it have to be a form of knowledge?
2. Does the dialogue form contribute in any significant way to the philosophical
content of the Meno?
3. Is Socrates justified in rejecting Meno’s final definition of virtue?
4. How reasonable are Socrates’ ideas about definition?
SECTION B Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
1. Why does Philo not answer Cleanthes’ ‘voice from the clouds’ objection in
Part II?
2. Why might we not be ‘led to infer, by all the rules of analogy’ that there is a
designer God?
3. EITHER: Was Hume an ‘attenuated deist’?
OR: Can we make sense of Philo’s pronouncement that ‘no one [but him] has
a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound
adoration to the Divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the
inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature’?
4. Why does the existence of evil pose a problem for natural religion? Do any of
the arguments Hume presents in the Dialogues solve this problem?
– 3 – PHT0/4
SECTION C Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women
1. EITHER: What are the limits of free speech according to Mill? Is this position
tenable?
OR: Critically assess Mill’s defence of free speech.
2. Does Mill succeed in defending equality of the sexes?
3. What does Mill mean by the thought that utility ‘must be grounded on the
permanent interests of man as a progressive being’? Is he right?
4. What would Mill have thought about pornography?