SECTION A Plato, Meno
1 If virtue is knowledge and Socrates claims to know nothing, he cannot
be a teacher of virtue.
Discuss.
2 Does the slave boy learn geometry without being taught?
3 If Meno’s paradox is not a paradox, what is it?
4 Has Socrates proved that the soul existed before birth?
SECTION B Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
5 ‘But allowing that we were to take the operations of one part of nature
upon another for the foundation of our judgment concerning the whole
(which can never be admitted) …’ (part II) Why not?
6 ‘None but we mystics, as you are pleased to call us, can account for this
strange mixture of phenomena.’ (part X) Why?
7 Why do none of the words ‘atheist’, ‘agnostic’, or ‘deist’ quite fit Philo?
8 At the end does Pamphilius award victory to the right participant in the
Dialogues?
SECTION C Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women
9 ‘Mill’s distinction between self- and other-regarding actions fails since
there is no such thing as a purely self-regarding action.’
Discuss.
10 Either (a) Is Mill right to suggest that there is nothing valuable
about custom?
Or (b) Is Mill right to suggest that we cannot learn from others’
experience?
– 3 – PHT0/4
11 Either (a) ‘The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to
the conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a
preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule which
is adapted to the normal constitution of human society.’ (Mill)
Discuss.
Or (b) ‘I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of
the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present
relation to one another.’ (Mill)
Discuss this claim and its relevance to Mill’s general position.
12 Does liberty require that freedom of speech is absolute?