Section A
1. ‘I must know who Meno is before I can say if he is handsome. For the
same reason, I must be able to define virtue before I can say if it is
teachable.’ Is this a defensible piece of reasoning?
2. Is there a way of making sense of Socrates’ claim that ‘no one really
desires what is bad’ so that it isn’t obviously false?
3. ‘The man who does not know has within himself true opinions about the
things that he does not know.’ (PLATO) Discuss.
4. ‘… it makes me wonder, Socrates, … why knowledge is prized far more
highly than right opinion, and why they are different’. (PLATO) Should we
accept Socrates’ answer to these questions?
Section B
5. Is it philosophically significant that Descartes’s Meditations are written in
the first person?
6. ‘For, if I judge that the wax exists, for the reason that I see it, it is certainly
much more evident that I myself also exist, from the very fact that I am
seeing it.’ (DESCARTES) Discuss.
7. ‘The privation in which the essence of error consists lies in this wrong use
of free choice.’ (DESCARTES) Discuss.
8. Does Descartes have a non-circular argument for the existence of an allperfect God?
Section C
9. ‘If Mill had told us how exactly to understand “harm”, the meaning of the
Harm Principle would have been perfectly clear.’ Would it?
10. Do Mill’s arguments in On Liberty support a ban on the expression of
racist views?
11. ‘Whatever any portion of the human species now are …, such, it is
supposed, they have a natural tendency to be.’ (MILL) Why does Mill
object to this claim?
12. Can Mill’s opposition in On Liberty to ‘gross usurpations upon the liberty of
private life’ be reconciled with his remarks in The Subjection of Women on
injustices in the family?