My Philosophy A Level prior to my BA Philosophy degree (updated)
I had previously studied A Level Philosophy as a long-distance Certificate course and the tutor who marked my assignments for it was very encouraging, supportive and suggested I study philosophy at uni because I'm really good at it. He gave me very high marks and gave me two marks per assignment - an A Level mark and the mark he would give me if it were for an UG essay. So I had a very good idea of how my work should be marked at university and that I should expect a 1st class degree. The tutor thought I'd already overshot the A Level standard and therefore the A Level exams wouldn't suit me because they won't expect to mark essays that look degree-like and he was loath to change/disrupt my style and approach just for a couple of years simply to sit A level Philosophy. Especially since A Level philosophy isn't necessary in order to study it at uni.
The A Level course covered History of Philosophy and how to read and interpret philosophical texts so I'd already developed a particular interest in this area and wanted to take this field of philosophy further, prior to even applying to university. Early Modern philosophy was in the A Level course content, complete with an assignment on Descartes, which was good preparation for my BA Philosophy course which covered Descartes several times over the years. I already knew I enjoyed political philosophy pre-uni and wanted to continue this too on my degree. Being analytic and doing logic was already in my head and I was used to looking at it as playing a supportive role in philosophy.
I also began my interest in JS Mill's philosophy during my A Level study because he features quite prominently throughout the A Level courses, unlike at universities where I was surprised to find some lecturers (and consequently students) can have a negative stance on him. He did write a tremendous amount across various subjects e.g. in the A2 section he comes up in all three options ie Mind, Philosophy of Science, Political Philosophy which specifically included JS Mill's Harm Principle! As well as a study of his text 'On Liberty'! So I'm wondering 🤔why this feminist (atheistic/critical of institutional religion, rather like Hume) philosopher wasn't featured more in the BA course content than merely a cursory glance at him. I did an essay on him for Ethics but that was only because there was a sudden, last minute essay title/topic switch (a common habit on the course). What was that about?🤔 Hume also came up far more regularly throughout the A Level course than on the BA.
A Level Philosophy
AS Course:
Theory of knowledge:
Descartes (a lot!); GE Moore; Wittgenstein; Putham on possible worlds; brains in a vat; Plato; Chomsky; Leibniz; Spinoza; Kripke; some logic (e.g. All crows are black..); Analytic synthetic propositions; Locke; Hume; Primary and Secondary qualities; Berkeley; Dancy; Ayer; Mill.
Classical Foundationalism and criticisms of it (Ayer, Austin, Sellars); Coherentism/ coherence theory of truth; Reliabilism (e.g. Gettier); Nozick (e.g. truth tracking); Common sense realism (e.g. Strawson, McDowell (externalism)); Representative realism (e.g. Mackie on it and veil of perception); Phenomenalism
Moral philosophy:
Utilitarianism including Bentham, JS Mill; Hare; Peter Singer
Kant
Virtue theory: including topics such as courage, emotions, justice, practical wisdom; Arendt
Consciousness; Animal welfare/rights (including Singer); Metaethics; Hume's sentiments; Fact Value
Emotivism; Prescriptivism; Intuitionism e.g. G E Moore; Moral Realism
basic logic, validity, premises
JS Mill including respect for autonomy; Locke on toleration, can't get another to believe something via coercion; Nietzsche
Philosophy of Religion:
Strawson and his predicates; Aquinas (one book I read included his homophobia in his Aristotelian purpose argument); Free will; Swinburne
Logic, positivism, verification principle
Maimonides; God's existence; William Paley
Hume's criticisms of religion (and Anscombe's arguments against Hume); Darwin - evolution and design argument; Anselm; William James on religious experience; Pascal's Wager; Plantinga
Evil, problem of evil; Moral obligation
Miracles (including Hume and arguments against him)
Peter Geach and Euthyphro dilemma
A Study of Texts (I did all of them except Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism): Plato's Republic; Descartes Meditations; Marx and Engels: The German Ideology- alienation, manufacture, commerce, trade, division of labour, production, class, capitalism
Analytical skills
A2 course:
A2 options: Philosophy of Mind or Philosophy of Science or Political Philosophy. I studied all three although you only had to do one. So I mainly focused on Political Philosophy.
Mind:
I learnt this alongside my A Level psychology I was doing at the time, the class was taught by a practising psychologist.
Dualism; mind/body; qualia; identity theory of mind; mental causation; behaviourism; knowledge of self and self-consciousness (feelings, sensations, hopes, fears, subjective states); sympathy for another; sense and reference, Frege; solipsism/knowledge of other minds; Turing; J.S. Mill and inference to best explanation; persons, what is a person?; personal identity, psychological and physical continuation
Science:
induction, deduction; scientific method and laws; reductionism; falsificationism; relativism Koon; instrumentalism; realism; Hume; Kripke; constant conjunctions; J.S. Mill; Popper; aims of science; objectivity of science; methodology; problems concerning research; natural and social science
Political Philosophy:
the usual including Rawls but I especially enjoyed JS Mill because he was a feminist and I thought it was interesting to see how Marx fitted in with my Sociology A Level.
Social order and how to achieve the good life / living well and flourishing. What is the best life possible for human beings? Authority; State; law; obligation; ideologies; Marx; Hobbes; Locke; Rousseau (The Social Contract and Discourses); Liberalism, Rawls (Theory of Justice), Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia), Ronald Dworkin, Raz; Nationalism; Anarchism
Freedom, rights, the common good, conflict/protest; retribution; authority power, persuasion, coersion, obligation; Max Weber; Hobbes (Leviathan); Locke (Two Treatises of Government); Machiavelli (The Prince); the state; the will of the people, the general will; Aristotle (The Politics); Marx (Early Writings); Mill (On Liberty; Utilitarianism and other writings)
A2 Texts (studied all of them but students could risk doing only one): Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics; Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Mill: On Liberty; Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil; Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; Ayer: Language, Truth and Logic
The last A2 unit, you take two philosophers or topics and compare them. The idea is to learn to make connections. That's why I have a tendency to compare e.g. Shepherd and Hume on miracles (two philosophers and topic centred) see my paper and handout on academia on this, which I presented at a Hume workshop 2016:
https://libakaucky.academia.edu/research
In my dissertation, I thought of comparing Hume and De Grouchy on the topic of empathy and sympathy and brought in modern feminist philosophers into the argument. This is also available to read on my academia page:
A Level Assessment Objectives: knowledge and understanding; selection and application; Interpretation and Evaluation.
N B. I may update this post later to add more details but this list is a comprehensive overview of the A Level course content back when I was studying it.
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