TCE Philosophy exam 2026Exam: Tue 10 Nov · TASC timetable

The theory that all knowledge, or at least all substantive knowledge of the world, is grounded in and derived from sense experience. There are no innate ideas; the mind acquires its content through sensation and reflection.

S knows that P if and only if (1) P is true, (2) S believes that P, and (3) S is justified in believing that P. The three conditions are meant to be jointly sufficient for knowledge.

The deliberate use of doubt as a tool. Descartes does not believe everything is false; he withholds assent from anything that could be false in order to discover what, if anything, survives doubt and can serve as a foundation.

The branch of ethics that investigates the nature, status and foundations of moral claims, rather than recommending particular actions. It asks what morality is, not what to do.

The claim that the morally right action is the one that produces the greatest balance of wellbeing over suffering, considering all those affected and weighting each person's interests equally.

The thesis that every event is necessitated by prior events together with the laws of nature, so that at any moment exactly one future is physically possible. It is a claim about causation, not about prediction or fatalism.

The idea that an agent can deserve praise or blame, reward or punishment, purely in virtue of having freely performed an action, independently of any further good the response might bring about.

Any argument that infers the existence of God, or a first cause or necessary being, from the existence of the universe and the fact that its existence and the causes within it call for an explanation.

An argument that infers the existence of an intelligent designer, usually God, from the order, regularity or apparent purpose observed in the natural world or the universe as a whole.

The difficulty of reconciling the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God with the existence of evil and suffering in the world.

An argument is a group of statements, one of which (the conclusion) is claimed to follow from the others (the premises). It is not a quarrel; it is a structured piece of reasoning.

An informal fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that is psychologically persuasive but logically defective for reasons to do with meaning, relevance or evidence rather than logical form.

Being one and the same individual, not merely being exactly similar. Two new tennis balls are qualitatively identical but numerically distinct. Personal identity over time is a question of numerical identity: are the earlier and later persons literally one and the same?

The view that talk of mental states can be analysed into, or reduced to, talk of actual and possible behaviour, so mental terms refer to behavioural dispositions rather than to inner states or substances.

The view that mind and body are two distinct kinds of substance: a non-physical, thinking mental substance and a physical, extended bodily substance, each able in principle to exist without the other.

The monist view that everything that exists is physical, so the mind is not a distinct non-physical substance but the brain, and mental states are nothing over and above states of the brain.

What is ultimately good for a person, considered from the point of view of their own interests. A theory of wellbeing tells us what makes someone's life go better or worse for them, as distinct from what makes them morally good.