Literature: Nonfiction (including philosophy)
The nonfiction questions cover the essay as a form, its rhetoric and practitioners, and a survey of Western philosophy that rewards matching a doctrine to a thinker.
Rhetoric and the essay
Montaigne invented the essay as a skeptical, digressive form; Bacon wrote compressed aphoristic essays; Addison and Steele's Spectator shaped the periodical essay. Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is sustained ironic argument, not a policy recommendation. Emerson ("Self-Reliance"), Thoreau (Walden; "Civil Disobedience"), Orwell ("Politics and the English Language"), Baldwin, and Didion recur on exams. Learn the appeals, ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (reason), plus devices: antithesis, parallelism, anaphora, rhetorical question, understatement, syllogism, and the inductive versus deductive distinction.
Philosophy: doctrine-to-thinker matching
- Plato: theory of Forms, allegory of the cave, philosopher-kings (Republic).
- Aristotle: virtue ethics, the golden mean, eudaimonia (Nicomachean Ethics).
- Descartes: the cogito, mind-body dualism (Meditations).
- Hume: empiricism and skepticism about causation.
- Kant: the categorical imperative, judging the maxim rather than consequences.
- Bentham and Mill: utilitarianism; Mill adds qualitative distinctions among pleasures and the harm principle (On Liberty).
- Marx: historical materialism and alienation; Nietzsche: will to power, master and slave morality.
- Sartre: existence precedes essence; Camus: the absurd, though he rejected the existentialist label.
- Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Rawls: justice as fairness and the veil of ignorance.
Worked example
A described argument holds that an act is right when it produces the greatest overall happiness and that consequences alone determine moral worth. That is utilitarianism, and the consequentialist criterion is the deciding clue. Kant's ethics would instead test whether the maxim can be universalized and would ignore the outcome, so Kant is the distractor to reject.
Traps
- Blaming a satiric speaker's proposal on the author; ironic personae are not the writer.
- Mixing Bentham's quantitative calculus with Mill's qualitative one.
- Assigning existence precedes essence to Kierkegaard, or the absurd to Sartre alone.
- Reading Thoreau's civil disobedience as a defense of Locke's social contract.