Cameroon GCE A-Level Philosophy cheat sheet

Validity: an argument is valid iff it is impossible for all premises true and conclusion false; validity concerns form, not actual truth of premises.

Soundness = validity + all premises actually true; a sound argument guarantees a true conclusion, a valid one need not.

Four categorical propositions: A (All S are P), E (No S are P), I (Some S are P), O (Some S are not P).

Square of opposition: A–E contraries (not both true), I–O subcontraries (not both false), A–O and E–I contradictories, I follows from A and O from E (subalternation).

Distribution: A distributes subject only; E distributes both; I distributes neither; O distributes predicate only. A term distributed in the conclusion must be distributed in the premises.

Common formal fallacies: affirming the consequent (P→Q, Q, ∴P), denying the antecedent (P→Q, ¬P, ∴¬Q), undistributed middle, illicit major/minor.

Modus ponens: P→Q, P, ∴Q (valid). Modus tollens: P→Q, ¬Q, ∴¬P (valid).

Informal fallacies: ad hominem, ad populum, ad verecundiam (appeal to authority), straw man, false dilemma, begging the question, post hoc ergo propter hoc, hasty generalization.

Induction yields probabilistic support, not deductive certainty; counterexample and controlled comparison are its main tests.

Knowledge as justified true belief (JTB): S knows P iff P is true, S believes P, and S is justified in believing P.

Gettier cases show JTB is insufficient: justified true belief can rest on a false lemma or on luck, so a fourth condition (no false lemmas, or a reliability condition) is debated.

Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz): reason alone can yield substantive knowledge; innate ideas or a priori deduction are primary.

Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume): all ideas derive from experience; the mind is a tabula rasa, and Hume reduces causation to constant conjunction and custom.

Kant's synthesis: intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty; synthetic a priori judgments (e.g. arithmetic) are possible.

Scepticism: Cartesian doubt suspends all beliefs that can be doubted; Hume's induction problem shows no non-circular justification of uniformity of nature.

Foundationalism vs coherentism: basic beliefs self-justifying versus beliefs justified by mutual support within a system.

Sources of knowledge: perception, reason, memory, testimony; testimony is reducible (Hume) or non-reducible (Reid) to other sources.

Truth theories: correspondence (truth as agreement with fact), coherence (consistency within a system), pragmatic (truth as what works).

Ontology studies what exists; categories include particulars, universals, substances, properties, relations, events, and abstract objects.

Universals: realism (they exist independently - Plato's Forms, Aristotle's immanent forms) versus nominalism (only particulars exist; 'red' is a name) versus conceptualism (universals are mental).

Substance: Aristotle's primary substance is the individual thing; Descartes has two created substances (mind, body); Spinoza holds one substance, God-or-Nature.

Identity and change: the problem of persistence - same object over time requires either an enduring substratum or a bundle of temporal parts (perdurantism).

Causation: Hume's regularity theory (constant conjunction), counterfactual theories (if C had not occurred, E would not), and powers/dispositional accounts.

Modality: necessary truth holds in all possible worlds; contingent truth holds in some but not all. Possible-worlds semantics grounds necessity and possibility.

Free will: determinism (every event caused), libertarianism (some actions uncaused by prior states), compatibilism (freedom as acting on one's own desires without external constraint).

Mind–body positions: dualism, physicalism, idealism, neutral monism, and emergentism.

Time: A-theory (past, present, future are real, tensed) versus B-theory (only earlier/later relations, tenseless).

Consequentialism judges acts by outcomes; utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) maximises total or average welfare, with Mill distinguishing higher and lower pleasures.

Deontology (Kant): act only on maxims you could will as universal law; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.

Virtue ethics (Aristotle): eudaimonia through habituated excellences; the mean between excess and deficiency, guided by phronesis.

Meta-ethics: cognitivism (moral statements are truth-apt) versus non-cognitivism (emotivism, prescriptivism); realism versus anti-realism.

Hume's is–ought gap: descriptive premises alone cannot entail a prescriptive conclusion.

Moral relativism holds rightness depends on culture or individual; objectivism holds some moral truths are independent of opinion.

Justice theories: Rawls's veil of ignorance and two principles (equal basic liberties; difference principle permitting inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged).

Euthyphro dilemma: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because loved? Challenges divine command theory.

Double effect: an action with a good intended effect and a foreseen bad side effect may be permissible if the bad is not the means and is proportionate.

Presocratics: Thales (water as arche), Heraclitus (flux, logos), Parmenides (being is one, change illusory), Democritus (atomism).

Plato: theory of Forms, allegory of the cave, tripartite soul (reason, spirit, appetite), philosopher-kings in the Republic.

Aristotle: four causes (material, formal, efficient, final), hylomorphism, syllogistic logic, virtue as habit, the unmoved mover.

Medieval: Augustine (faith and reason, divine illumination), Aquinas synthesising Aristotle with Christianity (five ways, natural law), Ockham's nominalism and razor.

Descartes: method of doubt, cogito ergo sum, mind–body dualism, clear and distinct ideas as criterion of truth.

Rationalists: Spinoza's geometric ethics and pantheism; Leibniz's monads and principle of sufficient reason.

Empiricists: Locke (tabula rasa, primary/secondary qualities), Berkeley (esse est percipi), Hume (causation, self as bundle of perceptions).

Kant: Copernican revolution, phenomena versus noumena, categorical imperative, transcendental deduction of categories.

Hegel: dialectic (thesis–antithesis–synthesis), absolute spirit, history as the unfolding of freedom.

Debate on African philosophy: Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy and ethnophilosophy versus Paulin Hountondji's critique of 'unanimism' and demand for critical, individual authorship.

Ethnophilosophy treats communal worldviews as philosophy; professional philosophy (Hountondji, Wiredu) insists on argument, critique, and universal standards.

Ubuntu: a person is a person through other persons; relational personhood and communal ethics, prominent in Bantu thought and modern African political discourse.

Sage philosophy (Henry Odera Oruka): four trends - ethnophilosophy, professional, nationalist-ideological, and philosophic sagacity (critical individuals within tradition).

Negritude (Senghor, Césaire): affirmation of black cultural identity and values as a response to colonial denigration.

Consciencism (Kwame Nkrumah): philosophical foundation for African decolonisation, blending African communalism with scientific socialism.

Communitarianism versus Afro-liberalism: Menkiti's personhood-through-community versus Gyekye's moderate communitarianism respecting individual rights.

Logic and language: Wiredu argues Akan thought uses a non-bivalent logic of degrees of truth; Mbiti's claim about African time (no distant future) is contested.

African epistemology: communal and holistic knowing, oral tradition as a knowledge source, and the relation of the individual knower to the community.

Dualism (Descartes): mind and body are distinct substances; interaction problem asks how an immaterial mind moves a physical body.

Behaviourism (Ryle): mental talk describes dispositions to behave; the 'ghost in the machine' is a category mistake.

Identity theory: mental states are identical with brain states; challenged by multiple realisability and the explanatory gap.

Functionalism: mental states are defined by causal roles, not physical substrate; supports strong AI but faces the qualia objection.

Chinese room (Searle): symbol manipulation by rules does not constitute understanding, so syntax is not sufficient for semantics.

Consciousness: qualia, the hard problem (Chalmers), and the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience.

Intentionality: mental states are about objects; Brentano's mark of the mental, and the question of whether machines can have it.

Philosophical anthropology: Aristotle's rational animal, Kant's dignity of persons, Cassirer's animal symbolicum, and the debate on human nature versus culture.

Personal identity: Locke's continuity of consciousness/memory versus Hume's bundle theory versus Parfit's reductionism.

Social contract: Hobbes (war of all against all, sovereign for security), Locke (natural rights to life, liberty, property; right of revolution), Rousseau (general will, popular sovereignty).

State of nature differs: Hobbesian fear and competition, Lockean relative peace with property, Rousseauan natural freedom corrupted by society.

Liberty: negative liberty as absence of interference (Berlin) versus positive liberty as self-mastery; constant versus modern liberty (Constant).

Justice: Rawls's veil of ignorance and difference principle versus Nozick's entitlement theory (just acquisition, transfer, rectification).

Legitimacy and authority: the problem of political obligation, and whether consent, fair play, or natural duty grounds obedience.

Marx: historical materialism, class struggle, alienation, ideology critique, and the state as instrument of the ruling class.

Communitarianism (Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor) critiques the unencumbered self; feminism critiques the public/private divide.

Multiculturalism and recognition (Taylor, Kymlicka): group rights and identity versus liberal neutrality.

Power and the state: Weber's legitimate domination (traditional, charismatic, legal-rational) and Foucault's disciplinary power.