Catalonia PAU History of Philosophy common mistakes
Catalonia PAU History of Philosophy · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
In the essay question, the candidate summarizes the author's doctrine (e.g., lists Plato's levels of reality) but never states and defends a thesis of their own on the question actually asked.
The PAU essay rewards a reasoned position on a prompt; candidates trained on 'explain the theory of X' reproduce memorized content because it feels safe, and they mistake coverage for argument.
What to do instead
Before writing, draft a one-sentence thesis answering the prompt, then structure the essay as thesis, two or three arguments with textual support, one counter-argument acknowledged and answered, and a conclusion restating the position. Practice by writing essays where the first paragraph must contain the word 'because'.
The candidate quotes or paraphrases the text-analysis passage without identifying its thesis, and answers comprehension questions by copying sentences verbatim instead of reformulating them.
Time pressure and fear of misinterpretation push candidates toward literal transcription; many have never been taught the difference between locating information and explaining it.
What to do instead
Practice a fixed routine: read the passage twice, underline the main claim and the connective that signals it (therefore, but, since), then write each answer as 'The author claims that ... because ...'. Ban verbatim copying in self-marking and compare your paraphrase against the original.
When explaining Plato, the candidate uses the allegory of the cave as a decorative story and fails to connect the sun, the divided line, and the Form of the Good into one account of knowledge and reality.
Textbooks present the similes separately, so candidates memorize each image in isolation and cannot show how the Good grounds both knowledge and being, which is exactly what exam prompts probe.
What to do instead
Build a single map linking the three images: the sun stands for the Good as cause of being and intelligibility, the divided line ranks cognitive states from eikasia to noesis, and the cave shows the educational ascent and its political consequence. Rehearse explaining any one image by reference to the other two.
The candidate treats Augustine and Aquinas as interchangeable 'Christian Platonists' and cannot explain how Aquinas uses Aristotle's hylomorphism and the distinction between essence and act of being to answer questions Augustine answered through illumination.
Both authors are often taught in a compressed unit, so candidates learn the labels 'faith and reason' and 'God' without the technical apparatus that distinguishes them, and they lose marks on comparison questions.
What to do instead
Prepare a contrast table on three axes: how each explains knowledge of truth (illumination versus abstraction from sense experience), how each relates reason and faith (understanding seeking faith versus natural theology as a science), and how each accounts for evil and creation. Anchor each cell in one named work and one argument.
On Descartes, the candidate narrates the six meditations in order but cannot state why the evil-demon doubt is more radical than the dreaming doubt or how the cogito escapes it, and confuses the proofs of God's existence with the proof of the external world.
The meditations are memorable as a narrative, so candidates retell the story and never isolate the logical function of each step; the two proofs in the Third and Fifth Meditations blur together.
What to do instead
Write a one-page flowchart of the Meditations with the function of each move: hyperbolic doubt strips certainty from senses and mathematics, the cogito survives because it is self-verifying in the act of doubting, the causal argument from the idea of the infinite establishes a non-deceiving God, and the Fifth Meditation proof plus divine veracity restores clear and distinct perception. Test yourself by asking what would fail if any single link were removed.
On Hume, the candidate uses 'impression' and 'idea' as loose synonyms and cannot explain the copy principle or how the missing shade of blue is supposed to complicate it.
The terminology sounds familiar and candidates skim the Enquiry, so they miss that the distinction in force and vivacity carries Hume's whole empiricist argument about meaning and causation.
What to do instead
Memorize the definitions and their work: impressions are the livelier perceptions of sensation, ideas are faint copies used in thinking, and the copy principle is the test of meaningful terms. Then rehearse the shade-of-blue counterexample and how Hume treats it as an exception that does not overturn the rule, and apply the test to the idea of necessary connection in causation.
On Kant, the candidate says that the categories 'are innate' or that we 'cannot know reality', which misstates transcendental idealism as a form of skepticism or as innatism, and cannot distinguish phenomena from things in themselves.
Kant's vocabulary is compressed and candidates import Descartes or Berkeley, so the crucial claim that experience is possible only through synthesis by the understanding is lost behind slogans.
What to do instead
Practice stating the Copernican turn in one sentence and then unpacking it: the categories are a priori conditions of possible experience, not innate ideas and not psychological habits, and the thing in itself is thinkable but not knowable. For each category, give one example of the judgment it makes possible, and explicitly contrast Kant's position with Hume's skepticism and Berkeley's idealism.
On Marx, the candidate reduces historical materialism to 'economics determines everything' and cannot explain the base-superstructure relation, alienation, or why Marx thinks the worker's relation to the product is the key to estranged labor.
Simplified summaries circulate widely and candidates memorize slogans, missing that Marx describes a dialectical relation with relative autonomy and locates alienation in the activity of production, not merely in low wages.
What to do instead
Study the four aspects of alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (from the product, from the activity, from species-being, from other people) and state precisely which is primary and why. Then explain base and superstructure with a concrete example and note how Engels later qualified the determination as 'in the last instance'.
On Nietzsche, the candidate equates the will to power with political domination or Social Darwinism and treats the eternal return as a cosmological claim rather than a test of affirmation.
The aphoristic style and popular misreadings supply vivid but false associations, and candidates lack the genealogical method needed to see these as diagnoses of values rather than doctrines of force.
What to do instead
Learn the method before the slogans: genealogy asks how values arose and what they serve, ressentiment explains slave morality, and the will to power names the drive to expand and interpret, not to conquer people. Frame the eternal return as a thought experiment asking whether one could affirm one's life, and support each reading with a specific aphorism or section from the Genealogy of Morality.
In argument-evaluation tasks, the candidate labels a passage 'valid' or 'invalid' without identifying the premises and conclusion, and does not distinguish validity from truth or detect equivocation when an author shifts the meaning of a key term.
Candidates have read about validity but rarely practice reconstructing arguments in standard form, so they judge plausibility of content instead of the logical relation between premises and conclusion.
What to do instead
Drill reconstruction: number the premises, write the conclusion as a single sentence, then test the form by substitution with an obviously false content but the same structure. Add a checklist for equivocation, circularity, and unwarranted inference, and apply it to a passage from each syllabus author once a week.