Madrid PAU History of Philosophy common mistakes
Madrid PAU History of Philosophy · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
In Kant questions, the candidate uses 'transcendental', 'a priori', 'phenomenon', 'noumenon' and 'category' interchangeably or loosely, so an answer about the Copernican turn ends up claiming that the mind creates reality or that we can never know anything at all.
Kant's vocabulary is the densest on the syllabus and the Spanish terms invite everyday readings ('trascendental' sounds like 'transcendent'). Candidates learn the labels before the distinctions and fill the gaps by analogy.
What to do instead
Master four sharp distinctions and use them in every Kant answer: a priori vs empirical; transcendental (conditions of possible experience) vs transcendent (beyond possible experience); phenomenon vs thing in itself; receptive intuition vs spontaneous concept. Write one sentence per distinction showing what goes wrong if it is collapsed, and check every Kant paragraph against them before finishing.
In Marx, Nietzsche and Ortega answers, the candidate reduces each to a slogan ('religion is the opium of the people', 'God is dead', 'I am I and my circumstance') and builds the whole answer on the slogan, without reconstructing the argument that supports it or the concept it depends on (alienation and base/superstructure; genealogy and will to power; vital reason and perspectivism).
These authors are quotable, and quotations are easier to remember than arguments. The aphoristic style of Nietzsche in particular makes isolated sentences look like complete positions.
What to do instead
For each of these authors, prepare one chain of three linked concepts and be able to state the inferential link between them (e.g. alienation of labour → private ownership of means of production → class antagonism; genealogy of moral values → slave revolt in morals → ressentiment). Quote only after stating the argument, and always explain what the quotation is doing in that argument.
In the text-commentary section, the candidate summarises what the passage says paragraph by paragraph and stops there, never identifying the author's thesis, the argumentative structure, or the philosophical problem the text is answering.
Secondary-school practice trains 'commentary' as paraphrase, and under time pressure paraphrasing feels safe because every sentence is visibly 'about the text'. The candidate never learned that the PAU commentary rubric rewards identifying the problem, the thesis, the premises and the conclusion.
What to do instead
Before writing, produce a five-line skeleton on the exam sheet: (1) problem the text addresses, (2) author's thesis in one sentence, (3) premises offered, (4) conclusion, (5) one line on significance. Then write the commentary so each paragraph maps onto one skeleton line. If a paragraph of your answer could be deleted without losing an argumentative step, it is paraphrase and should be cut.
When asked to define or explain vocabulary ('eidos', 'category', 'substance', 'clear and distinct idea', 'impression', 'synthetic a priori', 'alienation', 'resentment', 'vital reason', 'being-in-the-world'), the candidate gives a dictionary gloss or a loose synonym and does not place the term inside its author's system.
Vocabulary is revised as a list of one-line definitions, so the term is detached from the argument that gives it meaning. Candidates also translate the Spanish term literally and lose the technical sense.
What to do instead
For each term, write a card with four fields: author and work, what the term contrasts with (e.g. impression vs idea; analytic vs synthetic; substance vs accident), the role it plays in one specific argument, and one example the author himself gives. Learn terms in contrast pairs, since the meaning of a technical term is usually fixed by what it excludes.
The candidate dates and contextualises a philosophy text as if it were a history exercise - reign dates, biographical anecdote, century - and spends the commentary's opening third on this instead of on the philosophical problem.
History of philosophy is taught alongside general history, and contextual material is easy to reproduce and feels authoritative. It also fills space when the candidate is unsure of the argument.
What to do instead
Cap contextualisation at two sentences: author, work, and the philosophical debate the text intervenes in. Then move immediately to the problem and thesis. If you cannot name the debate, the correct move is to reconstruct it from the text's own contrasts (what the author is attacking), not to add more historical background.
The candidate writes 'Plato says ideas exist in another world' or 'Kant says we cannot know reality' as if these were isolated opinions, without linking the doctrine to the question it was invented to solve, so comparison questions collapse into two unconnected summaries.
Textbooks present doctrines as conclusions to memorise, and students revise by memorising conclusions. Comparison then becomes listing, because nothing in the memorised material explains why two authors disagree.
What to do instead
For every author on the syllabus, memorise one sentence of the form 'X claims ... in order to solve ..., which his predecessors could not solve because ...'. In comparison answers, open with the shared problem, then show the divergence as two different solutions to it. Practise by writing the shared-problem sentence for five pairs (Plato/Aristotle on universals, Descartes/Hume on knowledge, Kant/Hegel on the limits of reason).
In the essay or reasoned-opinion question, the candidate gives a personal reaction ('I think freedom is very important in today's society') with no thesis, no argument and no reference to any author studied, or at the opposite extreme writes a purely expository summary with no position of their own.
The two halves of the task pull in opposite directions - 'argue' and 'use the authors' - and candidates resolve the tension by picking one. Many also believe a personal opinion needs no justification, or conversely that citing authors is enough and a stance is risky.
What to do instead
Use a fixed three-part frame: state a thesis in the first two sentences ('I will argue that ...'), defend it with at least two explicit arguments, each anchored to a named author's concept, then state and rebut the strongest objection. Close by naming the limit of your own position. Rehearse this frame on past-style prompts until the structure is automatic.
The candidate attributes to a philosopher a position he explicitly rejects, most commonly reading Plato as saying the sensible world is unreal, Descartes as proving the external world exists by a causal argument from the senses, Hume as a dogmatic sceptic who denies causation outright, or Nietzsche as a nihilist who recommends nihilism.
These are the compressed versions that circulate in summaries and social media, and they are memorable precisely because they are oversimplified. The candidate never checks the compressed claim against a primary passage.
What to do instead
Build a 'corrections' list of the five or six most common distortions and attach to each the primary-text phrase that refutes it (e.g. Hume's 'custom or habit' as the source of the idea of necessity; Nietzsche's nihilism as the diagnosis, not the prescription). Before the exam, write each distortion and its correction in a single sentence and test yourself on them.
The candidate answers a comparison question by writing two separate mini-essays on the two authors, with the second half never referring back to the first, so no actual comparison of concepts, arguments or conclusions takes place.
It is the lowest-risk strategy under time pressure: two blocks of memorised material guarantee content. The candidate does not realise the rubric awards marks for articulated relations, not for coverage.
What to do instead
Structure comparisons around three or four axes chosen in advance (e.g. source of knowledge, status of universals, scope of reason, relation of individual to society) and treat each axis as a paragraph: author A's position, author B's position, and one sentence stating precisely where and why they part. Never write a paragraph that mentions only one author after the introduction.
The candidate mismanages time and format: runs out of time and leaves the essay unwritten or truncated, writes the commentary without quoting or locating specific lines, or ignores the stated word limit and produces a one-paragraph answer to a question worth a third of the grade.
Candidates practise content but never rehearse under exam timing, and they allocate time proportionally to how much they have to say rather than to how many marks each section carries.
What to do instead
Before the exam, fix a minute budget per section based on the paper's mark weighting and rehearse two full papers with a timer. In the commentary, always anchor claims to the text with a short quotation or a line reference. Check at the end that every section has at least its minimum structure (thesis, argument, conclusion) even if brief, since an incomplete section scores far worse than a compressed complete one.