History of Philosophy (Ancient and Medieval)
This domain tests accurate attribution: who held which doctrine, in which work, and against whom. Answers that describe a position without tying it to a named figure and text lose credit.
Ancient core
- Presocratics: Parmenides on being and the denial of change; Heraclitus on flux and logos; Democritus on atoms and void.
- Plato: the theory of Forms as separate, eternal, non-sensible objects; the divided line and cave as epistemological ascent; recollection in the Meno; the tripartite soul and justice in the Republic.
- Aristotle: four causes (material, efficient, formal, final); hylomorphism; substance and essence; eudaimonia, the mean and phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics; potentiality and actuality; the unmoved mover.
- Hellenistics: Epicurean ataraxia and the denial of providence; Stoic logos, virtue as the only good, and preferred indifferents; sceptical epochē.
Medieval core
- Plotinus: emanation from the One.
- Augustine: evil as privation of good, divine illumination, interiority and will.
- Anselm: ontological argument from that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
- Aquinas: the Five Ways; natural law grounded in synderesis and practical reason; analogy of being; faith and reason as distinct but harmonious.
- Islamic and Jewish thought: Avicenna on essence and existence; Averroes on the unity of intellect; Ockham's nominalism, divine command and the razor; Scotus on univocity and haecceity.
Worked example
Anselm argues that even the fool who denies God has the concept in his understanding; a being that exists in reality is greater than one existing only in the understanding; so the greatest conceivable being must exist. Gaunilo's parody: by the same form a greatest conceivable island must exist. Aquinas's reply: the argument works only for a being whose essence is existence, which we do not grasp. Reconstruct the premises, then state which premise the objection attacks.
Traps that cost marks
- Describing Platonic Forms as ideas in someone's mind.
- Reading Aristotle's four causes as causes in the modern event-causation sense.
- Crediting Augustine with inventing just war theory outright rather than developing Cicero's and Ambrose's material.
- Merging the Five Ways into one argument: each has a distinct premise and a distinct gap.