IB Philosophy HL study guide
IB Philosophy HL · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
IB Philosophy Higher Level is the two-year Diploma Programme course in philosophy, assessed by the IB Organisation and graded on the 1–7 scale. It suits students who enjoy argument more than memorisation: you are asked to reconstruct positions, expose assumptions and defend your own view in continuous prose. The IB Philosophy HL study guide has 9 sections and about 2,607 words.
01Core Theme: Being Human
Being human is the compulsory core theme, examined in Paper 1, Section A. You answer one essay from a choice, worth 25 marks, and the wording is nearly always evaluative: "To what extent…", "Assess…", "Is it true that…".
295 words, about 1 min02Optional Theme: Aesthetics
Aesthetics questions in Paper 1 ask you to evaluate theories of art, beauty and aesthetic judgement, usually by testing them against specific works. Marks come from using examples analytically rather than descriptively.
292 words, about 1 min03Optional Theme: Epistemology
Epistemology essays ask you to analyse the structure, sources and limits of knowledge. Strong answers distinguish the components of knowledge, then use counterexamples to expose weaknesses in a proposed analysis.
285 words, about 1 min04Optional Theme: Ethics
Ethics essays require you to apply and criticise normative theories, or to assess metaethical claims about moral truth, in relation to a concrete issue. The exam rewards accurate reconstruction of a theory before you attack it.
274 words, about 1 min05Optional Theme: Philosophy and Contemporary Society
This theme asks you to bring philosophical analysis to bear on present-day institutions, technologies and practices. Questions are contemporary in content but demand the same argumentative rigour; vague commentary about "modern life" scores poorly.
276 words, about 1 min06Optional Theme: Philosophy of Religion
Essays assess arguments for and against religious belief, the nature of religious language, and the rationality of faith. Precision about which argument you are attacking matters more than breadth.
296 words, about 1 min07Optional Theme: Philosophy of Science
Essays examine how science works, what distinguishes it from non-science, and whether its theories describe reality. You must handle historical cases and the normative question of method at once.
266 words, about 1 min08Prescribed Text Study
Paper 2 (one hour, 25 marks) sets an essay on your prescribed text from the IB list, which in recent sessions has included works such as Plato's Republic , Descartes' Meditations , Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Mill's On Liberty , Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality , Sartre, Arendt, Wollstonecraft and Du Bois. The question quotes or paraphrases a passage or claim, and you must argue about it.
305 words, about 2 min09Internal Assessment: Philosophical Analysis of a Non-Philosophical Stimulus
The IA requires a philosophical analysis of a stimulus that is not itself philosophical-a news report, advertisement, film scene, policy document, meme, song lyric. HL is 1,600–2,000 words; the stimulus is appended and excluded from the count.
318 words, about 2 min