Core Theme: Being Human
What the paper demands
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…". The examiner tests whether you can use named positions as tools inside an argument of your own, not whether you can summarise a debate.
Core territory
- Personal identity: Locke's consciousness/memory criterion; Hume's bundle theory; Reid's brave-officer objection; Parfit's reductionism and psychological continuity.
- Mind and body: substance dualism, identity theory, functionalism.
- Freedom: hard determinism, compatibilism, Sartre's radical freedom and bad faith (mauvaise foi).
- Self and other: Sartre's look (le regard), Levinas's face of the Other, Hegel's master–slave dialectic.
- Meaning: Camus's absurd, Nagel's ironic stance.
Worked example
"Is the self an illusion?" A weak answer lists Hume. A strong one argues: Hume holds that introspection delivers only particular perceptions, so the self is a bundle; Reid and Kant object that memory and the unity of consciousness presuppose a subject that owns the perceptions; Parfit replies that psychological connectedness does the work the self was meant to do, so the concept can be dropped without loss. Then weigh: does the objection beg the question, and does Parfit still smuggle in a bearer of continuity?
Traps
Biography instead of argument; treating determinism as fatalism; quoting "existence precedes essence" without explaining bad faith; ignoring the exact wording; never committing to a considered judgement.