Prescribed Text Study
What is tested
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. HL candidates also sit Paper 3, a philosophical analysis of unseen material, which draws on the same skills.
Core rules
- Know the text's architecture: what the author sets out to prove, in what order, and with which key terms.
- Learn six to ten short passages precisely enough to reconstruct the argument without the book.
- Engage with at least one serious objection, and with a recognised reading where the text is contested.
- Quote sparingly; every quotation needs analysis.
Worked example
Descartes: "the nature of mind is better known than the nature of body." Reconstruction: universal doubt strips away sensory claims; the cogito survives; the wax argument shows the mind grasps identity through judgement, not imagination; so the mind is known first and more certainly. Evaluation: the argument relies on the clear-and-distinct criterion, which is itself established only after God's existence is proved, generating the circularity objection (Arnauld). Reply: the criterion is established for present clear perceptions, not all past ones. Judge whether the reply is adequate.
Traps
Retelling the plot or argument without answering the question; ignoring the passage; leaning on secondary summaries; failing to define the text's technical terms.