IB Philosophy SL cheat sheet

The core theme asks what grounds the category “human”: biological species membership, rationality, self-consciousness, moral agency, social recognition, or existential self-definition.

Substance dualism holds that mind and body are distinct kinds of substance; property dualism holds that one substance has two irreducible kinds of property.

Physicalism holds that mental states are physical or depend entirely on physical processes; identity theory equates mental types with brain types, while eliminativism rejects folk-psychological categories.

Personal identity debates contrast psychological continuity accounts, such as Locke’s memory criterion and Parfit’s connectedness, with bodily or animalist accounts and narrative identity.

Determinism claims that every event, including action, is fixed by prior causes; compatibilism redefines freedom as acting from one’s own desires without external constraint; libertarianism requires indeterminism plus agent control.

Sartre distinguishes facticity from transcendence; “existence precedes essence” denies a fixed human nature, and bad faith is the denial of freedom through identification with a role or facticity.

Self–other relations appear in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, Sartre’s Look, and Levinas’s ethics of the Other, which describe identity as constituted through recognition, conflict, or ethical demand.

Personhood criteria often include rationality, self-awareness, moral agency, capacity for pain, and future-directed interests; applying them can include or exclude humans and non-humans.

Decision rule: when evaluating a theory of being human, distinguish descriptive claims about what humans are from normative claims about what treatment persons deserve.

The Ethics optional theme examines normative theories, metaethics, moral psychology, applied moral issues, and the structure of moral reasoning.

Consequentialism judges acts by outcomes; utilitarianism specifies welfare maximization, with act/rule and hedonistic/pluralistic versions differing over what counts as the good.

Deontology judges acts by conformity to duty or rules; Kant’s categorical imperative includes the formula of universal law and the humanity-as-end-in-itself formula.

Virtue ethics centers character and eudaimonia; Aristotle’s phronesis and doctrine of the mean contrast with Confucian role ethics and care ethics.

Metaethics: moral realism asserts mind-independent moral truths; anti-realism includes error theory, expressivism, and relativism; cognitivism versus non-cognitivism concerns whether moral claims are truth-apt.

Moral psychology includes Humean instrumentalism versus Kantian rationalism about motives; moral luck challenges control-based praise and blame.

Applied decision rule: specify the moral question, identify relevant facts, apply a theory, test it with counterexamples, and consider affected parties and residual duties.

Justice theories include Rawls’s veil of ignorance and difference principle, Nozick’s entitlement theory, utilitarian aggregate trade-offs, and care ethics’ relational focus.

Evaluation rule: distinguish act-token from rule or type, actual from expected consequences, and demandingness objections from correctness objections.

Prescribed text study requires close reading of one work from the IB list; assessment focuses on argument, concepts, positions, context, and critical evaluation.

A central argument is reconstructed as premises and conclusion; identify hidden assumptions and the scope of the conclusion.

Distinguish the author’s stated view from views expressed by narrators, characters, or interlocutors in dialogues and literary texts.

Contextual factors such as historical situation, political debates, and philosophical tradition matter when used to explain textual claims, not as a substitute for analysis.

Key concept analysis defines terms as the author uses them, notes ambiguities, and tracks shifts in meaning across the text.

Objection–response mapping identifies the strongest objection, the author’s reply, and whether the reply succeeds against rival positions.

Quotation use is brief, accurate, and integrated; paraphrase and citation are required, and block quotations rarely strengthen philosophical analysis.

Decision rule: a textual claim is supported by specific passages or arguments, not by general summary or author reputation.

Questions may require linking the text to core or optional themes; textual evidence remains primary.

The internal assessment is a philosophical analysis of a non-philosophical stimulus; the stimulus is not itself a philosophical text.

Stimuli may include news articles, advertisements, film clips, images, social media posts, legal cases, or other cultural products that raise identifiable philosophical issues.

The analysis must extract and evaluate philosophical assumptions, concepts, arguments, and implications rather than summarize the stimulus.

Marking is criterion-based and includes qualities such as understanding, interpretation, analysis, evaluation, organization, and use of philosophical language.

The work is internally assessed by the teacher and externally moderated by the IB.

Academic honesty requires citing sources, acknowledging borrowed ideas, and avoiding collusion; the stimulus and sources must be referenced.

Decision rule: select a stimulus with enough conceptual depth to sustain multiple philosophical issues, not merely a controversial topic.

Structure: introduce the stimulus and philosophical question, analyze selected issues, evaluate positions, and conclude with a justified judgment.

Word limit and format requirements are prescribed; exceeding the word limit can lead to a penalty, and appendices are not for argument.