PhB Bachelor of Philosophy Study Guide 2026

Everything you need to pass the PhB Bachelor of Philosophy exam in one place: the exam format, every topic to study, real practice questions with explanations, flashcards, and full-length practice tests. Free, no sign-up needed.

📚 PhB Bachelor of Philosophy Topics to Study (33)

✍️ Sample PhB Bachelor of Philosophy Questions & Answers

1. What is 'agent causation' as defended by Roderick Chisholm and Timothy O'Connor?
The view that agents as substances are irreducible causes of their own actions

Agent causation holds that the agent itself—not merely prior events—is the direct cause of action, posited as a solution to the luck objection against libertarianism.

2. Rawls's difference principle holds that social and economic inequalities are just only if they:
Are attached to offices open to all under fair equality of opportunity and benefit the least advantaged

The difference principle permits inequalities only when they make the worst-off members of society better off than they would be under strict equality.

3. Which approach holds that skeptical possibilities like brains in vats are not genuine epistemic threats because ordinary knowledge-attributions operate in low-stakes contexts?
Contextualism

Contextualism claims that the standards for knowledge-attributions shift with context, so everyday claims to know are true even though they fail under skeptical scrutiny.

4. To the soft determinist, saying you could have done something else is equivalent to saying you would have done something other if ____.
your desires had been different

Soft determinists reconcile free will with determinism by redefining what it means to 'could have done otherwise.' They argue that an action is free if it stems from one's own desires, intentions, and character, even if those internal states are themselves determined. Therefore, 'you could have done something else' implies that you would have acted differently if your underlying desires or motivations had been different.

5. The distinction between 'meaning in life' and 'meaning of life' is philosophically important because:
The former concerns local sources of meaning in activities; the latter concerns life's overall cosmic purpose

Contemporary philosophers distinguish between what makes individual activities meaningful (meaning in life) and whether life as a whole has a cosmic purpose (meaning of life).

6. The mind-body problem is centrally concerned with:
How non-physical mind and physical body causally interact

The mind-body problem asks how a seemingly non-physical mind can causally interact with a physical body, and how mental and physical properties relate.

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