Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Qualifying Examination in Philosophy — Questions and Answers

Question 1: Which philosopher argued that all knowledge comes from sensory experience, coining the phrase 'tabula rasa'?

Gottfried Leibniz
Immanuel Kant
John Locke (Correct answer)
René Descartes

Correct answer: John Locke

Locke held in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the mind begins as a blank slate filled by experience.

Question 2: It is attributed to _____ that the proverb "An unexamined life is not worth living" was first said.

Socrates (Correct answer)
Plato
Aristotle
John Locke

Correct answer: Socrates

The famous dictum 'An unexamined life is not worth living' is a central tenet of Socratic philosophy, attributed to Socrates during his trial as recorded by Plato in the Apology. It encapsulates his belief that critical self-reflection, moral inquiry, and the pursuit of wisdom are essential for a meaningful human existence. Without examining one's beliefs and values, life lacks true purpose and understanding.

Question 3: Feelings are _____ in the moral life.

reason based
essential and inevitable (Correct answer)
an unerring guide
essential to impartiality

Correct answer: essential and inevitable

While moral philosophy often emphasizes reason, feelings (emotions) are widely recognized as an essential and inevitable component of human moral experience. They motivate moral action, inform our perceptions of right and wrong, and are deeply intertwined with our values and empathy. Although not an unerring guide, emotions play a crucial role in our moral judgments and responses.

Question 4: The problem of personal identity over time asks what makes a person at one time the same person as a person at another time. Psychological continuity theories hold that identity consists in:

Social recognition by others
Continuity of memories and psychological connections (Correct answer)
Continuity of the same physical body
Persistence of a non-physical soul

Correct answer: Continuity of memories and psychological connections

Locke and later Parfit argued that personal identity is constituted by overlapping chains of memory and psychological continuity.

Question 5: W.D. Ross's concept of 'prima facie duties' means that moral duties are:

Absolute and never overridden
Valid only within social contracts
Binding unless overridden by a stronger duty in a given situation (Correct answer)
Derived entirely from consequences

Correct answer: Binding unless overridden by a stronger duty in a given situation

Ross argued that prima facie duties (e.g., fidelity, non-maleficence) are real moral obligations that can be outweighed by more pressing duties in specific circumstances.

Question 6: Substance ontology, dominant in the Aristotelian tradition, holds that the fundamental entities of reality are:

Individual substances that bear properties (Correct answer)
Properties or qualities themselves
Events and processes
Relations between things

Correct answer: Individual substances that bear properties

For Aristotle, substances — individual cats, stones, people — are the primary beings, while properties like 'white' or 'running' exist only as attributes of substances.

Question 7: Bernard Williams's critique of utilitarianism centers on the claim that it violates:

The universalizability of moral rules
The social contract between citizens
Personal integrity and agent-relative commitments (Correct answer)
The greatest happiness principle

Correct answer: Personal integrity and agent-relative commitments

Williams argued that utilitarianism alienates agents from their deepest projects and commitments, undermining personal integrity.

Question 8: Mereology is the study of the relationship between:

Parts and wholes (Correct answer)
Causes and effects
Space and time
Mind and body

Correct answer: Parts and wholes

Mereology examines questions like when parts compose a whole, whether wholes are distinct from their parts, and what determines an object's boundaries.

Question 9: Peter Singer's utilitarian argument for famine relief concludes that affluent individuals are morally obligated to give until:

They have given 10% of income
Local needs are fully met first
Government foreign aid becomes sufficient
Giving more would cause comparable moral harm to themselves (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Giving more would cause comparable moral harm to themselves

Singer argues we must give until the point where giving further would sacrifice something of comparable moral importance.

Question 10: Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil,' developed from her reporting on Eichmann's trial, refers to:

State-sanctioned genocide
Revolutionary violence
Evil arising from thoughtless compliance rather than malice (Correct answer)
The inevitable spread of totalitarianism

Correct answer: Evil arising from thoughtless compliance rather than malice

Arendt argued that Eichmann exemplified how ordinary people commit great evils through bureaucratic thoughtlessness and failure of independent judgment.

Question 11: The 'separateness of persons' objection to utilitarianism, associated with Rawls and Nozick, argues that utilitarianism:

Illegitimately aggregates welfare across individuals, ignoring their distinctness (Correct answer)
Fails to account for future generations
Cannot explain why justice matters more than happiness
Wrongly treats all pleasures as commensurable

Correct answer: Illegitimately aggregates welfare across individuals, ignoring their distinctness

Critics argue that by summing welfare across persons, utilitarianism treats society as a single individual and ignores that sacrifices imposed on one person cannot be compensated by gains to another.

Question 12: Wittgenstein's private language argument in Philosophical Investigations argues that a language whose terms refer only to one's private sensations is:

Possible but ineffable
The basis of all language
Equivalent to behaviorist descriptions
Impossible because meaning requires public criteria (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Impossible because meaning requires public criteria

Wittgenstein argued that meaning requires the possibility of correction by public standards; a purely private language would have no standard distinguishing correct from incorrect use.

Question 13: Carol Gilligan's ethics of care challenged Kohlberg's moral development theory primarily on the grounds that it:

Ignored cultural differences in moral development
Privileged a justice-oriented, typically male moral voice over a care-oriented one (Correct answer)
Relied on virtue ethics rather than principled reasoning
Overemphasized emotion at the expense of reason

Correct answer: Privileged a justice-oriented, typically male moral voice over a care-oriented one

Gilligan argued Kohlberg's model was gender-biased, neglecting the relational, care-focused moral reasoning more common among women.

Question 14: The philosophical principle of charity requires that when interpreting another's argument you should:

Attribute to them the strongest, most rational version of their position (Correct answer)
Focus only on explicit statements, ignoring implied meanings
Accept their conclusion without scrutiny
Assume the worst-case reading to strengthen your critique

Correct answer: Attribute to them the strongest, most rational version of their position

The principle of charity demands interpreting arguments in their strongest form before critiquing, ensuring that refutations engage with the best version of the opposing view.

Question 15: What does it mean for a moral theory to be 'agent-neutral'?

It prioritizes the agent's own welfare above all others
The reasons it generates are the same for every agent regardless of their personal relationships (Correct answer)
It applies only to impartial spectators, not ordinary agents
It treats all cultures as morally equivalent

Correct answer: The reasons it generates are the same for every agent regardless of their personal relationships

Agent-neutral theories give every agent the same reason structure (e.g., 'reduce suffering wherever it occurs'), unlike agent-relative theories that give different reasons to different agents.

Question 16: Kant's 'Copernican Revolution' in epistemology claimed that:

Mathematics is empirically derived
Empiricism fully explains knowledge
Objects conform to our cognition, not the reverse (Correct answer)
Knowledge mirrors an independent reality

Correct answer: Objects conform to our cognition, not the reverse

Kant argued that our cognitive faculties impose structure on experience, making the mind constitutive of objects of knowledge.

Question 17: In debates about causation, counterfactual theories hold that event C causes event E if and only if:

C and E are constantly conjoined
Had C not occurred, E would not have occurred (Correct answer)
C transfers energy to E
C preceded E in time

Correct answer: Had C not occurred, E would not have occurred

David Lewis developed counterfactual analysis of causation, defining causal dependence in terms of what would have happened in the nearest possible world where the cause was absent.

Question 18: Which philosopher introduced the concept of 'divine simplicity' as developed in medieval scholasticism, holding that God has no parts or properties distinct from His essence?

Anselm of Canterbury
Thomas Aquinas (Correct answer)
William of Ockham
Duns Scotus

Correct answer: Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas developed the doctrine of divine simplicity most systematically, arguing in the Summa Theologiae that God's essence, existence, and attributes are all identical.

Question 19: The realism vs. anti-realism debate in metaphysics concerns whether the objects studied by a given domain:

Exist independently of human minds and practices (Correct answer)
Are defined by cultural consensus
Are identical to sense data
Are useful constructs for scientific prediction

Correct answer: Exist independently of human minds and practices

Realists hold that entities like electrons or numbers exist mind-independently; anti-realists argue that such entities depend on human conceptual schemes or practices.

Question 20: The No False Lemmas condition was added to the JTB account to handle Gettier cases by requiring that:

The inference chain contain no false intermediate steps (Correct answer)
Knowledge be certain
Beliefs be produced by reliable faculties
Justification be non-defeasible

Correct answer: The inference chain contain no false intermediate steps

The No False Lemmas response to Gettier requires that no false propositions play an essential role in the justificatory chain for knowledge.

Question 21: Alvin Goldman's reliabilist epistemology defines justified belief as one produced by:

Self-evident intuition
Cultural agreement
Logical deduction alone
A reliable cognitive process (Correct answer)

Correct answer: A reliable cognitive process

Reliabilism holds that a belief is justified if it is produced by a cognitive process that reliably yields true beliefs.

Question 22: Supervenience, a key concept in metaphysics, states that properties of type A supervene on properties of type B when:

A-properties are reducible to B-properties
No two things can differ in A-properties without differing in B-properties (Correct answer)
A-properties cause B-properties
All A-properties are identical to B-properties

Correct answer: No two things can differ in A-properties without differing in B-properties

Supervenience is a dependency relation weaker than reduction: mental properties supervene on physical properties if there can be no mental difference without a physical difference.

Question 23: Physicalism (or materialism) in metaphysics holds that everything that exists is:

Mental or dependent on mind
Neutral between mind and matter
Abstract and non-spatiotemporal
Physical or dependent on the physical (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Physical or dependent on the physical

Physicalism is the view that all facts, including mental facts, are ultimately physical facts or fully determined by physical facts.

Question 24: Contextualism in epistemology holds that the truth conditions for knowledge attributions vary with:

The coherence of the system
The content of the belief
The context of the attributor (Correct answer)
The reliability of the process

Correct answer: The context of the attributor

Epistemic contextualism, defended by DeRose and Cohen, argues that what counts as 'knowing' shifts depending on conversational context.

Question 25: Which term refers to the view that scientific theories are merely useful instruments for prediction, not descriptions of unobservable reality?

Instrumentalism (Correct answer)
Naturalized epistemology
Scientific realism
Coherentism

Correct answer: Instrumentalism

Instrumentalism holds that scientific theories need not be literally true about unobservable entities as long as they produce accurate predictions.

Question 26: Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper challenged the JTB account of knowledge by providing cases where justified true belief is:

A form of skepticism
Equivalent to wisdom
Insufficient for knowledge (Correct answer)
Unnecessary for knowledge

Correct answer: Insufficient for knowledge

Gettier cases show that a person can have a justified true belief yet still lack knowledge due to epistemic luck.

Question 27: Descartes' method of doubt in the Meditations is an example of which epistemological approach?

Pragmatism
Reliabilism
Contextualism
Methodological skepticism (Correct answer)

Correct answer: Methodological skepticism

Descartes used systematic doubt as a method to strip away uncertain beliefs and find indubitable foundations for knowledge.

Question 28: Higher-order theories of consciousness hold that a mental state is conscious when it is accompanied by:

Global availability in a workspace
A higher-order mental state representing it (Correct answer)
A first-order sensory state
Phenomenal qualia

Correct answer: A higher-order mental state representing it

HOT theories, associated with David Rosenthal, argue that consciousness requires a higher-order thought that one is in a given mental state.

Question 29: Platonism in metaphysics holds that abstract objects such as numbers and properties:

Exist independently of minds and concrete things (Correct answer)
Reduce to physical patterns
Are useful fictions
Are mental constructions

Correct answer: Exist independently of minds and concrete things

Plato argued that abstract entities like the Form of Beauty or the number 7 have objective, mind-independent existence in a non-physical realm.

Question 30: G.E. Moore's 'open question argument' was designed to refute:

Ethical naturalism (Correct answer)
Divine command theory
Social contract theory
Moral skepticism

Correct answer: Ethical naturalism

Moore argued that for any natural property F, it remains an open question whether 'what is F is good,' showing goodness cannot be identified with any natural property.

Question 31: You are writing your dissertation and realize two of your core claims are inconsistent. The process of revising both your principles and your particular judgments until they align is called:

Transcendental deduction
Inductive generalization
Reflective equilibrium (Correct answer)
Inference to the best explanation

Correct answer: Reflective equilibrium

Reflective equilibrium, developed by Rawls, involves iteratively adjusting general principles and particular judgments until they cohere with each other.

Question 32: Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states that any consistent formal system capable of expressing basic arithmetic contains statements that are:

Neither true nor false
True but unprovable within the system (Correct answer)
Provable only with additional axioms from outside
Both provable and disprovable

Correct answer: True but unprovable within the system

Gödel showed that in any consistent, sufficiently strong formal system, there are truths it cannot prove, undermining Hilbert's program for a complete axiomatization of mathematics.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Qualifying Examination in Philosophy

The PhD qualifying examination tests doctoral candidates on core areas of academic philosophy including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind, requiring mastery of major philosophical traditions and the ability to critically analyze philosophical arguments.

Questions

35 min

Time Limit

70%

To Pass

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