IB Philosophy Past Papers & Drilling (Paper 1): Core Theme Stimulus and Essay Answers

Question 1

Four moves that reach the top band: (1) name the issue precisely (e.g. whether personal identity requires psychological continuity); (2) anchor it in the extract (remembering a wedding tune but not today’s grandson severs memory continuity exactly where it matters); (3) compare at least two positions (memory/psychological continuity vs bodily or brain continuity, or the narrative-self view); (4) test with counterexamples and conclude (anterograde amnesia, Alzheimer’s, duplication thought experiments).
Level descriptors (25-mark task: 0 / 1-5 / 6-10 / 11-15 / 16-20 / 21-25): 21-25 requires a precise statement of the issue, close reference to the stimulus, counterexamples, and a conclusion consistent with the argument.
Sample spine: if identity is memory continuity, the grandmother knows an earlier version of me and the person at the bedside is a stranger; if identity is spatiotemporal/bodily continuity, her mistake is a cognitive fault and changes nothing about who I am – which then raises whether being recognised by others is itself part of who we are (relational identity).

Question 2

What the examiner looks for: the image tests the gap – the torn frame writes death as an interruption of the sequence rather than its completion. A top-band answer (1) names the issue (whether a person requires narrative completeness or tolerates rupture); (2) uses the image’s detail (twelve frames vs the blank; one face changing); (3) compares positions (narrative identity vs biological/animal identity, or a Heideggerian reading in which finitude constitutes a life); (4) evaluates (if the last frame is torn away, do the first eleven still amount to a life?).
Bands: 16-20 = stance and counterexamples present but evaluation thin; 21-25 = both details of the image are turned into argument and the further question – whether the blank is mere ignorance or is itself meaningful – is handled.

Question 1

Argument lines: (1) non-cognitivism (emotivism/expressivism) – moral language expresses attitudes rather than describing facts, so the claim is defensible; (2) the standard reply – the embeddedness of moral language (we say “you were wrong”, not merely “I dislike it”; moral disagreement behaves like disagreement in belief); (3) a hybrid view can keep both; (4) a realist reply that moral judgements are truth-apt.
Credit extra: compare the Confucian idea of rightness (yi) with Humean sentimentalism – Confucian ethics grounds morality in cultivated feeling yet rejects truth-aptness denial, which forces the sharper question whether an emotional basis excludes objectivity.
Conclusion: Evaluate demands a judgement (e.g. emotivism correctly identifies the causal role of feeling but cannot explain the normative force of moral language).

Question 2

Argument map: (1) support – future people will have interests and our choices can foreseeably harm them, so obligations exist; (2) the non-identity problem – if a policy determines who comes to exist, no one can say they were the person harmed, so the harm cannot be assigned; (3) does an obligation require an existing object? (compare duties to the dead and to institutions); (4) a replacement route – locate the duty in institutions and practices (sustainability principles, resource trusts) rather than in non-existent individuals.
Conclusion: an explicit judgement, e.g. the obligation is not to harm the conditions of future wellbeing foreseeably – which is not a copy of the face-to-face model.

Question 3

Test each condition: (1) truth (does lucky truth count?); (2) belief (must it be a conscious belief?); (3) justification (its strength: infinite regress, circularity, foundationalism vs coherentism). (4) Counterexamples: a justified true belief can be true only by luck (Gettier cases), which motivates a no-luck condition (reliable process, or safety/sensitivity).
Evaluate: ask whether patching the definition into “non-lucky justified true belief” costs simplicity, or whether a knowledge-first approach undermines the whole analysis project.
Band hint: 11-15 = lists the three conditions; 16-20 = supplies counterexamples; 21-25 = offers counterexamples and evaluates the repairs.

Question 4

The two poles: (1) empiricism – all concepts trace back to sensory impressions (sensory deprivation thought experiments; a person blind from birth cannot acquire colour concepts); (2) rationalism/innatism – mathematical and logical knowledge, and concepts such as identity and causation, do not rest on sensory instances. (3) A Kantian middle way: experience is where knowledge begins while the forms of knowledge are supplied by the subject. (4) The hard question: does the narrowed claim – all synthetic knowledge needs experience – still hold (is mathematics synthetic a priori)?
Conclusion: decide whether sense experience is a necessary condition or merely a triggering condition; that distinction settles the claim.