Example 1 — Extracting a philosophical issue from a stimulus

Stimulus. A photograph of an elderly woman looking at a photograph of herself as a child. The two images are held in the same frame.

A weak opening:

This image shows an old woman looking at a picture of herself when she was young. It makes us think about how people change as they get older and how memories are important.

A strong opening:

The stimulus raises the problem of personal identity over time: in what sense is the woman holding the photograph the same person as the child in it? They share almost no matter, no beliefs, and no capacities. If they are the same person, something must persist through that change — and the question is what.

The image itself suggests one candidate. The woman recognises the child as herself, which points toward Locke's memory criterion: personal identity consists in psychological continuity, not bodily continuity. I will argue that the memory criterion is closer to what we actually care about than the body criterion, but that it fails as a strict account of identity, and that a narrative view better accommodates the case the photograph presents.

What separates them. The weak version describes the image and gestures at a theme. The strong version names a philosophical problem, uses a detail of the stimulus as evidence for a specific position, and states a thesis. That last sentence — the signposted argument — is what the top bands reward, and it takes thirty seconds to write.

There is no single correct issue in a stimulus question. This image could equally support mind and body, or the constructed self, or the reliability of memory as knowledge. You are marked on the philosophy you build, not on matching a hidden answer.

Example 2 — Analysing an argument into premises and conclusion

Analyse the following argument: "No one is morally responsible for their actions, because every action is caused by prior events the agent did not choose." [6]

The argument can be set out as follows:

P1. Every action is caused by prior events. P2. The agent did not choose those prior events. P3. Moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted otherwise. C. Therefore no one is morally responsible for their actions.

The argument is valid in structure: if every action is fully determined by causes outside the agent's control, and responsibility requires the ability to have done otherwise, then the conclusion follows.

Its weakest point is P3, which is not stated in the original and must be supplied — the argument depends on it and does not defend it. The compatibilist denies P3 directly: what responsibility requires is not that the agent could have done otherwise in an identical universe, but that the action flowed from the agent's own desires and reasoning without coercion. On that account P1 and P2 can be granted and the conclusion still blocked.

P1 is also less secure than it appears. Quantum indeterminacy suggests not every event is fully determined. But this does not help the libertarian: an action that is partly random is not thereby more the agent's own, which is the luck objection. Indeterminism removes necessity without supplying authorship.

6/6.

Two things earn this. Setting the argument out in numbered premises exposes the hidden assumption — and the hidden premise, P3, is where the real dispute lives. Second, the answer notices that undermining P1 does not rescue free will, which is the move most candidates miss: they treat "determinism might be false" as though it settled the matter in favour of freedom.

Example 3 — Evaluation at the top band

Evaluate the claim that the mind is distinct from the body. [10, extract]

Substance dualism holds that mind and body are distinct kinds of thing — the mind non-physical and thinking, the body extended and unthinking. Its appeal is that it takes seriously an apparent difference the alternatives seem to explain away: a thought does not appear to have a mass or a location, and no description of neural tissue seems to be a description of a feeling.

The decisive objection is interaction. If the mind is non-physical, it has no physical properties by which to act on the body, and the body none by which to act on it, yet the two plainly influence one another — a decision moves an arm, a drug alters a mood. Descartes located the interaction in the pineal gland, but naming a site does not explain a mechanism, and any causal contribution from a non-physical mind appears to introduce energy into a closed physical system. The dualist can retreat to epiphenomenalism, conceding that the body affects the mind but not the reverse — but this makes conscious deliberation causally idle, which is very hard to believe of the deliberation that produced the theory.

Physicalism avoids this at a cost. Identity theory faces multiple realisability: if an octopus with entirely different neural architecture feels pain, pain cannot be identical to c-fibre firing. Functionalism repairs this by defining mental states by causal role, but then confronts qualia. Mary, who knows every physical fact about colour vision without having seen colour, appears to learn something on leaving her monochrome room — and if so, the physical facts were not all the facts.

Judgement. The dualist is right that something in conscious experience resists physical description, and the knowledge argument makes that resistance precise rather than merely intuitive. But substance dualism is not the way to honour it: positing a second substance purchases the explanation of experience at the price of making causation inexplicable, which is a worse trade. The more defensible position is that the mind is not a distinct substance while conceding that our current physical vocabulary is incomplete — the explanatory gap is real, but a gap in an account is not evidence for a second kind of thing.

Why this reaches the top band. Both positions are stated at their strongest, and the dualist is given the epiphenomenalist retreat rather than being dismissed. The objections are specific and named. And the conclusion is genuinely qualified: it grants what is right in the view it rejects and identifies precisely where that view overreaches. A confident verdict either way would score lower, because the argument does not establish one.

Educerie · original worked examples written against the published IB syllabus structure for Philosophy, core theme, first assessment 2025. All stimulus material and argument reconstructions are our own; the positions discussed are standard in the philosophical literature. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.