IBDP Philosophy SL
The IB Diploma Programme Philosophy Standard Level course invites students to engage with some of the most profound and enduring questions in human thought: What am I? Can I know anything with certainty? What makes an action right or wrong? Does God exist? What is justice? What is beauty? Rather than treating philosophy as a body of facts to be memorised, the IB approach develops students as philosophical thinkers — people who can construct rigorous arguments, identify hidden assumptions, evaluate competing positions, and reach justified conclusions under genuine uncertainty.The course is organised around a core theme and two prescribed themes. The core theme, Being Human, is studied by all students and explores personal identity, the mind-body problem, free will and determinism, and competing conceptions of human nature. Students then choose two from six prescribed themes — Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, and Aesthetics — allowing genuine depth of engagement with areas of philosophical inquiry that resonate with their interests and future studies. A prescribed philosophical text is also studied in depth, developing close-reading and textual analysis skills alongside the broader thematic work.Assessment at SL comprises two external papers and an internal assessment. Paper 1 tests the core theme through short-answer and extended-response questions. Paper 2 tests the prescribed themes through essay questions and the prescribed text through passage-based analysis. The internal assessment is an 800-word philosophical analysis of a non-philosophical stimulus — an image, object, or short text — in which students demonstrate their ability to identify philosophical problems in everyday life and engage with them rigorously.AccelaStudy's adaptive platform maps every leaf goal in this specification to targeted lessons, practice questions, contrastive pairs that highlight common confusions between philosophical positions, and tribunal-style verdict exercises that simulate the evaluative reasoning required in extended responses. Whether you are working through the trolley problem, Descartes' evil demon, Rawls's veil of ignorance, or Hume's standard of taste, AccelaStudy ensures you build both the conceptual understanding and the argumentative fluency needed to excel in IB Philosophy SL.
210
Minutes
60
Questions
4/7
Passing Score
$173
Exam Cost
Who Should Take This
This course is designed for IB Diploma students taking Philosophy at Standard Level who want structured, adaptive support across all components of the course. It is ideal for students who are new to philosophy and need to build foundational skills in argumentation and conceptual analysis, as well as for those who have some philosophical background and want to deepen their engagement with the core and prescribed themes. Students preparing for Paper 1, Paper 2, or the internal assessment will find targeted practice and feedback. It is also valuable for students in humanities, social sciences, or law who want to strengthen their analytical writing and critical thinking skills beyond the philosophy classroom.
What's Covered
1Personal identity and the self; mind, body, and consciousness; free will and determinism; human nature. Assessed in Paper 1.
2One of: Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of religion, Philosophy of mind, Political philosophy, Aesthetics. Assessed in Paper 2 Section A.
3A second prescribed theme from the same list. Assessed in Paper 2 Section A.
4One text from the IB prescribed list studied in depth. Assessed in Paper 2 Section B (passage-based analysis).
5800-word philosophical analysis of a non-philosophical stimulus (image, object, or short text) connecting to a prescribed theme; teacher-marked, externally moderated.
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
13 Activity Formats
Course Outline
1Core Theme: Being Human 3 topics
Personal Identity and the Self
- Define personal identity and outline the central philosophical question of what makes a person the same individual over time, referencing key thinkers such as Locke, Hume, and Parfit.
- Explain the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, distinguishing it from bodily continuity and soul-based accounts, and apply each to thought experiments such as teleportation and brain transplants.
- Evaluate the bundle theory of the self as proposed by Hume, contrasting it with Kantian and existentialist accounts of selfhood, and assess which best accounts for human experience of identity.
Mind, Body, and Consciousness
- Describe the mind-body problem and identify the main positions — substance dualism, physicalism, property dualism, and idealism — with reference to Descartes, Ryle, and contemporary philosophers.
- Explain Descartes' argument for substance dualism, including the cogito and the conceivability argument, and analyse the interaction problem as a major objection to Cartesian dualism.
- Evaluate physicalist theories of mind — including identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism — assessing their ability to account for qualia and the hard problem of consciousness.
Free Will, Determinism, and Human Nature
- Define hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism, and outline the key arguments each position offers regarding the relationship between causation and human freedom.
- Explain compatibilist accounts of free will — particularly those of Hume and Frankfurt — distinguishing freedom as the ability to act on one's desires from freedom as the absence of causal determination.
- Evaluate competing conceptions of human nature — including rationalist, empiricist, existentialist, and biological determinist views — assessing their implications for moral responsibility and social policy.
2Prescribed Theme A: Epistemology 2 topics
The Nature and Sources of Knowledge
- Define knowledge, belief, truth, and justification, and outline the traditional tripartite definition of knowledge as justified true belief, including Gettier's counterexamples.
- Explain the rationalist claim that reason is the primary source of knowledge, contrasting Descartes' method of doubt and innate ideas with Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason.
- Explain the empiricist claim that all knowledge derives from sensory experience, analysing Locke's tabula rasa, Berkeley's idealism, and Hume's fork between relations of ideas and matters of fact.
- Evaluate the debate between rationalism and empiricism as sources of knowledge, assessing Kant's synthetic a priori as an attempted resolution and its philosophical significance.
Scepticism, Perception, and Justification
- Describe Cartesian scepticism, the evil demon hypothesis, and the brain-in-a-vat scenario, identifying how these thought experiments challenge the reliability of sensory knowledge.
- Analyse foundationalism and coherentism as theories of epistemic justification, distinguishing their structural accounts of how beliefs are warranted and identifying key objections to each.
- Evaluate responses to scepticism — including Moorean common sense, reliabilism, and contextualism — assessing the extent to which any response successfully defeats the sceptical challenge.
3Prescribed Theme B: Ethics 2 topics
Normative Ethical Theories
- Define consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, and outline the central moral question each theory addresses regarding what makes an action right or a person good.
- Explain utilitarian ethics as developed by Bentham and Mill, distinguishing act from rule utilitarianism, and analyse the hedonic calculus and the greatest happiness principle as decision procedures.
- Explain Kant's deontological ethics, including the categorical imperative in its three formulations, and apply the universalizability test and the formula of humanity to concrete moral dilemmas.
- Explain Aristotelian virtue ethics, including eudaimonia, the doctrine of the mean, and the role of practical wisdom (phronesis), and analyse how character-based ethics differs from rule- and outcome-based approaches.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics by applying each to a shared moral dilemma, assessing which theory provides the most defensible moral guidance.
Metaethics and Applied Ethics
- Describe the metaethical positions of moral realism, moral anti-realism, emotivism, and relativism, identifying what each claims about the nature and status of moral judgements.
- Analyse the is-ought gap (Hume's guillotine) and the naturalistic fallacy (Moore), explaining why these arguments challenge attempts to derive moral conclusions from non-moral facts.
- Evaluate moral relativism — including cultural relativism and individual subjectivism — assessing whether the diversity of moral beliefs across cultures undermines the possibility of universal moral truths.
4Prescribed Theme C: Philosophy of Religion 2 topics
Arguments for the Existence of God
- Outline the cosmological argument in its Kalam and Thomistic forms, identifying the key premises regarding causation, contingency, and the need for a first cause or necessary being.
- Explain the teleological argument from design — including Paley's watchmaker analogy and Aquinas's fifth way — and analyse Hume's and Darwin's objections to design-based reasoning.
- Explain Anselm's ontological argument and Descartes' version, distinguishing the concept of a greatest conceivable being from existence as a predicate, and analyse Kant's and Gaunilo's objections.
- Evaluate the cumulative case for theism, assessing whether the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments together provide sufficient rational justification for belief in God.
The Problem of Evil and Religious Language
- Describe the logical and evidential problems of evil, distinguishing moral from natural evil, and identify the Epicurean dilemma as a challenge to the coherence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God.
- Analyse theodicies — including the free will defence, Irenaeus's soul-making theodicy, and Plantinga's modal response — assessing how each attempts to reconcile evil with divine attributes.
- Evaluate the meaningfulness of religious language, contrasting cognitive and non-cognitive approaches, and assess the verificationist challenge, Wittgenstein's language games, and analogical predication.
5Prescribed Theme D: Political Philosophy 2 topics
The State, Legitimacy, and Social Contract
- Define political authority, legitimacy, and the state of nature, and outline how Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each construct a social contract to justify political authority.
- Explain Locke's theory of natural rights and limited government, distinguishing his account of legitimate authority from Hobbes's Leviathan, and analyse the implications for the right to revolution.
- Evaluate anarchist and libertarian critiques of state authority, assessing whether the state can be justified on grounds of consent, utility, or natural duty, and the extent to which political obligation is binding.
Justice, Liberty, and Equality
- Describe Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, including the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the two principles of justice, and identify how they are intended to generate a fair social contract.
- Analyse Nozick's libertarian critique of Rawlsian redistribution, explaining the entitlement theory of justice and the Wilt Chamberlain argument against patterned principles of distribution.
- Evaluate competing conceptions of liberty — negative liberty as freedom from interference (Berlin) versus positive liberty as self-mastery — assessing their implications for the scope of state intervention.
6Prescribed Theme E: Aesthetics 2 topics
The Nature of Art and Aesthetic Experience
- Define aesthetic experience, the sublime, and the beautiful, and outline how Kant distinguishes judgements of taste from judgements of the agreeable and the morally good in the Critique of Judgement.
- Explain competing definitions of art — including imitation theory, expression theory, formalism, and institutional theory (Dickie) — and apply each to contested cases such as conceptual art and found objects.
- Evaluate the relationship between art and morality, assessing autonomism versus moralism and the question of whether the ethical content of a work is relevant to its aesthetic value.
Interpretation, Intention, and Aesthetic Judgement
- Describe the intentionalist, anti-intentionalist, and reader-response approaches to the interpretation of artworks, identifying the role of the author's intention in determining correct interpretation.
- Analyse whether aesthetic judgements are objective or subjective, examining Hume's standard of taste and the tension between the universality of aesthetic claims and the diversity of aesthetic responses.
- Evaluate the concept of aesthetic value, discussing whether beauty, sublimity, or artistic merit can be meaningfully ranked and whether cultural context undermines or enriches aesthetic judgement.
7Prescribed Text Study 1 topic
Close Reading and Textual Analysis
- Identify the central thesis, key arguments, and philosophical method of the prescribed text, outlining the historical and intellectual context in which the philosopher was writing.
- Explain the logical structure of key passages from the prescribed text, distinguishing premises from conclusions, identifying implicit assumptions, and reconstructing arguments in standard form.
- Evaluate the philosophical significance of the prescribed text by assessing the strength of its central arguments, identifying major objections raised by other philosophers, and judging the text's lasting contribution.
8Philosophical Skills and Methods 3 topics
Argumentation and Logical Analysis
- Define deductive and inductive argument forms, identify validity and soundness in deductive arguments, and distinguish strong from weak inductive arguments with reference to philosophical examples.
- Identify common informal fallacies — including ad hominem, straw man, false dichotomy, slippery slope, and appeal to authority — and explain why each undermines the cogency of a philosophical argument.
- Construct a well-structured philosophical argument on a given claim, incorporating a clear thesis, supporting premises, anticipation of objections, and a justified conclusion appropriate to IB extended-response format.
Thought Experiments and Conceptual Analysis
- Describe the philosophical function of thought experiments, identifying how scenarios such as the trolley problem, the Chinese room, and the experience machine are used to test intuitions and reveal conceptual commitments.
- Apply conceptual analysis to key philosophical terms — including justice, freedom, knowledge, and consciousness — distinguishing necessary and sufficient conditions and identifying counterexamples to proposed definitions.
- Evaluate the limits of thought experiments as philosophical tools, assessing objections based on intuition pump bias, unrealistic stipulations, and the gap between conceivability and metaphysical possibility.
Internal Assessment: Philosophical Analysis
- Identify a non-philosophical stimulus — such as an image, object, or short text — and outline the philosophical question or problem it raises, connecting it explicitly to a prescribed theme from the IB syllabus.
- Explain how the chosen stimulus connects to a specific philosophical concept or debate, demonstrating understanding of relevant philosophical positions and applying them to the stimulus in an original and coherent way.
- Construct an 800-word philosophical analysis of a non-philosophical stimulus that presents a clear philosophical question, engages with relevant positions, anticipates objections, and reaches a justified philosophical conclusion.
9Exam Technique and Assessment Preparation 1 topic
Paper 1 and Paper 2 Response Strategies
- Describe the structure of Paper 1 (core theme: Being human) and Paper 2 (prescribed themes and text), identifying the types of questions, mark allocations, and time management strategies for each component.
- Apply IB command terms — including analyse, discuss, evaluate, examine, and to what extent — to structure responses appropriately, distinguishing the depth and approach required by each command term in philosophy papers.
- Evaluate sample philosophy responses against IB marking criteria, identifying features of high-scoring answers — including clarity of argument, engagement with counterarguments, and use of philosophical vocabulary — and applying these to self-assessment.
Scope
Included Topics
- Core theme: Being human — identity, consciousness, personal identity, the mind-body problem, free will and determinism, human nature
- Four prescribed themes (students study two at SL): Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of religion, Philosophy of mind, Political philosophy, Aesthetics
- Prescribed philosophical texts: one text studied in depth for the HL essay (SL students study one text for Paper 2 Section B)
- Three assessment components: Paper 1 (core theme, 30%), Paper 2 (prescribed themes and text, 40%), Internal Assessment (philosophical analysis, 30%)
- Key philosophical methods: conceptual analysis, thought experiments, argumentation, counter-argument, dialectical reasoning
- Major philosophical traditions and thinkers relevant to each theme: rationalism, empiricism, existentialism, analytic philosophy, continental philosophy
- IB command terms taxonomy: analyse, compare, contrast, define, describe, discuss, evaluate, examine, explain, identify, justify, outline, state, to what extent
- Four assessment objectives (AO1 knowledge, AO2 application/analysis, AO3 synthesis/evaluation, AO4 philosophical skills) applied across all components
- Internal assessment: 800-word philosophical analysis of a non-philosophical stimulus (image, object, or short text) connecting to a prescribed theme
- Philosophical inquiry skills: identifying assumptions, recognizing fallacies, constructing valid arguments, evaluating philosophical positions
Not Covered
- HL-only components: HL essay (25%) and extended engagement with a single prescribed text across all papers
- Eastern philosophical traditions beyond those explicitly referenced in the IB syllabus as illustrative examples
- History of philosophy as a standalone chronological survey — philosophy is approached thematically, not historically
- Formal symbolic logic beyond basic argument structure (propositional logic, predicate logic, modal logic at advanced level)
- Psychology, neuroscience, or cognitive science content beyond philosophical relevance to mind-body and consciousness debates
- Religious studies content beyond philosophical analysis of religious claims and arguments
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