How To Answer An Essay Question
| Pets It can be notoriously difficult to answer a question in a philosophy exam. Hopefully your basic knowledge will be good and you will be able to form the gist of an answer to a question soon after reading it. But the difficult part can often be what question to answer! That may sound odd... the question is in front of you! But in philosophy, the questions are usually so broad that ten candidates could all give completely different, but equally valid, and good answers. So you must decide how you are going to answer the question in advance, and provide a focussed answer rather than one that drifts from one thought stream to another. For instance, imagine that you are set a question to discuss time travel. You can look at this in many different ways: Logically - does time travel seem logical, or does it break standard logics? Metaphysical - perhaps the obvious discipline to answer the question from, what are the metaphysical implications of time travel? Ethical - if time travel were possible, should we engage in it's practice, or would this not be ethical (for instance meddling with the future...) And so on... there are usually many ways to focus in on a philosophical question, and it is best to choose one specific stance or viewpoint and answer the question from that viewpoint. State at the top of your answer that you are going to look at the question from a certain slant. You will find this means you can provide a much more focussed - and hence detailed - answer in the time provided, whilst demonstrating to the examiner that you have thought about what you are writing. It tends to only be the best candidates that take this approach to essay questions. The majority of people will just dump down on the paper in some loose structure everything they know on a topic. So, focus on a very specific line of examination of the question, and you should get much better joy with your marks!
 Questions about philosophy:
|
|
Tweet this!
