UPHESC Assistant Professor Philosophy 2025 PYQs

Concept: Gandhi insists on the purity of means: means and ends are inseparable, like seed and tree.

1. ‘End justifies the means’ is Machiavellian and contradicts Gandhi.
2. ‘Truth is God’ is his own formula; man is essentially moral; and he did say that where the only choice is between cowardice and violence he would advise violence.

Short trick: Gandhi: ‘Means are the end in the making’ – so B is not consistent.

Concept: Match each thinker with his book.

1. Vivekananda – Jñāna Yoga (lectures on Vedānta).
2. Radhakrishnan – The Recovery of Faith (1955).
3. Tagore – The Religion of Man (Hibbert Lectures, 1930).
4. Gandhi – The Art of Living (compilation of his writings).

Short trick: Only option B gives Tagore → Religion of Man and Vivekananda → Jñāna Yoga.

Concept: In his Jñāna Yoga lecture ‘Māyā and Illusion’ Vivekananda says: “Māyā is not a theory for the explanation of the world; it is simply a statement of facts as they exist.”

1. The world is a mixture of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, life and death – this contradictory state is Māyā.
2. So Māyā describes how things are; it does not explain why they are.

Short trick: Vivekananda: Māyā = ‘statement of fact’.

Concept: In ‘An Idealist View of Life’ Radhakrishnan names three ways of knowing.

1. Sense experience – knowledge of the external world.
2. Discursive reasoning / intellectual cognition – logical, analytical knowledge.
3. Intuitive apprehension – integral, immediate knowledge, the highest form.
4. Dialectical method is Hegel's/Marx's, not Radhakrishnan's.

Short trick: Radhakrishnan's trio: Sense – Intellect – Intuition.

Concept: Plato's theory of Ideas (Forms): the eternal Forms are the true reality; sensible things are copies of them.

1. Particular things ‘participate in’ or ‘imitate’ (mimesis) the Forms – e.g. the allegory of the cave and the divided line.
2. Parmenides denied change; Pyrrho was a sceptic; Pythagoras made number the essence.

Short trick: Copy-world vs Form-world = Plato.

Concept: Locke opens Book I of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) with a systematic refutation of innate ideas.

1. Arguments: no universal consent; children and idiots lack these ideas; all ideas come from sensation and reflection.
2. Descartes and Spinoza (rationalists) accepted innate ideas; Berkeley came after Locke.

Short trick: Locke = Tabula rasa = first critic of innate ideas.

Concept: Leibniz's monads are simple, spiritual, active centres of force, infinite in number.

1. They are ‘windowless’ – nothing enters or leaves them, so they cannot causally interact.
2. Their apparent correspondence is due to pre-established harmony set by God.
3. Hence ‘monads interact with each other’ is not acceptable to Leibniz.

Short trick: Windowless → no interaction → pre-established harmony.

Concept: Match each theory to its classic exponent.

1. Sensationalism (all knowledge from impressions) – Hume.
2. Representationism (ideas represent material objects) – Locke.
3. Subjective idealism (esse est percipi) – Berkeley.
4. Metaphysical pluralism (infinite monads) – Leibniz.

Short trick: H-L-B-L: Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz → A.

Concept: Hegel: “What is rational is real and what is real is rational.”

1. For Hegel thought and being are identical – the categories of Logic are at once categories of reality.
2. Because reality has the same structure as thought, reality is rational – so R explains A.

Short trick: Thought = Being ⇒ Real = Rational.

Concept: Match the philosopher to his famous doctrine.

1. Locke – mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate).
2. Russell – logical atomism.
3. Hegel – the real is rational and the rational is real.
4. Berkeley – esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived).

Short trick: L-T, R-LA, H-R, B-E → a-III, b-IV, c-I, d-II.

Concept: Opening of the Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (B1): “Though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.”

1. Sense experience supplies the matter; the a priori forms (space, time) and categories of the understanding supply the form.
2. This synthesis of empiricism (Locke) and rationalism (Leibniz) is Kant's critical philosophy.

Short trick: Begins with experience (empiricism) + not from experience (rationalism) = Kant's synthesis.

Concept: Early Wittgenstein (Tractatus) held the picture/representational theory of meaning; later Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) rejected it.

1. Later ideas: language games, forms of life, meaning as use, family resemblance, private language argument.
2. The representational (picture) theory belongs to the earlier Tractatus period.

Short trick: Tractatus = Picture; Investigations = Use.

Concept: Philosophical Investigations §109: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

1. Philosophical problems arise when language ‘goes on holiday’; philosophy is therapy that dissolves them.
2. His aim: “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”

Short trick: Bewitchment + fly-bottle = Wittgenstein.

Concept: Moore's ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903) attacked Berkeley's esse est percipi.

1. Moore distinguished the act of consciousness from its object: the object (blue) is not the awareness of blue.
2. So existence of an object does not consist in its being perceived – this launched British neo-realism; Russell followed.

Short trick: Moore 1903 = first refutation of ‘esse est percipi’.

Concept: P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959).

1. Descriptive metaphysics describes the actual structure of our thought about the world; revisionary metaphysics (Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley) tries to produce a better structure.
2. Strawson argues that material bodies and persons are the basic particulars.

Short trick: Strawson: Descriptive vs Revisionary metaphysics.

Concept: Match each philosopher with his major work.

1. Husserl – Ideas (1913).
2. Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations (1953).
3. Sartre – Being and Nothingness (1943).
4. Heidegger – Being and Time (1927).

Short trick: Heidegger = Time, Sartre = Nothingness.

Concept: Existentialists are divided into theistic and atheistic.

1. Theistic: Kierkegaard (father of existentialism – ‘leap of faith’), Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel.
2. Atheistic: Sartre, (Heidegger is usually grouped with the non-theistic), Camus, Nietzsche.

Short trick: Kierkegaard – leap of faith → theistic.

Concept: Match the thinker with his central thesis.

1. Sartre – existence precedes essence.
2. Strawson – material bodies (and persons) are basic particulars (Individuals).
3. Quine – ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951).
4. Husserl – intentionality of consciousness.

Short trick: S-E, S-B, Q-D, H-I → a-II, b-III, c-IV, d-I.

Concept: p ≡ q is true exactly when p and q have the same truth value (TT → T, TF → F, FT → F, FF → T).

1. (A) (p . q) ∨ (~p . ~q): ‘both true or both false’ – the textbook form of material equivalence (Copi’s Equiv rule). Truth table T, F, F, T – correct.
2. (B) (p ∨ q) ⊃ (p . q): TT → T⊃T = T; TF and FT → T⊃F = F; FF → F⊃F = T. Truth table T, F, F, T – it is also exactly equivalent to p ≡ q.
3. (C) (p ⊃ q) ⊃ (p ⊃ q) is a tautology; (D) (p ∨ q) . (~p ∨ ~q) is exclusive-or, the negation of ≡.
4. Since both (A) and (B) define p ≡ q correctly, the question has two correct options as printed and is treated as a bonus.

Short trick: Test any candidate with the pattern T, F, F, T – both (A) and (B) pass.

Concept: This is De Morgan's theorem: ~(~p ∨ ~q) ≡ (~~p . ~~q) ≡ (p . q).

1. Truth table: TT → T≡T; TF → F≡F; FT → F≡F; FF → F≡F – true in every row.
2. So the biconditional is a tautology (always true).

Short trick: Negate the disjunction → conjunction of the negations (De Morgan).