PHIL340 – Practice Questions for Final Exam

A few remarks about this document and how to use it.

- This practice set will help you prepare for the final exam. It is very representative of both
the format and type of question that you will find on the actual exam. By composing practice
answers to these questions, you will be faster to answer related questions on the actual
exam. As you work through the practice set, you will likely find it necessary to pause and
review the lecture slides and/or your own lecture notes for a refresher.
- I have not written this practice set with an eye to making it completable within the time
constraints of the exam (i.e., 2.5 hours). I erred on the side of giving you additional questions
for the sake of practice.
- While you can expect to find overlap between the practice set and the actual exam, you
should not assume that all questions that appear on the exam also appear here. You should
anticipate variations on the questions. Accordingly, when a practice question gives you a
choice about which aspect of the course material to write about (e.g., “Explain one argument
that so-and-so offers for the claim that …”, “Describe one way that philosophers have
objected to this argument …”, “Explain one version of such-and-such general account …”), a
sensible strategy is to practice writing multiple answers to the question, corresponding to
each of the available ways one might answer it. That way, if a more specific question appears
on the exam than appears here, you won’t be thrown by it.
- Having said that, if you have limited time on your hands, working through these questions
at least once at least once will be the most efficient and effective way to prepare.
- In the actual exam, questions will vary in the number of points they are worth. You should
pay attention to this information and manage your work accordingly. As a rule, the number
of marks a question is worth will reflects the number of distinct points you should raise in
your answer. I have not included sample marks here, so you will want to be thinking about
how you might write a short concise answer and how you might write a longer, more in-
depth answer. (If a question is worth 1 or 2 marks, you will likely need to write a sentence
or two. If a question is worth 4 or 5 marks, an answer should be more like a paragraph).
- Lastly, I wish everyone the best with the end of term, and please feel free to attend my office
hours if you have any specific questions (though if that turns out not to be possible,
remember that the answers to these questions can be found in the lecture notes).

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QUESTION 1
a) Explain the difference between a valid argument and an argument that proves its
conclusion. [1 mark]
b) Explain why an argument whose premisses are inconsistent is automatically valid. [1
mark]
c) Add at least one extra premiss to turn the following into arguments with consistent
premisses which will prove their conclusions as long as their premisses are true. [4 marks
– 1 mark each]
i)
P1 Jack has been to Buffalo.
C Jack as been to the United States.
ii)
P1 If you don’t owe the government any money in taxes, there is no penalty for not filing a
tax return.
P2 Phil doesn’t owe the government any money in taxes.
C Phil is not legally required to file a tax return.
iii)
P1 There are cases in which global warming causes unusually cold temperatures.
P2 It was unusually cold in Toronto this February.
C Global warming is a real phenomenon.
iv)
P1 Anybody who doesn’t write enough in this exam will not do as well as he or she should.
P2 Anybody who leaves this exam early will
QUESTION 2
(a) Say whether each of the following relations is reflexive, whether it is symmetric, and whether
it is transitive. [6 marks total are available – half a mark for each property of a relation you get
right; half a mark off for each property you get wrong]

(i) x is less than y (in the domain of positive integers)

(ii) x is at least as tall as y (in the domain of people)
(iii) x belongs to the same college as y (in the domain of students at this university)
(iv) x has a border that is also a border of y (in the domain of countries in Europe).

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If you want to, you may give your answers by filling in this table – if you prefer to write your
answers in your book, use the table as a guide to what a complete answer will look like:

Reflexive Symmetric Transitive

(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)

b) Are any of the relations in (a) equivalence relations? Explain your answer. [1 mark]

QUESTION 3
Suppose that at t1 I form a lump of clay, L, into a statue, S. At t2 I squash my statue back into
formlessness again.

(a) Fill in the gaps to produce a version of the puzzle about identity across time raised by this case
[there are THREE gaps – 1 mark each]

1. S ……….(i) L (because L exists at times when S …………. (ii))

2 Between t1 and t2 S and L are in the same place at the same time.

But

3. There cannot be ………. (iii) in the same place at the same time.

(b) What is four-dimensionalism about identity across time (Lewis’s view)? [1 mark]

(c) How would a four-dimensionalist about identity across time (like Lewis) respond to the puzzle
you describe in (a)? [4 marks]

(d) What is primitivism [endurantism/3-dimensionalism] about identity across time (Ayers’

view)? [1 mark]

(e) How would a primitivist [endurantist/3-dimensionalist] about identity across time (like Ayers)
respond to the puzzle? [3 marks]

Consider the following argument.

1 An object, o, persists through a change between t1 and t2 iff, for some property F, o has F
at t1 but not at t2.
2 If x is identical with y then x and y have all their properties in common.
Therefore
3 No object persists through change. [From 1 and 2]
a) Explain why premiss 2 in this argument cannot be rejected. [1 mark]

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b) How would a four dimensionalist about persistence across time respond to this
argument? [4 marks]
c) How would a three dimensionalist about persistence across time respond to this
argument? [3 marks]
QUESTION 4
(a) Here is the truth table for the ‘→’ operator (‘if…then…’):

P Q P→Q
True True True
True False False
False True True
False False True

Explain in terms of this truth table why a counterfactual statement like ‘If Oswald hadn’t killed
Kennedy someone else would have’ is not a statement of form ‘P → Q’. [2 marks]

(b) Here is Lewis’s account of what determines whether a counterfactual conditional is true:

‘p □→ q’ is true if and only if q is true in every p-world which is a member of the same similarity
band relative to the actual world as the p-world which is closest to the actual world.

Now consider the counterfactual conditional ‘If Oswald hadn’t killed Kennedy, someone else
would have’. Explain in a few sentences how someone taking Lewis’s view of counterfactuals
thinks that it is determined whether this statement is true or false. [2 marks]

(c) Consider the following exchange:

Historian 1: On October 18 1216 King John ate too many peaches. This surfeit of peaches caused
his death, which occurred the next day.

Historian 2: We can’t say that the surfeit of peaches was the cause of John’s death because the
barons had arranged to have him murdered on October 20, so if he hadn’t eaten the peaches
he would have died anyway.

i. Which historian would a proponent of Lewis’s counterfactual theory of causation agree

with? Explain your answer. [4 marks]
ii. Which historian would a proponent of Mackie’s regularity account of causation Mackie
agree with? Explain your answer. [4 marks]

(d) Lewis says that one event, e2 depends causally on another, e1, if and only if the following are
both true:

e1 occurs □→ e2 occurs

e1 does not occur □→ e2 does not occur.

i. How does Lewis explain causation in terms of causal dependence? [2 marks]

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 ii. Explain why Lewis adopts the account you have provided at (i) rather than just saying that
e1 causes e2 if and only if e2 depends causally on e1. [2 marks]

(e) Every single time Jack opens the door of the fridge the light in the fridge goes on and a carton
of milk falls onto the floor. But the falling of the milk does not cause the light to come on, and the
light coming on does not cause the milk to fall.

i. Explain why this kind of example raises problems for regularity views of causation (for
example, Mackie’s view.) [4 marks]
ii. What would a proponent of a counterfactual view of causation (Lewis’s view) say about
this kind of example? [4 marks]
iii. What do you think Hume would say about this kind of example. [2 marks]
iv. What might a proponent of Strawson’s (primitivist) view of causation say about the
example? [2 marks]

QUESTION 5 [6 marks]
‘What I can do, relative to one set of facts I cannot do, relative to another, more inclusive, set.’
(Lewis ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’)

Explain the role that this claim plays in Lewis’s solution to the Major Paradox of Time Travel (the
‘Grandfather Paradox’) [6 marks]

QUESTION 6

Suppose today is December 1st, 2024.

(a) Use the information about today’s date to translate the following into the language of the B-
theory. [2 marks - 1 mark each]

(i) It was cold in Vancouver yesterday.

(ii) Tomorrow this horrible exam will be a thing of the past.

(b) Provide alternative translations of (i) and (ii) into the language of the B-theory which do not
use the information about today’s date. [2 marks – 1 mark]

(c) Translate the following into the language of the A-theory. [2 marks – 1 mark each]

(i) The sun shone in Vancouver on December 1st, 2023.

(ii) At some time later than the time of this utterance, Jane will go to Winnipeg.

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QUESTION 7 [8 marks]
Suppose today is December 1st, 2024.

(a) Fill in the gaps to produce an argument for fatalism: [There are FOUR gaps – 1 mark each]

1. We cannot alter the past. [Ancient piece of wisdom.]

2. For all times t and all propositions p, if p is true at t then for all times t*……………………….(i)
[From the B-theory.]

Suppose that

3 On December 1st, 2024 the proposition ‘There is a sea battle going on’ is ………(ii).

[Supposition]

Then

4 For all t*……………………………………………………….. (iii). [From 2, 3]

5 For all t* earlier than now (v), it is true at t* that ‘There is a sea battle going on’ is true on
December 1st 2024. [From 4]

Therefore

6 ………………………………………………………………………… (iv) [From 1, 5]

(b) Explain why 6 follows from 1 and 5. [1 mark]

(c) How would an A-theorist who wants to avoid the fatalist conclusion respond to this
argument? You should both give the A-theorist’s response, and explain how the A-theory makes
this response coherent. [3 marks]