What is the interviewer looking for?

Crossing the bridge ...

If you are going for an interview for PPE at Oxford, you will have at least three interviews - one for each of your three subjects. This blog offers some help with the sort of questions you might be asked by your prospective philosophy tutors. You should use these questions as exercises for thinking about what these questions are about. You do that in the first place by trying to express your views in a clear and straightforward manner. As you do this you should find that there are more and more things to say. The problem then becomes how to marshall your opinions in a way that is coherent and to the point. This can only be done by practicing with a variety of questions. This blog is designed to give you the opportunity to do just that. It is intended for students who in all probability have had no experience with philosophy. You shouldn't see that as a disadvantage at all. Nobody expects you to know about these things and many tutors are probably not too keen on the kind of pigeonholing approach encouraged by the A Level examination in Philosophy. What people want to see is some personal ability to analyse these problems and that can only be assessed by the way you express yourself. This kind of ability can be improved greatly with some practice.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but some approaches will be more or less appropriate than others. Much will depend on your own ability to phrase things well and clearly. Good candidates will be able to develop their answers in relevant or interesting ways. The one thing you should avoid is being dismissive or giving dogmatic answers. Don't say, 'That's ridiculous! Of course he would do X or Y'. You have to be able to take a certain distance from the situations outlined in these example questions making it clear how one might look at things in either this or some other way. It's good if you can argue a case for different points of view. You can in the end come down on one side and reject the other, but the conclusion is not the most important thing. That as we've said is showing that you have an ability to give a clear analysis of some of the issues raised by the question you have been asked to consider.

Get a place for your bike

Over the next few weeks I'll publish a few questions of the kind that the interviewers might ask. I'll post one problem at a time and give you a chance to think about it for a couple of days. Then a little later I'll post some comments of my own about each. You can join the site and get emails of each new post sent to you so that you don't have to check back all the time. I hope you get some enjoyment out of thinking about these problems. That would be a good indication that you might enjoy the subject at Oxford or wherever you end up studying. They're all good places. It's more what you make of them.

For the next post, click on Blog Archive which you should find above on the right with the earliest first.