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IAS Mains Previous Year Paper Philosophy (1976)

IAS Mains Previous Year Paper Philosophy (1976)

IAS Mains Previous Year Paper Philosophy (1976)

Philosophy-1976 (Mains)

1. Discuss the concept of freedom vis-à-vis discipline efficiency and decision-making. Examine their exact roles in democracy.


What exactly do you mean by ‘time’? Would you subscribe to the view that time is unreal?


2. Is ’the greatest good of the greatest number’ a faultless moral standard? Can there be any other standard for running a State?

3. Analyze the concepts of stability and progress. In what measure should they affect the life of

(i) an ordinary individual or entrepreneur and

(ii) a State

4. Examine the relation between duty and right. How are they connected with what is called good’?

5. Analyze the concept of action and discuss in this connection whether and how far niskama-kanna is possible.

6. Discuss whether capital punishment should be abolished.

7. Can there be morality without religion? Answer with special reference to the Indian notion of dharma.


8. What exactly does appearance differ from reality? The Advaitins think that the only explanation of perceptual error is that it cannot be explained (anirvacaniyakhyati) Discuss.

9. Analyze the notion of cause with special reference to the following points:

(a) Whether the distinction between subjective and objective sequence has any effect on the theory of causation.

(b) Whether and in what sense casual connection is objective.

10. If the whole field of experience is under the jurisdiction of science, is there any talks left to philosophy? Or would you say a philosopher is necessarily a ‘rationalist and empirical science need not bother about philosophy?

11. How exactly is consciousness related to matter (particularly to body)? Can one’s consciousness be taken to be metaphysically independent of his body?

12. Does the existence of a thing depend upon its knower? Does it depend on him like values depending on one who prescribes or appreciates? Or would you say that values and facts are equally independent of whether someone knows, prescribes or appreciates?

13. Can one prove the existence of God? What are the Nyaya, Advaita and Kantian answers to this question?



20 Jan, 2020, 17:53:26 PM