School started again a couple of weeks ago, and in Year 3 a subject arrives that nobody has done before: philosophy. It starts from zero, and in most classes the first oral test falls in October — for almost everyone the first philosophy oral test of their life, and the first time they find out that “studying philosophy” does not mean what studying history meant.
The syllabus starts from the Presocratics, goes through Socrates and Plato and reaches Aristotle and the Hellenistic age by the end of the year: a path that is built over the first two months. If you set up your method badly on Thales and Anaximander, you carry it with you all year; if you set it up well, you reuse it unchanged on Descartes in Year 4 and on Nietzsche in Year 5. It is worth understanding how to do it in the first three weeks, before rushing to learn the names.
What the first oral test really asks
In history the game is already known: you read, memorise dates and facts, and give them back in the right order. In philosophy the book seems to ask for the same thing — a chapter, a philosopher, a “position” to repeat — and indeed very many people study it that way. But the oral test asks for something else: not “what did Thales say” but “why did he say it” and “what would he reply to someone who disagrees”. A question that in history almost never comes, and catches unprepared even those who have read the whole chapter.
There is also a problem of volume: in Year 3 the philosophy textbook asks for thirty, forty pages per oral test, a load that in Years 1 and 2 did not exist in any subject. With that volume, studying to repeat by heart stops working — it does not hold, and in any case it is no use, because it is not what is asked. You need a method that makes the content lighter to carry to the oral test, not just to read the night before.
The classic mistake: the list of “elements”
The most common way to study the Presocratics — understandable, because it is often also the way the book presents them — is as a list: Thales said water, Anaximander the apeiron, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire. Names paired with a word, learned the way you learn a list of dates in history.
Given back like that, the list is worth a 5. The teacher’s next question is almost always the same: “and why water in particular? What does Anaximander find unconvincing in Thales’ answer?” Whoever has learned only the name-word pairing has nothing to answer, because they never knew it: they only read it.
The underlying mistake is to think the Presocratics are independent answers to the same question, to be kept in mind one by one. They are not: they are a single debate that moves forward one step at a time, where each philosopher answers the limit left uncovered by the previous one. Anaximander does not propose the apeiron at random: he proposes it because he found a precise problem in Thales’ answer. An oral test that shows this shift, philosopher after philosopher, is worth an 8 while staying on the same names that someone who got a 5 would have used: the only thing that changes is what you can say about them.
The method: question, answer, argument
The way out of the list is to change the unit of study. You do not study “a philosopher”: you study three things for each philosopher, always in the same order.
- The question. What is the precise problem he is answering? Not a generic problem (“the world”), but the exact question — often it is precisely the one left open by whoever comes before.
- The answer. The thesis, in one sentence, with no filler adjectives.
- The argument. The reason for that answer and not another. It is the part almost everyone skips, and it is the only one the teacher really checks.
Before applying it, it is worth fixing the basic vocabulary, because it is the same for all five years of philosophy — the authors change, not the words:
- ἀρχή (arche): the principle, that from which everything originates.
- φύσις (physis): nature as birth and transformation — not the landscape.
- κόσμος (cosmos): the universe as order, the opposite of chaos.
- λόγος (logos): the rational structure that governs things and makes them comprehensible.
- being / becoming: being is what endures; becoming is the change that the senses show every day. A large part of the history of philosophy discusses which of the two is the true reality.
With these words already settled, question-answer-argument is written much faster, because the vocabulary does not have to be reinvented each time.
The debate on the arche, from Thales to Democritus
The Milesians open the debate with a new question: beneath the continuous change of things, is there a single principle that stays the same? Thales answers water: it is the only substance observable in the three states — solid, liquid, vapour — and it is linked to the birth and nourishment of every living being. A still concrete answer: the principle is a substance you can point at with a finger.
Anaximander, his pupil, finds a precise limit in that answer: if the principle were already qualified, like water, cold and wet, how could it generate its opposite, fire, hot and dry? A determinate substance cannot contain its own contrary. His answer is a step of abstraction: the apeiron (ἄπειρον), the indeterminate without boundaries or qualities of its own, from which opposites “separate out” and then return, almost as if paying for a fault. Anaximenes goes back to a concrete substance, air, but resolves what neither Thales nor Anaximander had addressed: the mechanism. Through rarefaction and condensation, air that thins becomes fire, air that compresses becomes wind, cloud, water, earth, stone — a single physical process explains all the transitions.
Pythagoras changes the type of answer that is possible: the principle is no longer a substance, it is number. What makes the cosmos an order and not a chaos is a structure of measurable ratios, the same one found in the musical proportions between the lengths of a string: from here on the arche can also be a form, not just a matter.
Heraclitus overturns the question itself: he no longer looks for what stays the same beneath change, because for him change is the deepest truth, not an appearance to be explained away. You cannot step into the same river twice: everything flows. But it is not chaos — there is a logos, a hidden rational law, which governs becoming and makes opposites (day and night, life and death, war and peace) one single thing seen in two moments. The fire he chooses as arche is not one element among others: it is the symbol of what is never still.
Parmenides takes the opposite direction, with a new instrument: not the observation of nature, but pure reasoning. If thinking and being are the same thing, you can only think and say what is; non-being can be neither thought nor said, so it does not exist in any way. From this premise — we see it in full below — he deduces that being is one, eternal, unchanging, and that the movement and multiplicity shown by the senses are an illusion. It is the first argument in Western philosophy built by pure deduction, and that is why it is the watershed of the chapter: whoever comes after must first explain how movement is possible, given that Parmenides has just shown that it should not be.
Empedocles and Anaxagoras respond to exactly this, accepting that nothing comes from nothing but multiplying Parmenides’ being. Empedocles divides it into four eternal roots — earth, water, air, fire — which Love unites and Strife separates: birth and death are only mixing and separation, not real generation. Anaxagoras uses infinite seeds, one for each quality, ordered by an intelligence separate from matter, the Nous. Democritus goes furthest of all: he admits that non-being really exists, as void, and fills it with atoms (ἄτομος, what cannot be cut) — particles that are full, eternal and indivisible like Parmenides’ being, but infinite and free to move precisely because the void exists. An answer that violates Parmenides’ premise at the exact point where he had locked it down, and does so knowingly: the stakes, after Parmenides, are all there.
Three worked examples
1. The question–answer–argument table: Milesians and Eleatics
| Philosopher | Question | Answer | Argument |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thales | What is the single principle from which all things derive? | Water | It is the only substance observable in the three states (solid, liquid, vapour) and it is linked to the birth and nourishment of living beings |
| Anaximander | How can a principle that is already qualified, like water, also generate its opposite? | The apeiron, the indeterminate without boundaries | Only what has no qualities of its own can give rise to all qualities and their opposites, without being used up in either of the two |
| Anaximenes | By what concrete mechanism does a single principle become the infinite things we see? | Air, through rarefaction and condensation | A single observable physical process explains the gradual passage from fire to wind, cloud, water, earth, stone |
| Parmenides | Can what is never have been, or cease to be? | No: being is one, eternal, unchanging; non-being is not | Thinking and saying always presuppose thinking and saying something that is: non-being cannot be conceived, so it does not exist in any way |
| Zeno of Elea | What happens if you admit that multiplicity and movement really exist? | You reach contradictory consequences (Achilles and the tortoise, the arrow at rest) | The paradoxes do not directly prove Parmenides’ thesis, but remove every way out for whoever denies it |
The column that separates a 5 from an 8 is the last one. The first two are already summarised in any textbook; the argument has to be reconstructed, and it is what the teacher really checks when asking “why”.
2. Parmenides’ argument, step by step
Reconstructed as a chain of premises and conclusions, Parmenides’ argument works like this:
- Premise. The possible paths of enquiry are only two: “being is” or “being is not”.
- Premise. The second path is impracticable: thinking and being are the same thing, so you can only think and say what is. Non-being can be neither thought nor said.
- Conclusion 1. Only the path of being remains: non-being does not exist anywhere or at any time — not even as void, not even as “not yet” or “no longer”.
- Conclusion 2. Being cannot have been born nor can it perish: being born would mean coming from a “before” in which it was not, that is, from non-being; perishing would mean passing to an “after” in which it is no more, again non-being. By conclusion 1 this “before” and this “after” do not exist, so being is ungenerated and incorruptible.
- Conclusion 3. Being cannot be multiple: to separate one part of being from another you would need a void, a non-being, between the two. It does not exist, so being is one.
- Conclusion 4. Being cannot move or change: moving means ceasing to be as it was and becoming as it was not yet, that is, bringing in non-being. So being is motionless and unchanging.
- Conclusion 5 (final). Complete and equal to itself in every direction, being is like a well-rounded sphere: if in one direction it were “more” and in another “less”, right where it is “less” there would be a little non-being.
From this chain descends all the rest of the syllabus: Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus do not challenge Parmenides’ method — they all accept that nothing comes from non-being — they only discuss how to save movement and multiplicity without contradicting that premise.
3. A three-minute oral answer: why Heraclitus and Parmenides are opposites
Here is how a well-built answer would sound, at the same level of detail expected in a Year 3 oral test:
“Heraclitus and Parmenides give two opposite answers to the same question: what is truly real, stable being or the becoming we see every day? For Heraclitus the truest reality is continuous change — everything flows, you cannot step into the same river twice — but beneath the change there is a logos, a rational law that holds opposites together: day and night, life and death, are the same thing seen in two different moments. For Parmenides the opposite is true: using only reasoning, not observation, he concludes that being is one, eternal and unchanging, because non-being cannot even be thought. The movement and multiplicity that the senses show are therefore an illusion, not the truth. They are opposites because they rely on two different sources — Heraclitus on the senses and the change they show, Parmenides on reason alone against the senses — and this alternative between senses and reason does not end with them: we find it again, under other names, for the rest of the philosophy syllabus.”
Three minutes, no lists: a thesis at the start, the two positions, the explicit comparison, a final consequence. It is the structure to reuse for any pair of philosophers the teacher sets side by side, in Year 3 as in the years after.
How we work in lessons
With students starting philosophy in Year 3 we spend the first month like this: no summaries from the textbook, but one card per philosopher — question, answer, argument, in three lines — built together in the lesson, not read alone at home. We reconstruct Parmenides’ argument in full as a chain of premises and conclusions, because it comes back identical with Descartes in Year 4 and with Kant in Year 5. Before the oral test we do at least one spoken run-through, timed at three minutes, on a comparison between two philosophers — like the example above.
Philosophy does not arrive alone: at the liceo classico it comes together with physics (a new subject too), while maths and physics stay at 2 hours a week for the whole three years — a rhythm that for many collapses right now, on several fronts at once (we also wrote about it in connection with the first Year 3 physics test). The mock maths and physics tests are not about philosophy — they are calibrated on the maths and physics syllabus, not on the Presocratics or Aristotle — but if the problem these days is not only philosophy, they tell you in a few minutes which topics you are behind on: the correct answer is free, the guided solution unlocks with the first lesson.
For the other subjects in the area you will find the full picture on the page about the humanities subjects. Lessons are online, one-to-one, one hour at a time: the costs (single lesson, 10-hour package) are on the pricing page. Payment is offline — bank transfer, Satispay, PayPal, card, Apple Pay or Revolut — and beforehand, if you like, a free 30-minute introductory call.
The oral-test method also works for history: I wrote it up in the post on history in Year 3. To see how the philosophy syllabus continues, the next step is Descartes and the cogito.
If the problem is not “I don’t understand Thales” but “I don’t know where to start studying philosophy”, it is precisely in the first weeks that you need a hand, not just before the grade. Write to us: we look together at your class’s syllabus and tell you honestly where to start.
