Personal Statement:Philosophy 4

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Before I reached the sixth form, the subject that I enjoyed most was English. I loved to read books, discuss them in class, and write essays expressing what I thought. However, I had many questions about the literature I was studying, and about English in general, to which I had difficulty finding straight answers. One question preoccupied me more than any other: what exactly is it that makes one book better than another? This dilemma bothered me, but I assumed that, like calculus in Mathematics or subjunctives in French, it was simply too difficult to study for GCSE. I did not doubt that an answer existed, and I looked forward to discovering it as part of the A-level syllabus.

The next year, I studied calculus in Mathematics, subjunctives in French and gerunds in Latin; my curiosity was satisfied even as it was excited by new problems that I had not even considered previously. However, the problem that most interested me came no closer to being solved.

I went to my English teacher with my problem and he suggested that it might be better solved by philosophy than by English. So I borrowed the books that he suggested, and before long I had read about Sartre, Barthes and Saussure, and their doctrines existentialism, structuralism and semiotics. I enjoyed these authors’ aggressive styles, and I felt clever talking about signifiers and signifieds, “en-soi”s and “pour-soi”s and the “absurdity of existence”.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?

It wasn’t until I read the Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell that I began to suspect that I had been wasting my time with these authors. This book was different to the philosophy that I had read so far: instead of producing a dazzling display of detailed terminology, the author seemed to have tried to avoid technical language; rather than attack his opponents for being bourgeois or having ‘bad faith’, he dealt only with their arguments; rather than draw moral and political conclusions from his reasoning, he claimed that philosophy could do no more than “diminish the risk of error”. Most conspicuously, when Russell posited a question, he invariably came to a definite conclusion about what its answer was, or whether it could be answered at all. I could see clearly that this type of philosophy was essentially different from what I had encountered before, and I began to wonder what the distinction might be. I did not have to wait long to find out.

Language, Truth and Logic by A.J. Ayer not only gave me a clear answer to this question; it also solved my original problem. Ayer’s aims were to show which statements could possibly be true or false and to clarify what was the precise role of philosophy.

In order to achieve his first aim, Ayer simply divided statements into those that could be shown to be true or false, or ‘verified’, which he called propositions, and those that could not, which he called ‘metaphysical’ statements. He then explained the only two ways to verify statements: logical reasoning and empirical induction. Only tautologies or contradictions -“analytic” propositions - could be verified by logical reasoning, and only statements that predicted future sense experience - “synthetic” propositions - could be verified by empirical induction. So only these statements could possibly be true or false.

The role of philosophy, Ayer went on, was to produce analytic propositions. It could not produce synthetic propositions, since that would make it a branch of science, but it could still be useful if it helped to make clear the meanings of science’s often-complex terminology. Having set out what constituted acceptable philosophy, Ayer noted that his definition failed to cover many common philosophical topics like God, “the absolute”, aesthetics and ethics. However, he concluded that the defect was not in his work, but in these topics: statements about them were ‘metaphysical’ according to his original definition, and it was pointless to argue about statements that were impossible to verify.

I found this argument convincing, though I am still not sure why there should necessarily be only two ways to verify statements. Nonetheless, I could now answer my two questions: Russell’s philosophy consisted of verifiable analytic statements, while the other philosophy, whether or not it was ‘meaningless’, was apparently not verifiable by Ayer’s criteria. If there was any statement to answer my question “what makes one book better than another” it would have to be a synthetic one, to be found using science.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

However, this realisation did not inspire me to give up philosophy and take up science, but rather to continue investigating philosophy. It was the philosophical features of my problem - the clarifying of the question and the precise definition of its terms, as opposed to the actual gathering of data - that had interested me.

How personal statements have changed?

The current personal statement format, with three 'scaffolding' questions, was introduced by Ucas in September 2025. This personal statement was submitted before then, using the old essay-style format. It has been carefully edited into the three-question format, with all of the original wording kept.

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