This week I am unashamedly advocating why you should use PI for your studies to help you get an A grade as I’m aware that at the beginning of the year many of you will be new to the A level course. So here are twelve good reasons – and a new competition announced for you to win a free book!

Progressive – PI starts easy and then moves into more complex issues. As you start a topic begin with the section ‘start here’ which gives you an overview and several hyperlinks and then move on to the handout and extracts from key philosophers. You can use the extracts for quotes to illustrate your main points in an essay. Finally I have selected some articles which are available from the internet by leading academics – for those who want to be A*!!

Pitched just right – textbooks try to say everything in 250 pages. That’s impossible, and leads to over-generalisation which is the enemy of proper, nuanced philosophy. So instead of relying on textbooks try using the method outlined here – building up your understanding layer by layer until enlightenment comes. My handouts are designed to be pitched above the standard textbook.

Innovative – you will find ideas here on how to integrate philosophy with culture, for example, documentaries and films both old and new. You can get hold of many of my film suggestions from a charity shop dvd collection for £1.50 – good value considering we are trying to become culture readers who critically assess the ideas of our time.

Community based – write to me with your problems and ideas – I read everything and if I have time, will sometimes reply! There are a number of authors who write for the site and also write books for us – but everyone who ever uses the site is part of this community. The idea of the DISQUS box at the bottom of every article is for you to add a comment – not to ask me a question as I won’t have enough time to reply to all of these and comments are more useful than questions. There are up to 30,000 users of the site so you can imagine I would never sleep if I answered every question!

Practical exam tips – see guidelines and model essays section and tell me if they’re useful! The guidelines in each section (I’m building them up as I write!) is where I comment on all the available material on a specific exam question – that is, examiner report, examiner mark scheme and examiner comments on content. These comments are often ambiguous and over-generalised, so need interpretation. Teachers, please add your own comments if I’ve got something wrong! Model answers are those scoring 90% plus in an actual exam – see each section for one or two.

Contemporary examples – see new document I’ve created in the abortion or euthanasia sections giving up to date examples throughout the year from key newspaper articles. You can read these articles for yourself by pressing the hyperlink or as teacher, use one or two in class for discussion. More to cme on all the applied ethical issues. Remember, examiners require us to use examples so..keep an eye on this part of the site!

Fabulously clear handouts – I aim to make the handouts crystal clear as to the meaning of complex ideas. So try reading these on each section of the site, and compare it with your textbooks. If anything is unclear or a misinterpretation of some idea, please add a DISQUS comment and I will guarantee to revisit it – I read all these comments every week.

Thinking skills – this is not a revision site although I will add revision documents a few weeks before the exams with my exam question predictions for this year. Instead, this is a thinking skills site – where we try to explore how to think analytically and evaluatively through different issues. The words ‘analysis’ and ‘evaluation’ roughly correspond to what the examiner calls AO1 and AO2 skills. At AS you need to explain nd analyse in part a and evaluate in part b – there’s strict separation in the mark scheme which collapses at A2 – where you need to weave the two together.

Experience-based – a lifetime of trying and, glad to say, often succeeding in teaching for an A grade since I first qualified as teacher in 1982 has led me to conclude that much more needs to be said and discussed about how to produce thinking philosophers who address issues of our current age intelligently and creatively. This is a core life-skill, I believe, so if you run with this as an idea and a goal I believe you will be much more likely to flourish and fulfil your true potential. Let’s go for it! Don’t teach and learn for an exam but teach and learn for skills and we will all be much better off.

Replaces boring textbooks – I hate the way chief examiners have been persuaded to write textbooks and then these textbooks are endorsed by the board. Just because you happen to be a chief examiner it doesn’t follow you are the world’s greatest philosopher or the clearest writer. And anyway, I don’t think the study of philosophy and ethics lends itself to textbooks who try to says everything in a relatively short space. We need to liberate our imaginations and not just charge up our memories to be good philosophers.

And finally – integrated with brilliant books and revision guides. The website remains free forever but I hope you will buy my books – otherwise I am doomed to a life on a state pension writing blogs by the light of a candle. That’s an exaggeration but the books are supposed to be brilliant so if you don’t agree, please write to me and I promise I will rewrite them! I know that’s eleven but the twelfth is fairly obvious and mentioned above – the website is my hobby and completely free! (I also like fishing, sailing, art, and poetry!!!).

Image: Ludwig Wittgenstein, my hero, who fought for Austria on the Italian front during WW1 opposite my grandad who was stationed on the River Piave. Fortunately my grandad missed! © Here