Quiz March 17

Happy St. Pat's Day! (and happy b'day to my sister)...

The quiz originally scheduled for March 5:

1. Sarah Bakewell says 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was following whose example, when he retreated to his tower to write and reflect? PB 52

2. What was Montaigne's "near death experience," and what did it teach him? PB 53

3. What did Montaigne learn from the Epicureans? PB 54



4. The view that we do not perceive objects directly and immediately, but infer them as the causes of our inner ideas or representations, is called representational _______. P 111

OR,
Primary qualities, according to John Locke, include size, shape, and movement. What kind of qualities are color, smell, and taste? P 111

5. When Samuel Johnson kicked a stone and said "I refute it thus," what view (or whose) was he trying to refute? P 116

6. The view that physical objects are just patterns of actual or possible sense experiences is called what? P 117

BONUS: The most satisfactory theory of perception so far, says Nigel, is causal realism. Its starting point is that the biological function of our senses is what? P 118-119

BONUS: A.C. Grayling says "you can't do ____ in philosophy unless you've engaged with _____."

BONUS: How did Montaigne differ from Descartes with respect to the role of doubt? PB 57

BONUS: Name one of the philosophers Bakewell (or Oliver) says Montaigne influenced. PB 59

BONUS: What skeptical slogan did Montaigne inscribe on the ceiling of his study? U@d



DQ:

1. At what age do you hope to retire? What will you do with yourself then? Will you plan to spend more time thinking?

2. Have you had a near-death experience, or known someone who did? What did it teach you/them? How often does the thought occur to you that you're always one misstep (or fall, or driving mistake) away from death?

3. What have you learned, so far, about "how to live"? Have you formulated any life-lessons based on personal experience, inscribed any slogans, written down any "rules"?

4. Are there any "authorities" (personal, textual, political, religious, institutional, traditional...) to whom you always and automatically defer? Can you justify this, intellectually or ethically?

5. Can you give an example of something you believe on the basis of probability, something else you believe because it has to be true (= follows necessarily from other premises you accept as true), and something you believe because you think it's the "best explanation")? Do you think most of your beliefs conform to one or another of these kinds of explanation?

6. Do you think science makes genuine progress? Does it gradually give us a better, richer account of the natural world and our place in it? Is there a definite correlation between technology and scientific understanding? Do you think there is anything that cannot or should not be studied scientifically? Why?