Questions from The Cave and the Light

Posted for Don Enss-

Chapter 4. The Doctor’s Son

1. “Everyone and everything were becoming bricks in the comprehensive and complex

edifice Aristotle was determined to build in order to reach the most profound truths.

Those truths, as he made clear, come not in a sudden moment of intuitive insight or from

some inner contemplative process. They are the result of _____________ and

___________.”

2. “____________ steps in after, not before, experience; it sorts our observations into

meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and exact as anything in Plato’s

Forms.”

3. “So instead of Plato’s philosophy of transcendence, in which everything is a reflection or

a sign of something higher and more real, Aristotle gives us a philosophy of

________________.”

4. “The Platonist looks at nature and says, ‘What does it mean?’ So does the Aristotelian,

but then he poses an additional question:

‘_____________________________________________?’ ”

Chapter 5. Good Citizen or Philosopher Ruler?

1. In which Greek city-state were Citizens restricted as follows: “were not allowed to use

money, practice a trade, make a statue, or write a poem.”?

a. Athens

b. Sparta

2. What is “one of Aristotle’s hallmarks of a democratic society”?

3. “Plato’s ideal republic is divided into three distinct groups.”

a. _________________

b. _________________

c. _________________

4. What was the result in Syracuse of Plato’s attempt to implement the theory of

government that he espoused in the Republic?

Chapter 6. The Inheritors: Philosophy in the Hellenistic Age

1. What is the Epicureans’s key to a happy life?

2. What is the Stoics’s key to a happy life?

3. Who was the “first homeless philosopher”?

4. What was the name of the city that “demonstrated so powerfully Aristotle’s assertion that

‘a difference of capacities among its members enables them to attain a higher and better

life by the mutual exchange of their different services.’”
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Discussion Question for May 18 th class.

Dr. Martyn Oliver, a lecturer in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of

Westminster stated the following:

“The discipline of philosophy has never been more under threat that it is today. The success of

science in explaining the different facets of human experience has taken from philosophy much

of what used to be regarded as its rightful territory.” 1

Dr. Oliver’s statement was made in 1997. In light of the recent announcement from NASA, that

the Kepler Space telescope has discovered 1,284 new planets that orbit distant stars with the

likelihood that some of them could have life as we know it, 2 do you agree or disagree with Dr.

Oliver’s statement?