Study Guide

Our 20-question exam, with a dozen questions on The Cave and the Light and 8 questions on Philosophy of Walking, will be drawn from the odd-numbered CL questions and the even-numbered PW questions. Questions will be reworded to suit the format, so the best way to study is by re-reading and reflecting on the relevant passages and not by simply memorizing the Qs & As. The correct answers are all to be found here:

GLOSSARY. Abelard, Anaxagoras, Anselm, apatheia, Aquinas, Archimedes, Aristotelian, artistic, Asclepius, Augustine, Bacon, Benjamin, Boethius, Bruno, Calvin, Cicero, Copernicus, Cynics, Darwin, Democritus, Diogenes, Epicurean, Erasmus, Ficino, Gandhi, Hegel, Heraclitus, Hobbes, Huichol, identity, immaterial, James, Jefferson, Luther, Machiavelli, Marx, material, Mill, Nietzsche, Ockham, Origen,  outside, Parmenides, Peripatetic, Platonist, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Seneca, Stoics, Strato, Tertullian, Tibetan, Thoreau, Voltaire, Wordsworth

CL Ch1

1. What was Socrates's "real crime"?

2. The goal of a virtuous life is ____.

3. What did Socrates express with his reference to Asclepius?

4. From what was Plato absent?

Ch2

1. Which pre-Socratics said that everything and nothing change, respectively?

2. What's the modern version of Plato's cave?

3. What (from Plato's perspective) should be our slogan?

4. The final escape from the cave is ____.

Ch3

1. What relationships did Plato but not Socrates attempt to clarify?

2. What Platonic obsession did Pythagoras provoke?

3. What is revealed, according to Plato, in the material world?

4. What two types of graduates did Plato's Academy train?

Ch4

1. Where does our most vital knowledge come from, according to Aristotle?

2. What role does reason play, for Aristotle, in generating knowledge?

3. What questions do Platonists and Aristotelians, respectively, ask of nature?

4. What's a better word for Aristotle's theory of the mean?

Ch5

1. What were Plato's and Aristotle's conflicting visions of freedom?

2. Who are Socrates' two main antagonists who argue against his (Plato's) conception of justice?

3. Name one of Plato's communitarian and one of Aristotle's individualist heirs.

4. What are two words that specify the difference between Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of politics?

Ch6

1. How did the Hellenistic philosophers want to broaden their inheritance from Plato and Aristotle?

2. What was Antisthenes' critique of Plato's Forms?

3. What were Strato's two crucial decisions?

4. What was Aristotle's alternative to Big Picture thinking?

Ch7

1. What key Aristotelian principle was embodied by the Great Library at Alexandria?

2. What did Aristotelians have to save, to sustain his assumptions about nature and the universe?

3. What Archimedean claim would Aristotle have rejected, even though his own method implied it?

4. What were Archimedes' last words, and his most famous word?

Ch8

1. What did Cicero mean by an "Archimedean problem"?

2. Which anti-Roman resistance fighter later chronicled their unparalleled historical achievement?

3. How did Cicero's conception of the republic differ from Plato's?

4. What can a good orator say to his audience, if he's read and mastered his Rhetoric?

Ch9

1. What was Cicero's posthumous status?

2. What Platonic myth set the stage for Roman disaffection, degeneration, decay, decline, and dissolution?

3. What virtue did Seneca advise the wise to cultivate?

4. William Blake's "eternity in a grain of sand" is a possible  reflection of whose philosophy?

Ch10

1. What did Plato do for Christianity, and vice versa?

2. How did Origen depart from his teacher Clement?

3. How did Origen view Socrates, in relation to conscience, wrongdoing, Jesus, or the embodied soul?

4. What did Origen do for Christian theology?

Ch11

1.  Who first made Church and State a cultural issue?

2.  What's the etymology of "religion"?

3. Who asked what Athens has to do with Jerusalem?

4. What did Augustine say about the relation between faith and reason (or rational understanding)?

Ch12

1. Boethius, an orthodox Catholic, mentions not even a single what in his Consolation of Philosophy?

2. How did "the Irish save civilization"?

3. What are the seven " liberal arts"?

4. How did Abelard reverse Anselm?

Ch13

1. Bernard was especially offended by Abelard's holding the Church to what?

2. What is the modern evangelical/colloquial term for Bernard's Christian variant on Plato's Myth of the Cave?

3. Gothic churches are the lasting home of what?

4. What was Plato's significance for the school of Chartres and the Gothic mind in general?

Ch14

1. The Crusades were a "notorious waste of lives and reputations," but what was their unintended positive consequence?

2. Aquinas implicitly repudiated what Averroist idea?

3. Averroism is reflected in what quip by Voltaire?

4. What is Aquinas's most famous aphorism?

Ch15

1. What Bacon sentence might have been written by Locke or Hume?

2. What moderate realist position did Ockham overturn?

3. What, besides the Roman Emperor Ludwig's autonomy, did Ockham defend?

4. What stunned Adam Smith at Oxford?

Ch16

1. For Salutati, what's the difference between Aristotelian democracy and a Platonic republic?

2. With what did Renaissance humanism replace the trivium and quadrivium?

3. What were Machiavelli's uncomfortable questions?

4. Who are "history's great heroes"?

Ch17

1. What secret did Ficino et al think they'd unlocked?

2. What's love's Platonic goal, in the Symposium?

3. What did Renaissance Platonism "realize" about all religions and civilization?

4. To what was Michelangelo's David a tribute?

Ch18

1. Who did Luther call an "arrogant pagan rascal"?

2. What was Erasmus's "one wish"?

3. Who were Folly's "devotees"?

4. What was the humanists' illusion, for Luther?

Ch19

1. Plato's realm of geometry and number is called what?

2. What Aristotelian assumption was contradicted in October 1604?

3. Why didn't Bruno doubt Copernicus's proposition that the Earth moved?

4. What made Galileo a Protestant hero?

Ch20

1. Why was Sir Francis Bacon delighted by the eclipse of Aristotelian natural philosophy?

2. What stumped the Cambridge Platonists?

3. Where is Newton's God?

4. Whose version of the social contract treats people like alcoholics?

Ch21

1. Who called Plato's Republic "nonsense"?

2. What term for a new moral perspective did the 3d Earl of Shaftesbury coin?

3. Where was "the Athens of the North"?

4. What single principle keeps civil society dynamic and expanding, according to David Hume?

Ch22

1. Who told Rousseau that he'd "lost the habit of walking on all fours"?

2. Rousseau calls our truer, better selves what?

3. When did Kant interrupt his daily post-luncheon walk?

4. Who called Rousseau "the insane Socrates"?

Ch23

1. Who found "bliss" in the French Revolution?

2. Pending the social contract's imposed submission to the General Will, what was the Romantic cure for commercial corruption?

3. What were Aristotle's three unities?

4. For Shelley the problem with political revolutions was what?

Ch24

1. How did French peasants and shopkeepers shock the leaders of the revolution?

2. How did Hegel's Idea resemble and differ from Plato's Ideas?

3. How did Marx alter Hegel's "dialectic"?

4. What was of overriding importance to J.S. Mill?

Ch25

1. What naturalist's Latin American expeditions inspired young Darwin?

2. What was Las Casas's new way of understanding cultural difference?

3.  Who first described nature as a whole in evolutionary terms?

4. What had to come crashing down, in Darwin's wake?

Ch26

1. What did Maxwell throw into upheaval?

2. What was Mach's Lockean line?

3. What was Einstein's teenage thought-experiment?

4. Bohr's quantum theory exposed what as illusions?

Ch27

1. Who did Nietzsche consider the most important pre-Socratic?

2. What was Nietzsche's objection to Socrates?

3. Who had a sudden revelation about time during his customary afternoon walk?

4. Who said Heraclitus's vision of Being was "only for the strong"?

Ch28

1. What bias did de Tocqueville say was built into the American character?

2. How did Jefferson regard Plato's influence on religion?

3. Who called success a "bitch goddess"?

4. What was James's view of Nietzsche?

Ch29

1. Who did Karl Popper blame for European civilization's 20th century betrayal?

2. What prominent Progressive philosopher/educator does Herman say believed government could help turn men into angels?

3. Who said the only truly progressive policy is a policy of individual freedom?

4. What Russian emigre, praising Aristotle's legacy, said there's one objective reality and that it can only be perceived via the senses?

Conclusion

1. Who does Herman say got "too much Aristotle too soon"?

2. What's the result (ac'ing to H) of "too much Plato"?

3. What familiar environmental slogan does Herman consider Platonic?

4. Current debates over climate change and economic growth reveal our need for what?

PW 1-4

1. What has introduced an invasive "sporting spirit" to the child's play of walking?

2. What does Gros say we escape from, by walking?

3. How did Nietzsche's walks differ from Kant's?

4. How does an expedition change our concept of "outside"?

5-9

1. What do long days of slow walking do for you, according to Gros?

2. What did Rimbaud need, to walk and make progress?

3. How do walkers "possess" the world?

4. What is "chatter," and what does it do?

5. In his later years what was Rousseau walking to find?

10-12

1. Walking puts us in touch with what?

2. What was the first philosophic treatise on walking?

3. How did Thoreau say we could get off the news-cycle "treadmill"?

4. What did the Lakota love?

13-16

1. Pilgrimage emphasizes what wish?

2. Why do you have to walk, according to Huichol mythology?

3. What sedentary distinction does The Cynic "cut through"?

4. What is walking's dominant joy?

17-19

1. Nietzsche's walks took him to the pinnacle of what?

2. What concerns did Nietzsche share with Kant?

3. How do urban and country walks differ?

4. What kind of walking yields the greatest "discoveries and joys"?

20-22

1. The servant in Promenade de Paris advises against a natural approach to what?

2. "Generalized prostitution" is another name for what, according to Walter Benjamin?

3. Who celebrated walking as testimony to mystical presence?

4. What reconciliation leads to a joyous lassitude?

23-25

1.”As if you could kill time without injuring ____,” said ______.

2. Walking promoted what ideal, for Gandhi?

3. Who said sitting put his thoughts to sleep?

4. One who becomes a lung-gom-pa is capable of what?