Exam 3 Study Guide (w/o Report Questions)

Exam 3 Study Guide (w/o Report Questions)... Exam to cover even-numbered Little History (LH) questions, and all questions pertaining to our other texts.

Just in case you want to study early.  I would definitely recommend it.

Quiz Nov 6/7 - Berkeley, Voltaire & Leibniz (& Voltaire), Hume & Rousseau

LH

1. What English poet declared that "whatever is, is right"?

2. What German philosopher, with his "Principle of Sufficient Reason," agreed with the poet?

3. What French champion of free speech and religious toleration wrote a satirical novel/play ridiculing the idea that everything is awesome?

4. What 1755 catastrophe deeply influenced Voltaire's philosophy?

5. What did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"?

6. Was Voltaire an atheist?

7. (T/F) Hume thought the human eye so flawless in its patterned intricacy that, like Paley's watch, it constitutes powerful evidence of intelligent design.

8. (T/F) Hume's view was that it's occasionally more plausible to believe that a miracle (the unexplained suspension of a law of nature) has happened, than not.

9. Rousseau said we're born free but everywhere are in ____, but can liberate ourselves by submitting to what is best for the whole community, aka the _______.

Not applicable:

DE (from the first half of each chapter... pose your alternative quz questions on the second half)

10. Name two fields of study Leibniz contributed to, and two of his inventions/proposals.

11. Leibniz's "atoms of nature," each a "windowless" self-contained world , are called what?

12. What did Berkeley allege to be the sole contents of the universe, and who said this was "close to my own view"?

13. Who won first place in a poll among philosophers to pick their all-time favorite, which close friend was at his deathbed, and what did he tell Boswell about an afterlife?

14. What is induction, and what did Hume think accounts for our confidence that the future will resemble the past?

15. What did Hume say theres' no point in trying to do?

16. What ill-defined concept of Rousseau's might be read as providing intellectual support for dictators?

17. What did Rousseau consider better pastimes than intellectual work?

Quiz Nov 11/12 - Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer LH 19-23; FL 29-30

1. Kant said we can know the ____ but not the ____ world. 

2. What was Kant's great insight?

3. What, according to Kant, is irrelevant to morality?

4. Kant said you should never ___, because ___. Kant called the principle that supports this view the ____ _____.

5. Who formulated the Greatest Happiness principle? What did he call his method? Where can you find him today?

6. Who created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation?

7. What did Hegel mean when he spoke of the "owl of Minerva"? What did he think had been reached in his lifetime?

8. What Kantian view did Hegel reject?

9. What is Geist? When did Hegel say it achieved self-knowledge?

10. What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including us)?

11. What did Schopenhauer say could help us escape the cycle of striving and desire?

FL 29-30

12. For what American president was "the world of legend and myth a real world"?

13. What made it possible, beginning in the '90s, for "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" to spread fast and wide?

14. What percentage of Americans say they never doubt the existence of God?

15. What was Augustine's instruction, 1,600 years ago?

Quiz Nov 18/19 - Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx LH 24-27; FL 33-34; AP -38

1. How did Mill disagree with Bentham about pleasure?

2. What view did Mill defend in On Liberty?

3. What's the benefit to society of open discussion, according to Mill, and what's wrong with being dogmatic?

4. Who did Bishop Wilberforce debate at Oxford in 1860?

5. The single best idea anyone ever had was what, according to whom?

6. What scientific developments since Darwin's time establish evolution by natural selection as more than just a theory or hypothesis?

7. Who was the Danish Socrates, and what was most of his writing about?

8. Why is faith irrational, according to Nigel Warburton?

9. What is "the subjective point of view"?

10. Why was Karl Marx angry? How did he think the whole of human history could be explained?

11. What was Marx's "vision"?

12. What did Marx call religion?

FL

11. What's the basic idea in A Course in Miracles?

12. Who is most responsible for giving a platform and credibility to magical thinking?

13. Name an argument Andersen compares to those for "harnessing placebo power."

AP

14. According to pragmatism, how should we judge truth?

15. Who said that "idealism fails to work . . . chiefly because it is unfinished?"

16. James rejected anatomy's loss of the sense that human being was more than what?

Quiz Nov 20/21 - Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud LH 28-30; FL 35-36; AP -77; Thoreau, "Walking" (JW).

Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud LH 28-30; FL 35-36; AP -77; Thoreau, "Walking" (JW).

1. What's the point of James's squirrel story?

2. Who said truth is what we would end up with if we could run all the experiments and investigations we'd like to? (And what's a word his name rhymes with?)

3. What did Bertrand Russell say about James's theory of truth?

4. What 20th century philosopher carried on the pragmatist tradition? What did he say about the way words work?

5. What did Nietzsche mean by "God is dead"? (And what's a word his name rhymes with?)

6. Where did Nietzsche think Christian values come from?

7. What is an Ubermensch, and why does Nigel find it "a bit worrying"?

8. How did Nietzsche differ from Kant but anticipate Freud?

9. What were the three great revolutions in thought, according to Freud?

10. The "talking cure" gave birth to what?

11. Why did Freud think people believe in God?

12. What was Karl Popper's criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis?

FL 35-36

13. Who does Andersen say ought to be important fighters defending reason, but have instead become enablers of Fantasyland?

14. What political scientist defends the veracity of people who say they were abducted by space aliens?

15. What Texas charter school's textbooks teach Genesis as a scientific theory?

16. When did Thomas Jefferson say it was okay for people to believe whatever they want?

AP -77

17. Which of Henry Lee's "freethinking" ancestors influenced the "revolutionary spirit" of early American thought?  

18. More than allowing us to "do whatever," Viktor Frankl's "existenial vacuum" means we are what? 

Walking

19. Wordsworth's servant distinguished the poet's library from his study, which was located where?

20. According to Thoreau, unless we hear what sound of Nature our philosophy is "belated?" 

Quiz Nov 25/26 - Russell, Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus LH 31-33; FL 37-39; AP -119

1. Reading whose autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God? OR, What did he see as the logical problem with the First Cause Argument?

2. The idea of a barber who shaves all who don't shave themselves is a logical ______, a seeming contradiction that is both true and false. Another example of the same thing would be a statement like "This sentence is ___."

3. A.J. Ayer's ______ Principle, stated in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, was part of the movement known as _____ ______.

4. Humans don't have an _____, said Jean Paul Sartre, and are in "bad faith" like the ____ who thinks of himself as completely defined by his work.

5. What was Sartre's frustrating advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance?

6. When Simone de Beauvoir said women are not born that way, she meant that they tend to accept what?

7. Which Greek myth did Albert Camus use to illustrate human absurdity, as he saw it?

FL

8. What was the message of The Courage to Heal?

9. The first big outbreak of what occurred in and around Bakersfield CA in the '80s?

10. Andersen says there's a line extending from flying saucer obsessives to what?

11. What is it important to recognize about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians'?

12. Who is both symptom and cause of conspiracism in America?

AP -119

13. How did James the medical student differ from James the humanist?

14. How do analytic philosophers tend to understand philosophy?

15. Emerson tied American Transcendentalism to what philosopher and to what class of ideas?

Quiz 2 Nov 25/26 - Wittgenstein, Arendt, Popper & Kuhn, Foot & Thomson LH 34-35; FL 40-41; AP -149

1. What was the main message of Wittgenstein's Tractatus?

2. What did the later Wittgenstein (of Philosophical Investigations) mean by "language games," what did he think was the way to solve philosophical problems, and what kind of language did he think we can't have?

3. Who was Adolf Eichmann, and what did Arendt learn about him at his trial?

4. What was Arendt's descriptive phrase for what she saw as Eichmann's ordinariness?

5. Both Popper and Kuhn changed the way people understood science. What did Popper say about the method for checking a hypothesis and what name did Kuhn give to major breaks in the history of science? 

6. What is the Law of Double Effect? Many people who disagree with its principle--and with Thomson's violinist thought experiment--think that whatever our intentions we shouldn't play who?

FL

7. Paul Ryan grew up reading whose fictions?

8. What do Pennsylvania and Tennessee formally require officeholders to believe?

9. When did an inaccurate study ignite the false belief that vaccines cause autism?

AP

10. What great American poet agreed with James, Royce, and Santayana about the deeper meaning of  ordinary experience?

11. How did Camus define "the absurd"? 

12. What did James say would be his first act of free will?

Quiz Dec 2/3 - Rawls, Turing & Searle, Singer LH 42-43; FL 42-43; AP -178

1. What did John Rawls call the thought experiment he believed would yield fair and just principles, and what was its primary device?

2. Under what circumstances would Rawls' theory permit huge inequalities of wealth between people?

3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?

4. What, according to Searle, is involved in truly understanding something?

5. How do some philosophers think we might use computers to achieve immortality?

6. What does Peter Singer say we should sacrifice, to help strangers?

7. Why did Singer first become famous?

8. How does Singer represent the best tradition in philosophy?

FL

9. Most mass killers in America are not psychotics or paranoid schizophrenics, writes Andersen, they're what?

10. What was the moment when the NRA "settled in deepest Fantasyland"?

11. What new technologies give Andersen "the heebie-jeebies"?

AP

12. For what did William James argue in "The Moral Equivalent of War"?

13. Hocking wanted to "overcome this alienation [of Cartesian solipsism]" and argued for what?

14. What philosopher, seeing unity as achieved through conflict, disagreed with Schelling's "static substratum?" 

Quiz 2 Dec 2/3 - FL 44-45; AP -208.

1. Disneyfication denotes what?

2. 1/3 of the people at theme parks are what?

3. How have we become mentally more like children?

4. A major argument of Andersen's book is that our dominant religion has become what?

5. Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire at what age?

6. "Magical thinking" is the tendency to believe what?

AP -208

7. Who said women had to be self-reliant because they were expected to take care of men?

8. Who defeated Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison in 1913, and won a Nobel Prize in 1931?

9. When "developed too exclusively," becoming educated omits a response to what "human appeal" or presence?

10. What school brought "young children into contact with original literary sources" and who created this school?