Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Study Guide Test #3

Study Guide Test #3

Quiz November 1/2
Spinoza, Locke, & Reid, LH 13-14; DE 3-4

1. Spinoza's view, that God and nature (or the universe) are the same thing, is called _______.

2. If God is _____, there cannot be anything that is not God; if _____, God is indifferent to human beings.

3. Spinoza was a determinist, holding that _____ is an illusion.

4. According to John Locke, all our knowledge comes from _____; hence, the mind of a newborn is a ______.

5. Locke said _____ continuity establishes personal identity (bodily, psychological); Thomas Reid said identity relies on ______ memories, not total recall.

DE 3-4

6. Who called Spinoza "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers"?

7. If we "understood clearly the whole order of Nature," according to Spinoza, what would we conclude?

8. "...atheism now carries no stigma in economically developed countries except _____."

9. What did Thomas Jefferson exaggerate about John Locke?

10. How did Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding play a role in advancing the Enlightenment?

11. From where did Locke say the authority of a ruler derives?

12. What is one of the odd consequences of Locke's theory of personal identity?


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 _______.

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 13/14
Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer LH 19-23

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

2. How does synthetic knowledge differ from analytic knowledge?

3. What was Kant's great insight?

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

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

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

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

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

9. What Kantian view did Hegel reject?

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

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

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


Quiz Nov 15/16
Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx LH 24-27

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?

Quiz Nov 20/21
Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud LH 28-30

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?


Quiz Nov 27/28
RUSSELL, AYER, Sartre, de beauvoir, Camus (LH)

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?

I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day at the age of eighteen I read _____'s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. Why I Am Not a Christian

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?

BONUS+: Who had a Near Death Experience his youthful philosophy would have declared "nonsense"?

BONUS++: Name the faux English matrons who crossed the channel to ask Sartre about his views on freedom?

Quiz Apr 29/30
Wittgenstein, Arendt, Rawls, Turing & Searle, Singer LH 34-35, 38-40

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Why did Singer first become famous?


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

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