Chapter 1 - Ideas from antiquity

Question 1

psyche

Answer 1

something that is present in a living being and absent in a dead being. Once translated from Greek to English, psyche means soul

Question 2

sophists

Answer 2

specialized in teaching the skills of rhetoric and public speaking, which enables students to express their political and social views in public

Question 3

who was Plato’s teacher?

Answer 3

Socrates

Question 4

Socrates

Answer 4

wanted his students to understand what is true and enduring, and he did this by having his students conduct dialogues. these dialogues encouraged his students to discover their own innate capacities for finding the truth

Question 5

Socratic dialogues

Answer 5

what Plato was able to bring together from Socrates’ ideas
- formed the basis for mental philosophy: a combination of nativism and rationalism

Question 6

nativism

Answer 6

emphasises innate qualities as the main source of human knowledge
Socrates believed that by repeatedly asking people questions, they would develop an understanding of what the answers should be

Question 7

rationalism

Answer 7

the idea that knowledge is not obtained through experience but rather by rationalising one’s own innate ideas about the world

Question 8

deduction

Answer 8

a way of acquiring knowledge (from general to specific)

Question 9

the Academy

Answer 9

founded by Plato, a collective of scholars who pursued their intellectual goals. the subjects in the Academy included philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy

Question 10

apparitions

Answer 10

refer to a person’s conscious experience of something

Question 11

ideal forms

Answer 11

perfect, unchanging concepts or blueprints that represent the true essence of things
- everything we see in the real world is considered an imperfect reflection or manifestation of these ideal forms

Question 12

idealism

Answer 12

the notion that behind every-day sensory experiences lies something more fundamental and idealistic

Question 13

the allegory of the cave

Answer 13

illustrates the distinction between appearances and ideal forms

Question 14

model of the psyche

Answer 14

consisting of appetite, duty/courage, and reason
- appetite is a direct reflection of immediate physical gratification
- courage involves the ability to resit threats

Question 15

Aristotle

Answer 15

was one of the best students at Plato’s Academy. Aristotle was less interested in Plato’s nativist ideas and more interested in extracting knowledge from the world by using observation

Question 16

empiricism

Answer 16

the idea that knowledge comes from the environment and must be processed through sensory experience

Question 17

induction

Answer 17

one arrives at a general conclusion based on empirical investigation

Question 18

the Lyceum

Answer 18

Aristotle’s own school

Question 19

hierarchical arrangement of psyche in organisms

Answer 19

hierarchical ranking dependent on the complexity of the organism

Question 20

vegetative souls

Answer 20

the organisms lowest in the hierarchy, possessed only by the ability to feed and reproduce

Question 21

sensitive souls

Answer 21

organisms that have the ability of sensation, memory, imagination, and locomotion

Question 22

rational souls

Answer 22

highest function of the psyche that only humans possessed, they had the ability to reason

Question 23

innate set of categories (Aristotle)

Answer 23

substance, quantity, quality, place, time, relation, and activity

Question 24

Alhazen

Answer 24

contributed to our understanding of perception and also demonstrated that knowledge comes from the outside in

Question 25

camera obscura

Answer 25

light from objects enters the eyes, allowing you to see, Alhazen supported this with his experiment, camera obscura

Question 26

Avicenna

Answer 26

distinguished between external senses and internal senses. knowledge for him came from the outside as much as the inside

Question 27

floating man thought experiment

Answer 27

With his senses taped off and his limbs bound, does the man floating in space have consciousness of himself? Avicenna said yes, concluding that the mind exists independently of the body. this conclusion went more in line with the view of Plato