Chapter 1 - Ideas from antiquity

Question 1

psyche

Answer 1

something present in a living being and absent in a dead being (soul)

Question 2

Plato

Answer 2

student of Socrates

Question 3

Sophists

Answer 3

specialised in teaching the skills of rhetoric and public speaking

Question 4

Socrates

Answer 4

Platos teacher
- wanted his students to understand what is true and enduring
- never wrote anything down (all of his knowledge known through Plato)

Question 4

Socratic dialoges

Answer 4

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

Question 5

nativism

Answer 5

emphasises innate qualities as the main source of human knowledge
- e.g. when a baby is born, it already has knowledge in the form of instincts
- Socrates believed that by repeatedly asking people questions, they would develop an understanding of what the answers should be

Question 6

rationalism

Answer 6

the idea that knowledge is not obtained through experience, but rather by rationalising one’s own innate ideas about the world
- the way to understand the world is not through feelings, but through reason

Question 7

deduction

Answer 7

a method of aquiring knowledge
- deduction from the general to the specific

Question 8

the Academy

Answer 8

Plato’s collective of scholars who pursued their intellectual goals
- philosophy, mathematics, astronomy

Question 9

apparitions

Answer 9

a peron’s conscious experience of something

Question 10

ideal forms

Answer 10

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 11

idealism

Answer 11

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

Question 12

allegory of the cave

Answer 12

illustrates the distinction between appearances and ideal forms
- used by Plato to support the idea that true knowledge does not come from the sense and that the world around is just a world of appearances

Question 13

model of the psyche

Answer 13

• appetite
• duty/courage
• reason

Question 14

appetite (desire)

Answer 14

a direct reflection of the immediate physical gratification

Question 15

courage

Answer 15

the ability to resist threats

Question 16

Aristotle

Answer 16

one of the best students of Plato’s Academy
- less interested in nativist ideas and more interested in extracting knowledge from the world by using observation
- concentrated on empiricism

Question 17

empiricism

Answer 17

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

Question 18

induction

Answer 18

a method of reasoning that involves generalizing from specific observations or experiences to derive broader principles or knowledge

Question 19

the Lyceum

Answer 19

Aristotle’s own school that he created when returning to Athens

Question 20

hierarchical arrangement of psyche in organisms

Answer 20

• vegetative souls (lowest in hierarchy)
• sensitive souls
• rational souls (highest in hierarchy)

Question 21

vegetative souls

Answer 21

organisms which possess only the ability to feed and reproduce

Question 22

sensitive souls

Answer 22

organisms with the abilitties of sensation, memory, imagination, and locomotion (ability or act of movement)

Question 23

rational souls

Answer 23

organisms with the ability to reason (only humans)

Question 24

which innate set of categories did Aristotle argue that the human psyche has

Answer 24

• substance (what something is)
• quantity (how much)
• quality (color, shape)
• place (where)
• time (when)
• relation (e.g. bigger or smaller)
• activity (what is it doing)

Question 25

Alhazen

Answer 25

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

Question 26

camera obscura

Answer 26

a dark box with a small hole in it. Alhazen discovered that the image of the outside world was displayed upside down in the box, and the same effect on the retina in the eye
- concluded that light comes in from outside when we look at something, just as knowledge

Question 27

Avicenna

Answer 27

important philosopher who distinguished between external senses and internal senses
- for him knowledge came as much from the outside as from the inside

Question 28

floating man thought experiment

Answer 28

Avicenna argued that even if a person is lacking sensory input, the person would still be aware of their own existence