Exam1 Flashcards
Which Roman physician developed one of the first personality theories, which was based on Hippocrates’ four humors? (Galen) What are the four humors and their corresponding personality traits?
Briefly explain each personality trait.
Hippocrates and Galen.
Hipp. believed in health. Galen came around with the personality aspects.
Blood, sanguine = sociable, charismatic
Phlegm, = phlegmatic = lazy, slow, lethargic, relaxed
Black Bile = melancholic, sad
Yellow Bile. = choleric = temperament, angry, steamy
Question 2
Explain Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Give an example from contemporary times (now) which would support his beliefs.
There is a cave ppl only see shadows, believe shadows real, prisoner breaks free sees reality and its tough, prisoners think hes crazy.
Trump and lies and shit and ppl see the light are criticized by other prisoners etc.
Question 3
This philosophical approach means “painted porch” after the building where its founder, Zeno of Citium, taught.
What is the name of this philosophy and why did the Romans adopt many of its tenets for how one should live life?
Which future philosophers (including religious figures) incorporated this approach into their teachings and how did this influence the thinking at the time?
Stoicism.
In stoicism 1. live according to nature 2. humans are mortal less sig parts of whole, 3. virtue is good only vice is bad all else is indifferent. 4. no use complaining 5. fellow human beings are siblings.
The romans adopted it because they had strong laws about order and strength of character such as the Mos Maiorum customs of the ancestors.
Cicero formally introduced Greek philosophy to Rome.
Seneca, a philosopher, wrote extensively on stoic philosophy.
Epictetus in Greece was a former slave who wrote about reason overcoming adversity, and what is and is not in our control.
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who wrote about Stoicism and published a book the Meditations.
Be a citizen of a cosmic society, all are sibling.
Question 4
What is the name of the philosophical school of thought that synthesizes Christianity with the teachings of Aristotle? Name and discuss the teachings of one of the people who championed this school of thought. What was the importance of this school of thought for the church and for scientific inquiry?
Scholasticism.
Roger Bacon was a key to the whole movement with his early arrival at the scientific method. Scholars would study texts and try to understand and interpret their learning to the real world. Peter Abelard, believing that arguments and counterarguments were a good way to arrive at a valid conclusion, was also invaluable to characterize the Scholastic Period. He was an early proponent of dialectic method, two ppl of opposing view coming together to arrive at issue. Many believed middle ages had no good, but the beckoned the coming of the enlightenment era.
Question 5
Describe the Geocentric and Heliocentric theories. (page 100,120)
Who are the philosopher-mathematicians associated with the development of each theory? Why did the church prefer one of these theories to the other?
Which theory best fits with Occam’s Razor and why?
The Geocentric model is the old model that says the planets and sun revolve around the Earth. Heliocentric says the Earth revolves around them.
Ptolemy promoted/proposed Geocentric model and Copernicus promoted/proposed Heliocentric model.
The church preferred the Geocentric model because according to their religion, humans are at the center of the universe and Earth was created by God, so why would the Earth revolve around other stuff?
The Heliocentric fits best with Occams razor because when looking at the moon and mars, viewing the way Mars does not make a consistent orbit and seems to go back and forth, the geocentric theory would require too many additional assumptions to account for this phenomenon.
Therefore, heliocentric theory becomes simplest.
(i’ve run into Flat Earther friends and I nearly killed myself by the way. )
Question 6
Francis Bacon (page 107) outlined four sources of error in scientific research.
List and describe each source of error and give an example for each.
The four sources of error were the four idols.
Idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the marketplace and idols of the theater.
Idols of the cave were a person’s own personal biases because of education or genetics or anything else. The way an SMU student looks at a situation versus how a buddhist monk raised in a monastery looks at a problem is going to be very different.
Idols of the tribe are our human biases. We all dream, conspire and crave and these human ideas taint the way we see issues. If we saw a lion speak we may not even understand him because he speaks out of a lion experience and not of a human one.
Idols of the marketplace are the issue of semantics and how words are perceived. If a salesmen approaches us using certain words we are sure to be swayed to one side or another.
Idols of the theater are our deeply held convictions to one belief or another. Once was a study of students observing rough play in a football game. Students rooting for the rough players said they were just serious about the game, but students not rooting for that team said it was dirty play.
Question 7
Why is Descartes (111) sometimes called the “father of modern psychology?”
Discuss at least three of his theories or views on the human condition and how they led to modern theories or approaches in psychology.
Descartes came up with innate ideas, The Reflex, and The mind-Body interaction.
-reactions to his notion of innate ideas so intense they launched new philosophical and psychological positions (modern empiricism and sensationalism)
-his mechanistic analysis of reflexive behavior can be looked on as the beginning of both stimulus-response and behavioristic psychology
-His focus on brain as important mediator of behavior and specification on mindy-body relationship was important.
His investigation of animals led to modern physiological and comparative psychology.
What followed Descartes was in one way or another a reaction to him, and made him considered a father of modern philosophy in general and of modern psychology in particular.
Question 8
John Stuart Mill (Page 145-146-) was an Empiricist who accepted his father’s (James Mill) Views of associationism, which were similar to other Empiricists such as David Hartley (and, you may remember, Aristotle).
However, J.S. Mill disagreed with his father and other early proponents of associationism in his proposal of Mental Chemistry.
What did J.S. Mill mean by Mental Chemistry and how was it different from what his father and previous associationists had proposed?
While his father and other associationists said that mind is composed of elements and sensations, and simple ideas led to complex ideas and the input of those sensory ideas sparked the other ideas, John Stuart Mill went a step further. His Mental Chemistry was more complicated than simple Mental mechanists. In it, simple elementary ideas could come in but the mind could chemically create and synthesize an entirely new idea from components. It is the fusion of sensory elements into a new compound. This led to a freedom of thinking for yourself, a need to explore your thoughts.
Question 9 Both Liebniz and Herbart use the concept of limen (Leibniz introduced the concept first).
What does limen mean and why is it important to Leibniz’s and Herbart’s theories? P176, 189, 194
Limen is the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness. It is important because both Liebniz and Herbart (though Liebniz first) discussed at length their views on the conscious and unconscious mind. This led to the psychoanalysis process of Freud.
Question 10 Describe Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical imperative” and give an example of it in practice.
Immanuel Kant came up with categorical rules of behavior.
The Categorical Imperative says that there are universal moral behaviors that are necessary to act on. He believed that motivation was the important factor in moral decision and not necessarily the consequences.
One should not attack animals, or cheat or steal. But importantly one should make a decision out of the moral reason and one of fear or not wanting to be caught.
Candy shop example if wanted *
Question 11
What did Nietzche mean by proclaiming “God is dead.”? Be specific in discussing this.
Nietzche believed in the übermench or superman and that anyone could become a much better thinking person having a better life but he strongly criticized the church for its dogma and criticism of free thinking. By God is dead or Gott ist tot, he meant that you did not need God in order to answer questions. He wanted people to think for themselves and be the best them that they could be.
Unfortunately the Nazis took him completely out of context in his concept of übermench.
He believed academics, philosophy and art should be your guide to life. He wanted people to reach their POTENTIAL. Thinking for self, creative doing for self. Not depending on anything else.
He differentiated between opinion and conviction, he thought opinion was good because it could be falsified and did not like things that could not be falsified which probably explains his criticism of the christian church.
These ideas of Nietzche’s flowed right into later humanistic ideas. He launched an attack on rationalism because he did not believe we could think out of sweeping generalizations.
(If one takes a general rule, and applies it to a case to which, due to the specific features of the case, the rule does not apply, then one commits the sweeping generalisation fallacy. This fallacy is the reverse of a hasty generalisation, which infers a general rule from a specific case.) = general rules do not always apply. (he was not a rationalist)
Question 12
Describe Hegel’s dialectical process. (p185,186,-) Give a detailed example of how it works.
The dialectical process is when proponents of two opposing ideas come together to discuss the ideas and find middle ground and source for better knowledge. A cycle starts with a thesis and antithesis which are balanced together to find a synthesis. The synthesis then becomes the new thesis and the cycle is repeated on and on to evolve into the best Absolute. Dialectic generally means to attempt to arrive at truth by back and forth argumentation among conflicting views.
thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Question 13
Describe the differences between
Empiricism, Rationalism, and Romanticism.
List two philosophers/scientists from each of these schools of thought and
briefly explain why they are in that school of thought.
Rationalism believed in innate ideas, was about reason in thinking, and believed in an active mind and deductive thinking. Many of its ideas might be more closely linked to mathematics in that it could use a mathematical formula to draw conclusions. Empiricism, however, did not believe in innate ideas, believed in sensation and experience guiding knowledge and learning, and believed more in inductive reasoning and a passive mind. Although there are clear distinctions between these two schools of thought, they’re not always clearly divided and some scholars found bits of overlap, though many tended to veer one way or another.
Romanticism developed as a resistance to the enlightenment era because many romantics found that being overly logical could be stifling to the individual freedoms and expressions. They stressed feelings and emotions and the individual experience. Some even stated the scientific method could simply not cover the entire human experience.
romanticism: 1. Rousseau: -father of Romanticism, -personal struggles with sexual repression, -distrust reason and organized logic and religion, - humans basically good and need freedom from too much structure to thrive 2. J.W. Goethe: -science is limited, -live w/ passion and aspire continuously to growth, -opposing forces of good and evil exist, people torn between stresses and conflicts of life, -darker aspects of human nature can allow for growth.
Empiricism:
- Thomas Hobbes: -humans were machines, -fear of death motivates humans to create social order, -all ideas came from sensory experience!
- John Locke: -sensory stimulated ideas, -disagreed with Descartes innate ideas, -if God installed innate ideas then all humans should have them, but they do not, -humans not born with innate ideas, whether moral, theological, logical or mathematical.
Rationalism:
- Baruch Spinoza: -God, mind and matter are the same thing, -ostracized from the church, -goal is live ethically correct and personally satisfying life, -mind-body relation,motivation,emotion/passion.
- Immanuel Kant: -Categories of thought, -Categorical imperative, –universals moral of right and wrong, -motivation matters and freely choosing right thing, -psychology is introspective analysis of the mind.
Question 14
Discuss the concepts of free will and determinism.
Describe one philosopher/scientist (Empiricist, Rationalist, or Romanticist) who believed in free will and one who believed in determinism.
Explain why each believed as he did.
The concept of free will states that we have free will over our path of life and our choices regarding that. However, determinism says that we do not have free will and our path of life is already pre-determined based on various factors.
Immanuel Kant believed in free will. He believed that denying free will was denying responsibility and furthermore, that the motivation behind our moral reasoning was important. In fact, more important than the consequence of an action. But in order to be moral we had to freely choose what was the right moral universal.
Hobbes did not believe in free will and he took the view of determinism. He said that even if man believed he was choosing freely he was not, he was only running up against options corresponding to appetite and aversion, and the choice then was a behavioral tendency, which is really in charge of the choices we make
Two people in Romanticism and why they’re in that.
- Rousseau: -father of Romanticism, -personal struggles with sexual repression, -distrust reason and organized logic and religion, - humans basically good and need freedom from too much structure to thrive 2. J.W. Goethe: -science is limited, -live w/ passion and aspire continuously to growth, -opposing forces of good and evil exist, people torn between stresses and conflicts of life, -darker aspects of human nature can allow for growth.
