Mid-Term Exam (Palmer Reading)

Question 1

What are some generalities that apply to all philosophers in the Pre-Socratic era?

Answer 1

1) Explanations of reality and its origins are no long merely mythical.
2) Natural phenomena are explained in terms of natural processes.
3) There are four basic elements with which they were familiar and used as their foundations - earth, air, water, and fire.

Question 2

Summarize Thales.

Answer 2

• The first monist
• Assumes that if there is change, there must be something that does not change.
• Water is the primary element from which all others derive.

Question 3

Summarize Anaximander.

Answer 3

• There must be a hidden abstract element, which he calls the boundless or the limitless, from which all other elements are derived.

Question 4

Summarize Anaxamines.

Answer 4

• Air is the fundamental element from which all others are derived. The world is composed of air in more or less condensed or rarified forms.

Question 5

Summarize Pythagoras.

Answer 5

• Numbers are the fundamental building block of reality.

- All explanations are mathematical.

Question 6

Summarize Xenophanes.

Answer 6

• Criticizes the religious views in Greek mythology.

- Says that if there are gods, they don’t dress and look like us. Attacks the anthropomorphism in religious thought.

Question 7

Summarize Heraclitus.

Answer 7

• Fire is the basic element from which all other elements derive/a metaphor for the nature of reality.
• Change is the key feature of reality.

Question 8

Summarize Paramenides.

Answer 8

• Motion is an illusion and change never happens.

- Being is uncreated, unchanging, eternal, immovable, indivisible, solid, and spherical.

Question 9

Summarize Zeno.

Answer 9

• Defends Paramenides via his Paradox that motion is impossible. (Finite transversing the infinite.
• Shows that we either accept Parmenides or we have to abandon Monism.

Question 10

Summarize Empedocles.

Answer 10

• First pluralist: reality is composed of an irreducible complexity of elements with four roots: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water.
• Motion and change are real: produced by two forces: Love (Positive Force) and Strife (Negative Force)
• First Recorded Theory of Evolution

Question 11

Summarize Anaxagoras.

Answer 11

• A pluralist who held that everything comes from infinite seeds.
• Motion and change are caused by Nous (the mind/Reason)

Question 12

Summarize Leucippus/Democritus.

Answer 12

• Pluralists and Materialists.
• Atomists - The world is composed of atoms traveling in pre-determined paths that are set according to rigid natural laws. (Determinism?)

Question 13

Summarize the goal of the sophists.

Answer 13

To replace philosophy with rhetoric and the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of rhetorical victory. Replace objectivity with subjectivity, and objective truth with relativity, and knowledge with skepticism.

Question 14

Summarize Protagoras.

Answer 14

• Relativity: “Man is the measure of all things.”

Question 15

Summarize Georgias.

Answer 15

• Nihilism: “There is nothing.”
• Skepticism: If there were anything, it couldn’t be known.
• Subjectivism: If it could be know, it couldn’t be communicated.

Question 16

Summarize Thrasymachus.

Answer 16

• Power, not law or morality, should be everyone’s goal. Might makes right.

Question 17

Summarize Callicles.

Answer 17

• Power, not justice, is good. Food drink and sex are the meaning of life.
• Morality is the weapon of the weak to shackle the powerful.

Question 18

Summarize Critias.

Answer 18

• Clever rules control subjects by encourage them to fear non-existent gods.

Question 19

Summarize Socrates.

Answer 19

• Thought the examined life was key.
• Professed to know nothing and used irony as a tool of analysis.
• The first martyr for philosophy.

Question 20

Summarize St. Augustine of Hippo.

Answer 20

• Combats early heresies.
• Proposes three solutions to the problem of free will.
  1) God is not time so to say he knows the future is inaccurate.
  2) God’s knowledge does not cause sin.
  3) God only punishes sins of free will: if a person can sin, wants to sin, and does sin.

Question 21

Summarize John Scotus Eriugena.

Answer 21

• First Method of Division of Nature: Things that are (Platonic Forms) and Things that are not (Everything Else Including God.)
• Second Method of Division: 1) God 2) the Forms 3) Physical World 4) God.

Question 22

Summarize Saint Anselm.

Answer 22

• Creates the Ontological Argument for God which goes like:
  1) Existence is a perfection
  2) If God lacks existence he is imperfect
  3) But by definition God is perfect
  4) God exists by definition

Question 23

Summarize Averroes

Answer 23

• Most influential muslim philosopher.

- Doctrine of double truth: Religious and scientific truth do not have to agree.

Question 24

Summarize Maimonides.

Answer 24

• Most influential Jewish philosopher who tries to remedy Judaism and Aristotelian philosophy.
• Comments off the question of faith and reason.

Question 25

Who are the continental realists and what do they believe?

Answer 25

• Descartes, Spinoza, and Lebiniz
• The foundation of knowledge is reason. The most important knowledge is a priori
• A divine being whose idea was innate to every human being plays a large role in rationalist philosophy.

Question 26

Summarize Descartes.

Answer 26

• Believes in Radical Doubt in the senses.
• The House of Knowledge starts with God’s existence, recovery of mathematics, and the existence of the material world.
• Radical Dualism: Science cannot explain the nature of consciousness. Soul can’t be scientifically reduced and the new sciences are not influenced by religion.

Question 27

Summarize Spinoza.

Answer 27

• Replaces Dualism with Pantheism

- God is the one substance but it is the same as nature.

Question 28

Summarize Leibniz.

Answer 28

• Also critiques Dualism.
• Reality is composed of monads that contain within them all past and future states.
• For everything that exists there is a sufficient reason it exists. Therefore God exists and are world is the best of all possible worlds.

Question 29

Summarize Hobbes.

Answer 29

• Replaces Dualism with Materialism.
• Selfishness is the motivation of action.
• State of Nature and State of Society.

Question 30

Summarize Locke.

Answer 30

Epistemology - Knowledge is in terms of primary qualities (size, shape, etc.) and secondary qualities (sensations in the mind produced by primary qualities.)
Ontology - Secondary qualities exist only in the mind and primary are real in the material substance.
State of Natural is a moral condition with rights.

Question 31

Summarize Berkeley.

Answer 31

• Explains human knowledge in terms of sense data and linguistic constructs.

Question 32

Summarize Hume.

Answer 32

• Sense data is the foundation of all knowledge and mind is a blank slate.
• Analytic propositions are true but tautologies.
• Synthetic propositions are meaningful only ion they can be derived directly from sense data. Concepts of the soul and God are nonsense just like time and space.
• Little faith in certain knowledge.

Question 33

Summarize Kant.

Answer 33

Epistemology - A remedying of empiricism with rationalism. Holds that there are synthetic a priori truths that are the structural components of the universal human mind. (Such as time and space.)
Ontology - Phenomenal World (The world as known by the human mind.) and Noumenal Mind (The World Impenitrable by the Human Mind). Both exist and the latter is where the soul and justice and god are located. These are objects of faith that can never be known in the real world.
Ethics - The Categorical Imperative. Some acts are universalizable and if everyone does it is it good or not. This is an absolutist moral system.