Palmer Readings

Question 1

List the Continental Rationalists.

Answer 1

1) Descartes
2) Spinoza
3) Leibniz.

Question 2

Summarize the basic claims of the Continental Rationalists.

Answer 2

• The foundation of knowledge is Reason.
• The mind is workin on the innate ideas of math and logic.
• The most important knowledge is a priori.
• A divine being plays a large role in this philosophy.

Question 3

Summarize the major points in Descartes philosophy.

Answer 3

• Uses the method of radical doubt to find the certain foundations of knowledge.
• Doubts the senses and has the evil genius thesis.
• I think, therefore I am.
• Only the sciences can explain the nature of the material world. But it cannot explain the nature of consciousness.
• His legacy is radical dualism.

Question 4

Summarize the major points in Spinoza’s philosophy.

Answer 4

• Changes Descartes dualism to pantheism by saying there is only one substance: God.

Question 5

Summarize the major points of Leibniz’s philosophy.

Answer 5

• Key principles of critiquing the dualism of Descartes: Principle of Identity and Sufficient Reason.
• Every proposition is ultimately a statement of identity os every true proposition is necessarily true. Reality is composed of monads.
• Everything exists for a reason and this world is the best possible of all worlds.

Question 6

List the Three British Empiricists.

Answer 6

1) John Locke
2) George Berkeley
3) David Hume

Question 7

Summarize the philosophy of Hobbes.

Answer 7

• Neither empiricist or rationalist but the former more than the later.
• Selfishness motivates all political and moral action.

Question 8

What is the main stance of the British empiricists?

Answer 8

• They reject all notion of innate ideas and postulate sense experience as the basis of all knowledge.

Question 9

Summarize Locke.

Answer 9

• We have knowledge of primary qualities that exist in the object and secondary qualities that exist in our minds.

Question 10

Summarize Berkeley.

Answer 10

• There is no physical substance. Primary and secondary qualities are in the mind.

Question 11

Summarize Hume.

Answer 11

• Hume holds the difference between synthetic and analytic propositions.
• Metaphysics are nonsense. There is no such thing as cause of effect.
• This leaves us with radical skepticism and very little knowledge, but Hume says we should act as if we have knowledge. (Pragmatism.)

Question 12

Summarize Kant.

Answer 12

• Argues that synthetic a priori truth exist but are the structure of the mind. Time and space are these structures and form the foundation of all knowledge.
• He can’t salvage metaphysics from Hume so he redefines it.
• There are two worlds: The Noumenal World, which is not accessible to human minds, and the Phenomenal world that we can access.
• The Categorical Imperative - Act according to universal maxim. But motivation is more important than consequences. (Kind of)
• Humans are only ends, never mere means.

Question 13

Summarize Hegel.

Answer 13

• Reason is divine. The history of human civilization is the advance of reason through time with thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
• The best is always brought forward by humanity.
• Absolute idealism - The history of the world is a history of ideals.
• Dialectic - Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.

Question 14

Summarize Schopenhauer.

Answer 14

• He wants a return to Kant from Hegel.

- We do not know ultimate reality. There is no God, only death. Everything is subject to Will.

Question 15

Summarize Kierkegaard.

Answer 15

• He wants to attack nominal Christianity and paints a grand picture of commitment to a Christian life.
• He’s the father of existentialism. Existence is not a concept , it can only be lived. It’s always concrete.
• Distinguishes subjective and objective truths.

Question 16

Summarize Marx.

Answer 16

• Cut the philosophy crap and change the world. PROGRESS FORWARD AS HEGEL WOULD. BEAT DOWN YOUR ENEMIES. GAIN MATERIAL WEALTH. CONTROL AND SIEZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION. FUCK YOU WEALTHY PEOPLE. IT’S OUR TIME NOW BITCHES.

Question 17

Summarize Nietzche.

Answer 17

• The goal of all action is power. The overman is the triumph of this will to power.
• God is dead. There is no objective morality. Only the will to power.

Question 18

Summarize the beliefs of the two Utilitarians.

Answer 18

• Place ethics on a firm, objective, empirical foundation.

Question 19

List the two Utilitarians.

Answer 19

Bentham

Mill

Question 20

Summarize Bentham.

Answer 20

• Human happiness is the goal of ethics. He’s a hedonist.

Question 21

Sumarize Mill.

Answer 21

• Corporate Human happiness is the goal.

- Human pleasure is different from animal pleasure.

Question 22

Summarize Husserl.

Answer 22

• All knowledge of the world is based on Cartesian consciousness. Thus we should study it.
• Eliminate all presuppositions.

Question 23

Summarize Heidegger.

Answer 23

• Wants to go back to the pre-Socratics.
• Go back to early Greek language since that’s the closes we have to being.
• Or learn German. Fucking Nazis.

Question 24

Summarize Sartre.

Answer 24

• Descartes was wrong. You only exist after you think about yourself, not before.
• Being is not marvelous bot horrifying. Being is nothingness.
• We are condemned to be free.

Question 25

Summarize the assumptions of Structuralism and Phenomenology.

Answer 25

Structuralism - Consciousness is an objective starting point for philosophy.
Phenomenology - Philosophy must begin with subjectivity.

Question 26

Summarize de Saussure.

Answer 26

• Words have value based on the place that word occupies in a given linguistic system.
• Language is a system of signs. Words are signs for other things. This relationship is arbitrary.

Question 27

Summarize Levi-Strauss.

Answer 27

• The meaning of social institutions is determined by their relations to other social institutions.
• All human thought is logical.
• There are universally valid principles of thought that hold for all people at all times.

Question 28

Summarize Lacan.

Answer 28

• Justifies Psychoanalysis.
• Every desire is the desire to be desired.
• The mind has three registers: the real (Pre-linguistic experience.), the imaginary (The world of the young child.), The Symbolic (Full access to the language that allows for individuation at the expense of isolation and incarceration in the prison of language.

Question 29

Summarize Derrida.

Answer 29

• Meaning is never fully present in language. Every philosophical text is self defeating and deconstructs.

Question 30

List the Three Pragmatists.

Answer 30

1) Peirce
2) James
3) Dewey

Question 31

Summarize Peirce.

Answer 31

• Coined the term pragmatism.

- Beliefs are the rules for action. Compare beliefs by comparing the habits they produce.

Question 32

Summarize James.

Answer 32

• The meaning of an idea is determined by tracing its practical consequences. Often different ideas produce the same consequences so no need to differentiate the two.
• Meaning is subjective and relative.
• Truth is only based on the power of something to work.

Question 33

Summarize Dewey.

Answer 33

• Thinking is about problem solving. Universals and sense data are not knowledge but tools to get to knowledge.
• Knowledge doesn’t reflect the world but changes it. So education and democracy have the same goal, change the world.

Question 34

Summarize the Analytic Tradition.

Answer 34

• The purpose of philosophy is analysis.

- Analyze the meaning and truth conditions of propositions used in ordinary and institutional discourse.

Question 35

Summarize Frege.

Answer 35

• He looks for the logical structure of meaning and truth. Tries to reduce math to logic.
• Meaning is not merely a denotation.

Question 36

Summarize G.E. Moore.

Answer 36

• Revolts against British Hegelianism.
• Everything is real that common sense says is real.
• There’s no real philosophical quandaries.

Question 37

Summarize Bertrand Russell.

Answer 37

• Philosophy is analytic and subordinate to science. It exists to analyze topics via Ockham’s Razor.
• Most descriptions assume existence of things. Which creates contradictions.

Question 38

List the Logical Positivists.

Answer 38

1) Ayer
2) Carnap
3) Neurath
4) Reichenbach
5) Schlick

Question 39

Summarize the Logical Positivists.

Answer 39

• Began under Schlick to make philosophy scientific.
• Restart Hume’s position and categories of propositions as either synthetic, analytic, or nonsense
• All truth propositions have to be verified.
• All moral statements are expressions of emotion that cannot be verified.

Question 40

Summarize Wittgenstein.

Answer 40

• Words are true.
• Discussions of philosophy must be resigned to propositions of natural science, but later says this is itself nonsense.
• Philosophy is only therapeutic. To dispel confusion and anxiety. Nothing else.

Question 41

Summarize Quine.

Answer 41

• Challenges Logical positivism on the reductionism and analytic/synthetic distinction.
• There’s no such thing as absolutely certainty, even in math.
• Philosophy has to be empiricist and materialist.
• Only statements of physics can be true.

Question 42

Summarize Nussbaum.

Answer 42

• Focuses on the relationship of fiction to moral philosophy.
• Need to study fiction in order to philosophically inquire into ethics. Applauds Aristotle’s ethics that apply differently to each person.
• Emotion has a legitimate role in reason and ethics.
• There’s no one thing to which all other values can be reduced.