Short Answer Questions

Question 1

The Enlightenment Room

Answer 1

• Unified worldview
• Importance and relevance in displaying Enlightenment Ideas
• Desire to know more of the natural world
• Emphasis on science and knowledge
• The room has statues, vases, and scientific implements
• We can see a shift from a religious emphasis to a scientific one

Question 2

Descartes’s version of the ontological argument

Answer 2

• Mathematical turn
• Infinity, finitude – I think therefore God is
• God is infinite, because I am finite it necessarily shows that there must be something infinite that brought me to being.
• “My perception of God is prior to my perception of myself”
• It is impossible for me to exist if God does not exist

Question 3

Primary and secondary qualities

Answer 3

• John Locke
• Primary qualities inhere to an object and refer to solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Objectivity about objects.
• Secondary qualities do not inhere in an object, they are qualities that the object has the power to create in us. Subjective reactions we have to objects.

Question 4

Scottish Common Sense Realism

Answer 4

• Thomas Reid
• Uniformity to sense of object – knowable
• Objects are real
• The fact that there’s uniformity to our subjective experience that is related to the subject’s relationship to that object, tells us that objects are in fact real
• Objects are real because there is a uniformity to our perception. Objects exist independent of subject.
• Our cumulative senses are reliable

Question 5

Define the noumena and the phenomena

Answer 5

• Noumenal: nous (mind) immaterial or essence
• Phenomena: experience/matter/material
• Kant divided the universe into these two categories
• The Categorical Imperative bridges the great divide

Question 6

The Categorical Imperative

Answer 6

• The noumenal breaking into the phenomenal
• Morality
• The philosophical golden rule “act in a way that your action can be universal”
• Singular absolute truth

Question 7

The Dialectic in history

Answer 7

• Hegel
• History of progress
• Reason
• Dominant idea/counter idea
• One generation’s synthesis is the next generation’s thesis

Question 8

Deism

Answer 8

• Gentlemen’s Religion
• God made the world but doesn’t sustain it
• The world is a finely tuned watch
• No belief in the incarnation of Christ – simply a good teacher
• Liberalism does the same thing as Deism.
• Religion is a necessary ingredient to society
• Halfway house to secularism