Test Prep Flashcards
The “Age of the Presocratics” is generally considered to be
From 600 BC to 479 BC
Pythagoras was a part of what school?
The Ionian school
A philosopher of the Ionian school who created a theory of oppositional meanings and qualities, as reflected in his five aphorisms of “oppositionality.”
Heraclitus
This philosopher had a clear sense of the reality and the immortality of the soul as the moral and intellectual core of human life and experience. His view was reflected in his eight aphorisms on the soul.
Heraclitus
This philosopher was deeply concerned with moral implications. There is, he seems to be teaching, a human reality that reflects an underlying moral order every bit as much as the natural world reflects a rational order. He holds, in fact, that the rational order of the natural world and the moral order are one and the same.
Heraclitus
Which Presocratic philosopher used atomism as an argument to resolve “Zeno’s paradox” of the impossibility of moving from one place to another?
Leusippus
Who was the founder of and the most famous and influential member of the Eleatic school?
Parmenides
Held that the physis, the one element of which everything is composed, is air. (p. 99)
Anaximenes
Held that the physis, the one element of which everything is composed, is water.
Thales
Rejected his mentor’s proposal of water as the one fundamental substance on the basis of a logical argument: properties such as wetness come in pairs (such as dryness as the opposite). If threis a single fundamental substance it must therefore be abstract, something without properties
Anaximander
Credited with the concept of the “atom,” from the Greek word atomos, which literally means “uncuttable.
Democritus
Held that the physis, the one element of which everything is composed, is the Apeiron.
Anaximander
This presocratic philosopher’s slogan was “panta rhei,” that is, “everything moves,” “everything flows,” or “everything changes.” (
Heraclitus
Well-known for the statement, “You never walk through the same stream twice.
Heraclitus
From the words of a goddess he learned that “what exists has always existed.”
Parmenides
Created a mathematical theorem that is one of the foundational concepts of modern geometry.
Pythagoras
The “Hellenistic Age,” which extends essentially from 600 BC to the collapse of the Greek empire in about 30 BC, is often divided into three periods. The first period, from 600 BC to 479 BC is referred to as _____________.
The Age of the Presocratics
The second period of the Hellenistic Age, from 479 BC to 323 BC is referred to as ___________
The Classical Greek Period.
The third period of the Hellenistic Age, from 323 BC to 30 BC, is referred to as
The Post Aristotelian Period.
Which of the following is not considered to be one of the philosophers of the Ionian School?
A.
Heraclitus
B.
Zeno of Elea
C.
Anaxagoras
D.
Pythagoras
B) Zeno
Who was Cicero referring to when he said that he “pulled philosophy down from the heavens and sent it into the cities and homes of man”?
Plato
How do we know so much about Socrates’s life?
Plato’s writing
Which Renaissance artist is responsible for the allegorical painting The School of Athens?
Raphael
Aristotle’s ideas are the guiding spirit of Western idealism and religious thought.
False
According to Herman, what was Socrates’s “real crime”?
Daring to think for himself and convincing others to do the same.
According to Socrates, why was death so desirable?
Death allowed one to achieve the highest wisdom and virtue, unencumbered by the physical body.
Why did Socrates refuse to break the law, even if the law was unjust?
Because doing wrong did injury to a man’s soul.
What was Plato’s given name?
Aristocles
Which philosopher amazed his fellow Milesians with two scientific achievements that led to a significant change in Greek thinking, and eventually in world thinking?
Thales
What did Thales believe was the first element?
Water
Which pre-Socratic thinker rejected the concept of stability and advocated that everything is endlessly changing?
Heraclitus
Who does Herman refer to as the father of relativism?
Heraclitus
Panta Rhei means…
All things change.
Logos means
The Word or the Spirit or the Reason or the Way
Who responded to the claim that “everything changes” by making the counterargument that “nothing changes”?
Parmenides
Heraclitus and Parmenides’ views on reality were diametrically opposed. Whose great achievement was it to combine these two views into one, thus giving birth to “history’s first great rational system”?
Socrates and Plato
What question led to the great achievement referred to in number eight above, and what was its answer that became the starting point for the intellectual tradition for the western world in the coming centuries?
What am I? A soul
Socrates and Plato said that “to be a human is to have ______.”
A soul (psyche)
What is one of the major points that separates Plato from his Neoplatonist imitators?
Many Neoplatonists were intuitionists
What is the standard Greek answer to the key to happiness, that is, to achieving that inner sense of well-being that the Greeks called eudaimonia?
Cultivating virtues such as courage, wisdom, and justice.
