Assignment

Answer the following questions, Be sure to number your answers, so they correspond with the questions.

Each answer to each question should be at least one paragraph or more. Answers may come from the textbook: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) (ISSN 2161-0002.), and from your mind.

Be sure to use standard English grammar and spelling.

1. If a computer app beats you every time you play chess, is the computer smarter than you? Does your computer think? Explain why or why not in detail.

2. Is free will possible if there is such a thing as God's plan? Explain how humans can be free if a higher power knows what you are going to do before you do it.

3. Explain and evaluate the paradox of Buridan's donkey and what Spinoza's view and use of this paradox.

4. Explain in detail in what sense does Alyosha Karamazov realize that he is free in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

5. Explain in detail why many existentialists such as Dostoyevsky and Sartre feel that human beings are outside determinism?

6. Explain the idea of analytic philosophy and contrast with other schools of philosophy.

7. Compare and contrast the logical positivist to the natural language theorist.

8. Explain the role of the "Vienna Circle" in the history of analytic philosophy.

9. Explain and evaluate the main themes found in existentialism. Does our being truly precede our essence?

10. Explain why Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky are considered predecessors of existentialism.

11. Critically analyze Husserl's phenomenology and how it informed existentialism?

12. Explain the meaning of being and nothingness according to Sartre.