Assignment

Question 1
Thomas Hobbes is known as the founder of British rationalism.
True
False

Question 2
Descartes believed that he could be absolutely certain about his new-found knowledge.
True
False

Question 3
In order to test the his ability to claim to know anything at all, Descartes decided to intentionally _____ everything he supposedly knew and to try to figure everything out from scratch.
doubt
confess
redistribute
own

Question 4
Thomas Hobbes believed that we obtain knowledge using our ______.
senses
mathmatical abilities.
library
assisants

Question 5
Francis Bacon was one of the pioneers in developing the _______ method.
inference
reconstructionist
empirical
scientific

Question 6
Kierkegaard is often referred to as the father (or grandfather) of _______.
existentialism
empiricism
rationalism
philosophy

Question 7
Kierkeegard stresses that the idea that life is full of either/or decisions in which one is forced to make a choice (because doing nothing is a choice itself), making it necessary to take a leap of _____ without having logical proof of which answer is correct.
discovery
faith
ignorance
calculation

Question 8
Nietzsche claimed that traditional values and philosophy were helpful to one's life.
True
False

Question 9
Nietzche believed that "God is dead," meaning that he believed that the idea that God exists is no longer something that an intellegent person could honestly believe in.
True
False

Question 10
Nietzsche believed that a race of superior humans, those who were the most capable, would end up replacing present-day humanity.
True
False

Question 11
Karl Marx believed that history was the story of the universe becoming aware of itself.
True
False

Question 12
Karl Marx is thought of as the father of the political philosophy known as ______.
Communism
Democracy
Republicanism
Monarchy

Question 13
Marx believed that history is the story of the struggle between ______ and the working class.
soldiers
capitalists
termites
the elderly

Question 14
Hegel hated knowledge that wasn't directly based on sense data.
True
False

Question 15
Marx blaimed virtually all the world's problem on economic (material) ______.
inequalty (deprivation)
progress (improvement)
success (advancement)
decline (depression)

Question 16
Edmund Husserl wanted to turn philosophy into _______.
the science of experience.
a religion.
an art.
the science of invention.

Question 17
Jean Paul Sartre believed that life had no meaning other than the meaning that _______.
can be derived from mathematics.
God has given it.
we choose to give it.
we find in the writings of the great thinkers of the past.

Question 18
Sartre believed that people possess total freedom, but with that freedom comes full responsibility for our actions. To deny this (according to Sartre) is _______.
bad karma
sin
bad faith
inventive.

Question 19
Martin Heidegger believed that understanding the "meaning of being" was the fundamental task of philosophy.
True
False

Question 20
Sartre believed that reality centered around the spirit force of the universe.
True
False

Question 21
David Hume believed that words such as "God" which denote things that we cannot see were nonsense, because all knowledge is based on sense data.
True
False

Question 22
Hume believed that it was _____ to prove a causal connection (a cause/effect relationship) between events because our senses cannot directly detect causation.
routine
easy
impossible
difficult

Question 23
Kant referred to things that cannot be studied with our senses as _____.
data
inferences
interpretations
noumena

Question 24
Kant believed in a system of ethics that was based on moral ______, not on consequences.
duty
observations
commandents
interpretations

Question 25
Kant believed our brains were naturally set up to sort our sense data into categories.
True
False

Question 26
Michel Foucault believed that language only had meaning within the context of the discourse community, or "epistime," with which it was associated.
True
False

Question 27
Richard Rorty believed that the key to learning was to be objective, something very easily done by an educated person.
True
False

Question 28
Issues with regard to artificial intelligence, or "AI," are a major issue in philosophy today, with philosophers debating how closely computer programing could ever replicate the human mind.
True
False

Question 29
Thomas Kuhn showed that even ______ is influenced by our biases as humans.
religion
science
thought
goverment

Question 30
Jaques Derrida felt that it is impossible to be aware of all one's biases, and would attempt to show how our atttempts to be objective are actually products of our biases. He called this process ______.
recallibration
deconstruction
deification
reobjectification

Question 31
Because he wanted to distinguish his version of pragmatism from the teachings of William James, Charles Sanders Pierce renamed his philosophy "pragmaticism."
True
False

Question 32
Pragmatists are not relativists - they believe that truth is a fixed thing that can only be learned through pure reason, as experiential knowledge is unreliable.
True
False

Question 33
Pragmatists believed that an idea was true if it worked, which led them to being focused on matters that were very ______.
mathematical
mystical
secret
practical

Question 34
Bertrand Russell believed that it was important to focus on the way we use _______ in philosophy.
technology
language
forms
history

Question 35
_______ believed that Philosophy was handicapped by the fact that language has limits with regard to what it can express, and we have no way of expressing what might lie beyond those limits.
Charles Sanders Pierce
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Anthony Flew
Soren Kierkegaard

Question 36
Nietzche believed that slave morality had long kept humankind down, but the overman, with master morality, would rekindle human creativity and advancement. Compare and contrast these two forms of morality. (at least a paragraph for each, 10 points).

Question 37
Explain Hobbes' idea of the social contract. (4 sentences)

Question 38
Kierkegaard believed that life forced people to make "either/or" decisions. What did he mean by this? How does this relate to his idea of a "leap of faith.?" (4 sentences)

Question 39
Explain how Utilitarians (Bentham and Mill, as an example) made moral decisions. (4 sentences)

Question 40
Explain why Marx felt that capitalism was unfair and would inevitably give way to communism. (4 sentences)

Question 41
Bonus: Explain postmodernism. How does it attempt to redefine how we look at the world? How does it critique earlier forms of philosophy? (4 sentences)

Question 42
Bonus: Describe Kant's moral theory. What according to Kant is necessary to make an act a moral act? (4 sentences)