Students

Review Questions

1. Explain what the “interconnectedness of knowledge” means, and provide some specific examples in support of the idea.
2. Outline what the reading has to say about Einstein and how he developed his theory. What role did a thought experiment play in that development?
3. What does the area of philosophy called epistemology study? How does the reading connect epistemology to a specific case?
4. What does the area of philosophy called metaphysics study? How does the reading connect metaphysics to a specific case?
5. What does the area of philosophy called ethics study? How does the reading connect ethics to a specific case?
6. What does the area of philosophy called political philosophy study? How does the reading connect political philosophy to a specific case?
7. What does the area of philosophy called logic study? How does the reading connect logic to a specific case?
8. Describe how the defendant and the judge who was about to pronounce sentencing both used the idea of free will and choice to explain their actions.

Plato Knowledge Is Recollection

Review Questions

1. Explain Socrates’s response when Meno asks “How will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?”
2. Explain Socrates’s response when Meno asks “Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?”
3. Explain Socrates’s point when he says that the boy “does not know now, what is the side of a figure of eight feet. But then he thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty. Now he has a difficulty, and neither knows nor thinks that he knows.”
4. In your opinion, did Socrates teach the boy or simply have the boy recollect what he already knew? Explain your answer.

Aristotle A Writing Tablet

Review Questions

1. Why does Aristotle claim that the “intellect” cannot be mixed with the body?
2. What does Aristotle mean when he says that “the soul is a place of forms or ideas . . . that the forms are there not in actuality, but potentially”?
3. How does Aristotle distinguish between the faculties of sense from that of intellect?

Augustine The Possibility of Deception

Review Questions

1. How does Augustine distinguish between what we know about ourselves and what we know about things outside of us?
2. Do you agree with Augustine when he says that even “without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this”? Explain your answer.
3. What is Augustine’s answer to skeptics who say, “What if you are deceived?” Do you agree or disagree with Augustine’s reply?

René Descartes Doubt and Certainty

Review Questions

1. Why doesn’t Descartes think that he will have to deal with each individual belief separately?
2. Why does Descartes think that sense experience cannot be the basis of knowledge?
3. Why does Descartes doubt even the truths of mathematics?
4. Are you certain that you are not dreaming right now? If you are certain, then what reasons can you give that cannot be doubted?
5. What role does doubting play in your life (e.g., in your daily routine; at work; during your studies; listening to the news; watching advertisements; in discussions with friends)?

John Locke Knowledge Derives From Experience

Review Questions

1. What are “innate principles and ideas”?
2. List some of Locke’s arguments against “innate principles and ideas.”
3. Explain Locke’s argument against the belief that the use of reason is necessary to discover innate principles.
4. Describe Locke’s arguments for his claim that young children do not immediately understand abstract and general ideas.

Gottfried Leibniz Deep Inside

Review Questions

1. What are some of Leibniz’s arguments regarding the question of whether the soul in itself is entirely empty, or else we are born with certain innate principles and ideas?
2. Do you agree with Leibniz’s position regarding innate ideas? Explain your answer.
3. How is Leibniz’s position regarding innate ideas similar to that of Plato?
4. How is Leibniz’s position regarding innate ideas different from that of Aristotle or Locke?
5. What is Leibniz’s position regarding “necessary truths”?

Mary Astell Degrees of Clearness

Review Questions

1. How does Astell describe the distinguishing characteristics of science?
2. How does Astell describe the distinguishing characteristics of authority?
3. How does Astell describe the distinguishing characteristics of opinion?
4. How does Astell use the concept of “clear and distinct ideas”?

David Hume Matters of Fact and Relations of Ideas

Review Questions

1. Outline some examples of Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact.
2. How does Hume support his claim that “The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction”?
3. Why does Hume claim that “causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience”?
4. Do you agree with Hume when he says “all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past”? Explain your answer.
5. What are Hume’s arguments for his claim that we come to expect that the future will resemble the past because of custom or habit?
6. What are some examples that Hume uses to support his claim that “In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience”?
7. Hume says, “all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavor, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.” How does Hume support this claim?

Immanuel Kant The Possibility of Experience

Review Questions

1. Define and give an example of “knowledge a priori.”
2. Define and give an example of “knowledge a posteriori.”
3. Define and give an example of “analytic judgments.”
4. Define and give an example of “synthetic judgments.”

Charles S. Peirce The Nature of Inquiry

Review Questions

1. Why does Pierce claim that few persons care to study logic?
2. Explain what Peirce means when he says that the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.
3. What does Peirce mean by the method of fixing belief called the method of science?
4. What does Peirce mean by the method of fixing belief called the method of tenacity?
5. What does Peirce mean by the method of fixing belief called the method of authority?

Helen E. Longino Can There Be a Feminist Science?

Review Questions

1. What are some of the basic ideas underlying “value-free science”?
2. Why does Longino criticize the idea of “value-free science”?
3. How do constitutive values and contextual values differ?
4. What does Longino believe should constitute a viable research program in neuroscience and psychology?
5. According to Longino, what role does a “political commitment” play in science?

Noretta Koertge Wrestling With the Social Constructor

Review Questions

1. How does Koertge define social construction or constructivist epistemology?
2. Discuss Koertge’s claim that “Feminists are also quick to accuse their opponents of dualistic thinking, e.g. of trying to force the rich complexity of a sexual spectrum into the artificially tidy and mutually exclusive boxes of biological male vs. biological female.” Why is this important to Koertge?
3. How does Koertge characterize the “sociological turn” in epistemology? Do you agree with her point? Explain your answer.
4. How does Koertge see the role of discovering the truth in science? Why is it important to Koertge? According to Koertge, how would the social constructivist program affect the role of truth in science?
5. What is the difference between the context of discovery and the context of justification? Give an example of each.
6. According to Koertge, “The proponents of politically progressive science, however, would argue that science has always been impregnated with social values through and through. Their agenda is not to try to make science more value-neutral. Rather it is to inject the correct values at all stages.” Why does Koertge worry about this?

Edmund Gettier Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

Review Questions

1. What is Gettier’s outline of the general form of the conditions for someone’s knowing a given proposition?
2. Do you agree with the general form of the conditions for someone’s knowing a given proposition? Explain your answer.
3. Specify the conditions that you think are adequate for someone to know a given proposition.
4. Describe Gettier’s two cases in which the conditions are true for some proposition, though it is at the same time false that the person in question knows the proposition.

Raymond Smullyan An Epistemological Nightmare

Review Questions

1. How does the Epistemologist characterize Frank’s concept of “private mental states”? Do you agree with the Epistemologist or with Frank? Explain your answer.
2. What are some of the things that the Epistemologist claims his machine can do? Do you think that such a machine is possible? Explain your answer.
3. What are some of Frank’s arguments in support of his view that cause him to doubt that the Epistemologist’s machine can really measure Frank’s psychological states? What are some of the Epistemologist’s counter-arguments? Whose arguments do you think are stronger? Explain your answer.
4. Why does the Epistemologist rely on the machine to find out what he believes? Why doesn’t he simply recognize directly what his beliefs are?
5. When the question of the Epistemologist’s sanity arises, what advice does the machine give him?
6. Describe the “terrible paradox” that confronts the Epistemologist. Do you agree that it is a paradox? Explain your answer.

Margaret MacDonald Sleeping and Waking

Review Questions

1. What are some of the main differences between dreams and waking illusions that MacDonald develops in the reading?
2. What does MacDonald mean when she says that the objects of illusory waking perception are, in some sense, located among the real objects which form their context? Do you agree with MacDonald’s claim? Explain your answer.
3. Why does Macdonald claim that “It makes sense to say, ‘Banquo’s ghost appeared at the banquet,’ but it would be nonsense to say ‘My dream of Westminster Abbey appeared between the window and the wardrobe’”? Do you agree with MacDonald? Explain your answer.
4. Why does MacDonald think it is important that “there are procedures for determining whether any waking perception is veridical or illusory. One perception is checked or corrected by others”?
5. Explain MacDonald’s meaning when she says that a dreamer is neither correct nor mistaken about what he dreams. How does MacDonald support this claim? Do you agree with MacDonald? Explain your answer.

John Pollock Just a Brain in a Vat

Review Questions

1. Why is the question “How is knowledge possible at all?” important?
2. What has been the role of skeptical arguments in epistemology?
3. Describe the operation that was performed on Harry. What did they do with Harry’s brain? What are they trying to prove?
4. Explain Pollock’s answer to the skeptics. Do you agree with Pollock or the skeptics? Explain your answer.
5. Do you think that it is possible that you are just a brain in a vat? Explain your answer.

Linda Zagzebski Knowledge and the Motive for Truth

Review Questions

1. Zagzebski says, “either we turn our pre-reflective trust into reflective trust, or we become skeptics.” Do you agree with Zagzebski? Explain your answer.
2. Zagzebski claims that reflection can increase the trustworthiness of our faculties. Do you agree with this idea? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Zagzebski means by “epistemic conscientiousness.”
4. What are “intellectual virtues”, and why does Zagzebski think they are important? Do you agree with Zagzebski?
5. Zagzebski says, “I propose that knowledge is the epistemically conscientious attainment of truth.” What does she mean by this?

Plato The Divided Line and the Cave

Review Questions

1. Draw Plato’s divided line illustration that was provided in the reading. Describe what each area contains and give specific examples of what would go in each area.
2. How are all the areas above the divided line related? What do they have in common? Do you agree with Plato’s explanation of what these areas contain and why they belong there?
3. How are all the areas below the divided line related? What do they have in common? Do you agree with Plato’s explanation of what these areas contain and why they belong there?
4. Explain the differences between “reason/understanding” and “belief/opinion.” Do you agree with Plato’s explanation of the differences? Explain your answer.
5. Why does Plato tell us that the areas above the divided line refer to the eternal and unchanging world?
6. Why does Plato claim that it is only in the areas above the divided line where our minds are capable of understanding the world of ideas, and we are, therefore, able to grasp truth through reason? Do you agree with Plato? Explain your answer.
7. Explain Plato’s Idea of Good.What role does it play in the divided line?
8. List and describe some examples of “images” that Plato talks about. According to Plato, how do images relate to physical objects?
9. Describe the Perceptual World in Plato’s divided line.
10. Describe the Conceptual World in Plato’s divided line.
11. Describe in detail the world of the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
12. Describe in detail what will happen to the prisoner if he is released into the world outside the cave.
13. Why does Plato says that the released prisoner would have a difficult time convincing the prisoners who are still in the cave about the outside world? Can you think of any strategies that you would use in order to convince the still-chained prisoners?
14. Do you agree with Plato when he says that the point of the allegory is that the prisoner’s journey from inside the cave to the world outside the cave can be interpreted as the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world? Explain your answer.

Aristotle First Principles

Review Questions

1. What does Aristotle mean when he says, “in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach”? Do you agree with Aristotle?
2. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the why of anything—e.g., why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.”
3. What are Aristotle’s “four causes”? Give an example of each.
4. Explain Aristotle’s meaning when he says, “A principle which everyone must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis; and that which every one must know who knows anything. Such a principle is the most certain of all. It is this: That the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.”
5. Explain Aristotle’s meaning when he says, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false; but neither what is nor what is not is said to be or not to be.”
6. What does the term “universal” mean for Aristotle?

Margaret Cavendish Observations

Review Questions

1. According to Cavendish, what are the features that distinguish sense perception from rational perception? Give some examples of each kind of perception.
2. Explain Cavendish’s meaning when she says, “the uncertainty and mistakes of human actions proceed either from the narrowness and wandering of our senses, or from the slipperiness or delusion of our memory, or from the confinement or rashness of our understanding.”
3. Why does Cavendish claim that we cannot always trust our sense perceptions? Do you agree with Cavendish? Explain your answer.
4. What does Cavendish means when she says that every creature has a double perception? Do you agree with Cavendish? Explain your answer.
5. Explain Cavendish’s claim that since sense perception is more likely to deluded, it cannot be the ground of reason.
6. What is the role of experimental philosophy in Cavendish’s view?
7. Explain what Cavendish means when she says that matter is infinite and eternal, thus it is impossible that any other new matter should be created. Do you agree with Cavendish?
8. Explain Cavendish’s meaning when she claims that since figure, motion, and matter are but one thing, and that no particular motion is or can be lost in nature, nor created anew, therefore motion is material.
9. What does Cavendish mean when she says that every part of nature has both sense and reason?

John Locke Primary and Secondary Qualities

Review Questions

1. Discuss some of Locke’s arguments against innate ideas. Do you agree with Locke? Are there any ideas that you think are innate in us? If so, what might they be?
2. Discuss Locke’s arguments regarding the origin of all our ideas. Do you agree with Locke?
3. According to Locke, what distinguishes primary qualities from secondary qualities? Using Locke’s analysis, choose a common physical object and list some of its primary qualities and secondary qualities. Do you agree with Locke about these distinctions?
4. Discuss what Locke means when he talks about the mind being “passive.” Give some examples.
5. Discuss Locke’s claim that a physical object“has no color in the dark.” How does this relate to Locke’s distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities? Do you agree with Locke that a physical object“has no color in the dark”? Explain your answer.

Gottfried Leibniz The Building Blocks of Reality

Review Questions

1. According to Leibniz, how do Monads differ from compound substances? Describe some of the attributes of each.
2. Why does Leibniz claim that every Monad is different from every other Monad? What does the Monads being different from each other ensure? What would happen if all Monads were identical?
3. Explain Leibniz’s meaning when he says, “Thus it may be said that a Monad can only come into being or come to an end all at once; that is to say, it can come into being only by creation and come to an end only by annihilation.” Do you agree with Leibniz? Explain your answer.
4. According to Leibniz, why are Monads “windowless”? Explain why this is important for Leibniz.
5. According to Leibniz, where do the natural changes of the Monads come from?

George Berkeley To Be Is to Be Perceived

Review Questions

1. Berkeley claims “That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow.” Do you agree with Berkeley? Explain your answer.
2. What are some of Berkeley’s arguments against the existence of physical objects that are independent of being perceived?
3. Berkeley says that “all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.” Do you agree with Berkeley?
4. Berkeley holds that “From what has been said it follows there is not any other Substance than Spirit, or that which perceives.” He then goes on to offer what he calls a “fuller proof of this point.” Explain what that “fuller proof” amounts to.
5. What are Berkeley’s arguments against the distinction between primary and secondary qualities? Do you agree with Berkeley? Explain your answer.
6. Why does Berkeley claim that the very notion of what is called Matter or corporeal substance involves a contradiction? Do you agree with Berkeley?
7. Why does Berkeley claim that “So far as I can see, the words will, soul, spirit, do not stand for different ideas, or, in truth, for any idea at all, but for something which is very different from ideas, and which, being an agent, cannot be like, or represented by, any idea whatsoever”?
8. What is Berkeley’s answer to someone who asks the following questions: “What therefore becomes of the sun, moon and stars? What must we think of houses, rivers, mountains, trees, stones; nay, even of our own bodies? Are all these but so many illusions?”
9. What are Berkeley’s reasons for using the term “idea” rather than the term “things”?

David Hume Commit It to the Flames

Review Questions

1. Why does Hume says that “The Cartesian doubt, therefore, were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable; and no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject”? Do you agree with Hume?
2. Why does Hume says that we cannot “have recourse to the veracity of the Supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses”? Do you agree with Hume?
3. Explain what Hume means when he says, “Bereave matter of all its intelligible qualities, both primary and secondary, you in a manner annihilate it, and leave only a certain unknown, inexplicable something, as the cause of our perceptions; a notion so imperfect, that no skeptic will think it worth while to contend against it.”
4. How does Hume contrast demonstrations (relations of ideas) with matters of fact?
5. Why does Hume say that humans seem to be fixated on the idea that physical objects exist independently of us? Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.

Mary Shepherd Ideas

Review Questions

1. Explain why Shepherd thinks it is important to answer the following question: “By what argument can it be proved, that the perceptions of the mind must be caused by external objects?”
2. Explain what Shepherd means when she says, “Although we are only conscious of our sensations, yet our whole combined sensations include in their relations the necessity, that there should be, and the proof that there are, other existences than the mere sensations themselves.”
3. How does Shepherd answer the following question: “How can we know of any continued existence when we can immediately know nothing but our sensations, which are obviously only interrupted existences?”
4. According to Shepherd, what role does reason play in the question concerning our knowledge of the existence of bodies?
5. What are some of Shepherd’s arguments that the ideas of Berkeley and Hume have resulted in the non-existence of mind as well as matter, and thus they are a source of universal skepticism? Do you agree with Shepherd? Explain your answer.
6. Outline some of Shepherd’s arguments for the “existence of exterior objects.”
7. Do you agree with Shepherd when she argues that the mind is conscious of the interruptions of its sensations; therefore, the ultimate causes which exist ready and capable to renew them, must be uninterrupted causes? Explain your answer.

Immanuel Kant Regarding an External World

Review Questions

1. What does Kant mean when he says that human reason “falls into confusion and contradictions,” because the principles it employs transcends the limits of experience? What are the limits of experience?
2. Describe Kant’s criticism of Locke’s ideas. Do you agree with Kant’s criticism? Explain your answer.
3. Explain in detail Kant’s claim that “Our age is the age of criticism.” Which areas are subject to criticism and which are exempted? Do you agree with Kant’s assessment?
4. Why is Kant’s discussion a “critical investigation of pure reason”?
5. What is the Fourth Paralogism?
6. Explain what Kant means by transcendental idealism.
7. Explain what Kant means by transcendental realism.

Margaret MacDonald Things and Processes

Review Questions

1. Explain what MacDonald means when she says the following: “Compare e.g., the proposition, ‘Whales are really mammals, they are not fish,’ with ‘Whales are really processes, they are not things.’ There are empirical tests which determine whether a creature is a mammal or a fish.”
2. Explain MacDonald’s meaning when she remarks that “if there are no trains, stations, potatoes or people then propositions about them, other than those which assert or imply their non-existence, must be false.”
3. What criticism does MacDonald use when she asserts the following: “I wish to point out here is that Engels’ assertion depends on his attempt to use a certain analogy, viz., that between ordinary propositions and scientific hypotheses”?
4. What is MacDonald’s main point when she says, “That the sun goes round the earth is not of course perceived by anyone but may be an erroneous deduction from what is perceived”? Do you agree with MacDonald? Explain your answer.
5. Explain MacDonald’s point when she claims that “Similarly we know and do not merely believe that there are such things as trains, trees and people for we know that some propositions of the form ‘This is a tree,’ ‘This is a train,’ ‘This is a person’ are true and that the use of these words differs from the use of words for what we should ordinarily call ‘processes.’ This is a linguistic and not an empirical distinction.” Why does MacDonald think the distinction is important?

Martin Heidegger Metaphysics

Review Questions

1. Provide some of the reasons that Heidegger gives to support his claim that the first of all questions (not the first question in the chronological sense) is “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
2. Why does Heidegger claim that if we properly pursue the first question in its sense as a question, we must avoid emphasizing any particular, individual being”? Do you agree with Heidegger?
3. Explain Heidegger’s meaning when he says, “Philosophizing always remains a kind of knowing that not only does not allow itself to be made timely but, on the contrary, imposes its measure on the times.”
4. Heidegger asserts that “by referring to safety in faith as a special way of standing in the truth, we are not saying that citing the words of the Bible, ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth, etc.,’ represents an answer to our question. Quite aside from whether this sentence of the Bible is true or untrue for faith, it can represent no answer at all to our question.” Do you agree with Heidegger?
5. Explain Heidegger’s meaning when he says, “All essential questioning in philosophy necessarily remains untimely, and this is because philosophy either projects far beyond its own time or else binds its time back to this time’s earlier and inceptive past.”

Hannah Arendt Eternity Versus Immortality

Review Questions

1. What does Arendt mean when she says that “Immortality means endurance in time”?
2. Explain Arendt’s distinction between “immortality” and “eternity.” Do you agree with Arendt?
3. How does Arendt use the concept of “biological life” to support her claims?
4. Explain the difference between the active life and the contemplative life. Do you agree with Arendt’s distinctions?
5. Explain Arendt’s meaning when she says that the experience of the “eternal” is a “kind of death, and the only thing that separates it from real death is that it is not final because no living creature can endure it for any length of time.”
6. Arendt says that “it is decisive that the experience of the eternal, in contradistinction to that of the immortal, has no correspondence with and cannot be transformed into any activity whatsoever.” Do you agree with Arendt? Explain your answer.

Katherine Hawley Science as a Guide to Metaphysics?

Review Questions

1. Explain Hawley’s meaning when she says there is “a widespread suspicion that science cannot really contribute to metaphysics, and that scientific findings grossly underdetermine metaphysical claims.” Do you agree with Hawley?
2. Explain the meaning of “presentism.” Discuss some of the arguments for and against it.
3. According to Hawley, what does “empirically adequate” mean? Provide some examples.
4. Describe the position called “scientific realism.” Do you subscribe to this position? Explain your answer.
5. Hawley talks about the “anti-realist argument.” What is it?
6. Explain what Hawley means by Undermining and Counterargument.

4A

Plato The Beginning of Everything

Review Questions

1. What reasons does the speaker provide for the assertion that “Everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause”? Do you agree with this assertion? Explain your answer.
2. Why does the speaker claim that the world was created and deny that it always existed? Do you agree with the speaker?
3. Explain the meaning of the following passage in the Plato reading: “But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.” Do you agree with this?
4. What does the speaker mean when he says, “for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further”?

Thomas Aquinas The Five Ways

Review Questions

1. Explain Aquinas’s first proof for the existence of God. Do you agree with Aquinas?
2. Explain Aquinas’s second proof for the existence of God. Do you agree with Aquinas?
3. Explain Aquinas’s third proof for the existence of God. Do you agree with Aquinas?
4. Explain Aquinas’s fourth proof for the existence of God. Do you agree with Aquinas?
5. Explain Aquinas’s fifth proof for the existence of God. Do you agree with Aquinas?

Gottfried Leibniz Sufficient Reason

Review Questions

1. What, according to Leibniz, “distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God”? Do you agree with Leibniz? Explain your answer.
2. What, according to Leibniz, are acts of reflection? Do you agree with Leibniz? Explain your answer.
3. What are the “two great principles” that Leibniz claims grounds our reasonings? Do you agree with Leibniz? Explain your answer.
4. Explain the difference between truths of reasoning and truths of fact. Do you agree with Leibniz? Explain your answer.
5. According to Leibniz, why must the final reason of things be in a necessary substance? Do you agree with Leibniz? Explain your answer.

George Berkeley The Author of Nature

Review Questions

1. Explain Berkeley’s argument when he says, “When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will.”
2. What support does Berkeley give for his claim that the “ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the imagination”? Do you agree with Berkeley?
3. Explain what Berkeley means by “laws of nature.” Is Berkeley’s use of this term the same as modern scientists use of it? Explain your answer.
4. What does Berkeley says about the difference between “real things” and “ideas”?
5. What arguments does Berkeley give to support the claim that the ideas of Sense are less dependent on the spirit, or thinking substance which perceives them, “yet still they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it”?
6. Do you agree with Berkeley when he says, “Hence, it is evident that God is known as certainly and immediately as any other mind or spirit whatsoever distinct from ourselves”? Explain your answer.

William Paley The Watchmaker Argument

Review Questions

1. Explain Paley’s reasoning and conclusions when he compares finding a stone while you are out walking with your finding a watch while you are out walking. Do you think that Paley’s arguments are strong or weak? Explain your answer.
2. Paley says that even if “we had never seen a watch made; that we had never known an artist capable of making one; that we were altogether incapable of executing such a piece of workmanship ourselves, or of understanding in what manner it was performed,” nevertheless, we would still conclude that it must have had a maker. Do you agree with Paley? Explain your answer.
3. Explain Paley’s meaning when he claims “It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to show with what design it was made: still less necessary, where the only question is, whether it were made with any design at all.”
4. What does Paley mean by the phrase “principle of order”?
5. Explain Paley’s point when he discusses the idea of “laws of metallic nature.”
6. Do you agree with Paley when he concludes that “There cannot be design without a designer”?

David Hume Against the Watchmaker Argument

Review Questions

1. Explain Philo’s point when he says, “Our ideas reach no further than our experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and operations. I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself.”
2. Explain Cleanthes’s argument by analogy for his conclusion that “we prove at once the existence of a deity.”
3. Explain Philo’s argument regarding the difference between a house and the universe. Do you agree with Philo? Do you think that it successfully counters Cleanthes’s analogical argument?
4. What is Philo’s point when he uses the phrase “proof of design”?
5. Explain Philo’s point when he says that we are not justified in transferring from parts to the whole.

4B

Anselm of Canterbury The Existence of God

Review Questions

1. Explain Anselm’s meaning when he says, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.”
2. Explain what Anselm means when he says, “For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists.”
3. Anselm concludes that “Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible.” Do you agree with Anselm? Explain your answer.
4. What does Anselm mean when he says “there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality”? What is the difference between the two italicized terms?
5. Explain Anselm’s distinction when he says that a thing may be conceived in two ways.

René Descartes The Idea of God

Review Questions

1. Descartes says, “I can demonstrate diverse properties of the triangle, all of which are assuredly true since I clearly conceive them: and they are therefore something; and I have already fully shown the truth of the principle, that whatever is clearly and distinctly known is true.” Do you agree with Descartes that the criteria of “clear and distinct” is adequate for his project? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Descartes means by “existence” and “essence.” Do you agree with Descartes’s use of these two concepts in his argument for the existence of God? Explain your answer.
3. Why does Descartes say that “it is not in my power to conceive a God without existence, that is a being supremely perfect, and yet devoid of an absolute perfection”? Why does Descartes claim that existence is a perfection?
4. Descartes says, “And although the right conception of this truth has cost me much close thinking, nevertheless at present I feel not only as assured of it as of what I deem most certain, but I remark further that the certitude of all other truths is so absolutely dependent on it that without this knowledge it is impossible ever to know anything perfectly.” What is Descartes’s point here?

Anne Conway On God

Review Questions

1. Explain what Conway means when she says, “In God there is neither time nor change, nor composition, nor division of parts.” Why is it important that God has these attributes?
2. Conway says that in God “there can exist no new knowledge or Will, but his knowledge and Will are eternal.” What is the difference between “eternal” and “infinite time”?
3. Explain Conway’s meaning when she says, “Likewise, in God there can exist no passion, which to speak properly comes from his creatures: For every passion is something temporal.”
4. Conway says, “let us suppose the duration of this world to be 600,000 years, or any other number of years, as great as can be by any reason conceived. Now, I demand whether it could be that the world was created before this time? If they deny it, they limit the power of God to a certain number of years; if they affirm it, they allow time to be before all time, which is a manifest contradiction.” Do you agree with Conway that it would be a contradiction?
5. Conway says, “Yet that indifference of acting, or not acting, can by no means be said to be in God; because this were an imperfection, and would make God like corruptible creatures.” Why would it be an imperfection?

David Hume Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Review Questions

1. What point is Demea making in this passage: “The unity too of the Divine Nature, it is very difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to deduce merely from contemplating the works of nature”?
2. Explain the importance of Demea’s general principle that “Whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence.” Do you agree with Demea? Explain your answer.
3. Do you agree with the following assertion of Cleanthes: “Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction”?
4. According to Cleanthes, “There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.” How does this affect Demea’s argument? Do you agree with Demea or Cleanthes?
5. Cleanthes asserts, “Therefore, the words necessary existence have no meaning.” Do you agree with Cleanthes? How does it affect Demea’s argument?

Sören Kierkegaard God Cannot Be Proven to Exist

Review Questions

1. Explain what Kierkegaard means when he says, “For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it.”
2. Explain what Kierkegaard means when he says, “But if when I speak of proving God’s existence I mean that I propose to prove that the Unknown, which exists, is God, then I express myself unfortunately. For in that case I do not prove anything, least of all an existence, but merely develop the content of a conception.”
3. Explain what Kierkegaard means when he says, “But between the God and his works there is an absolute relationship; God is not a name but a concept. Is this perhaps the reason that his essentia involvit existentiam [essence involves existence]?”
4. Explain what Kierkegaard means when he says, “What then is the Unknown? It is the limit to which the Reason repeatedly comes.”
5. Why does Kierkegaard argue that although we think our proofs get close to proving God’s existence, the final step is always a leap of faith? Do you agree with Kierkegaard? Explain your answer.

Markus Lammenranta Is Descartes’s Reasoning Viciously Circular?

Review Questions

1. What is the Cartesian Circle and why is it important?
2. Explain the importance of “clear and distinct” premises for Descartes.
3. Explain the criticism of Descartes when he says “that without knowledge of non-deceiving God he does not see how he can ever be certain of anything.”
4. What is Lammenranta’s point when he says of Descartes’s arguments, “These passages entail that clear and distinct perception is not sufficient for knowledge or certainty. One must know in addition that God exists and is not a deceiver”?
5. What is Lammenranta’s point when he asserts that “because Descartes’s proof presupposes that reason is reliable, it is hard to see how he could remove these doubts by it”?

4C

George Hayward Joyce The Problem of Evil

Review Questions

1. Explain why Joyce asserts that “The existence of evil in the world must at all times be the greatest of all the problems which the mind encounters when it reflects on God and His relation to the world.”
2. Why does Joyce believe that “Of man, it is true that the balance is immensely on the side of happiness”? Do you agree with Joyce? Explain your answer.
3. Joyce asserts that “The earthquake and the volcano serve a moral end which more than compensates for the physical evil which they cause.” What does Joyce mean by “moral end”? Do you agree with Joyce?
4. What role does the concept of “pain” play in Joyce’s discussion?
5. Explain Joyce’s meaning when he says, “The existence of moral evil, however, becomes explicable, when it is admitted that man’s life is a probation.”

J. L. Mackie Evil and Omnipotence

Review Questions

1. Why does Mackie claim that a theologian “can admit that no rational proof of God’s existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God’s existence is known in some other non-rational way”?
2. Mackie says, “I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational.” Do you agree with Mackie?
3. Mackie says, “In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false.” Explain why Mackie thinks that “if any two of them were true the third would be false.”
4. Explain Mackie’s criticism of the following position: “Evil is necessary as a means to good.”
5. Explain Mackie’s criticism of the following position: “Good cannot exist without evil.”

Keith Parsons A Simple Statement of the Problem of Evil

Review Questions

1. Why, according to most theologians and philosophers, can God do anything except make a contradiction true?
2. Explain what Parsons means when he claims that “whatever is brought about by nature or humans is indirectly created by God.”
3. When Parsons considers the concept of God, he lists three things that are required to be true: God is perfectly good; God is all-powerful; and God does not prevent the existence of natural and moral evil. But according to Parsons, “these three claims seem to form an inconsistent set.” Explain what Parsons means by this.
4. Parsons says that “the real implication of Epicurus’ argument is that such a God does not exist.” First, explain Epicurus’ argument. Second, discuss why you agree or disagree with the conclusion.
5. Do you agree with Parsons when he says, “if any (even one) actual evil is gratuitous, that is, if a perfectly good, all-powerful creator would not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting it, then God cannot exist”? Explain your answer.

4D

Blaise Pascal The Wager

Review Questions

1. Explain why Pascal says, “It is incomprehensible that there should be a God, and incomprehensible that there should not be a God.” What support does Pascal give for this claim?
2. What is Pascal’s point when he says, “But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither dimension nor limits”?
3. Pascal asserts that “Let us then examine this point, and say, ‘God is, or He is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? Reason can determine nothing about it.” Why does Pascal claim this about “Reason”?
4. Explain how Pascal justifies the claim that you must wagerthat either God exists or He doesn’t exist. Do you agree with Pascal?
5. What is Pascal’s point when he says, “We know truth, not only by our reason, but also by our heart”?

Damaris Cudworth Masham A Natural Inscription

Review Questions

1. Why does Masham claim that “Religion being (as I shall take it at present for granted) the only sufficient ground or solid support of virtue”?
2. Masham says, “It is indeed only a rational fear of God, and desire to approve ourselves to him, that will teach us in all things, uniformly to live as becomes our reasonable nature; to enable us to do which, must be the great business and end of a religion which comes from God.” Do you agree with Masham? Explain your answer.
3. Masham claims that “Skepticism is the proper disease our age, and has proceeded from diverse causes; but be the remoter or original ones what they will, it could never have prevailed as it has done, had not parents very generally contributed thereto, either by negligence of their children's instruction; or instructing them very ill in respect of religion.” Do you agree with Masham?
4. Masham says that “Absolute atheism does no doubt the best serve they who live as if there was no God in the World; but how far so great nonsense as this, has been able to obtain, is not easy to say.” Do you agree with Masham?
5. Explain Masham’s point when she assertsthat “An irrational religion can never rationally be conceived to come from God.”

Friedrich Nietzsche God Is Dead

Review Questions

1. Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, “In fact, we philosophers and free spirits feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the old God is dead; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation.”
2. Should we take Nietzsche’s famous line, “God is dead,” literally? Why or why not? Do you agree with Nietzsche?
3. Why does Nietzsche claim that most humans think it is impossible to accept that a moral system can be acceptable without a religious base? Do you agree with Nietzsche?
4. Why does Nietzsche think that we need to get rid of the religious idea of absolute values and universal moral laws? Do you agree with Nietzsche?
5. Why does the madman go around shouting, “I seek God! I seek God!”?

William. K. Clifford The Ethics of Belief

Review Questions

1. What point is Clifford making at the beginning of the reading about the ship’s owner?
2. Explain what Clifford means when he says that the question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of a belief. Do you agree with Clifford?
3. Explain what Clifford means when he asserts that the question is not whether a belief is true or false, but whether it is entertained on wrong grounds. Do you agree with Clifford?
4. What does Clifford mean by the phrase “it has been judged wrong to believe on insufficient evidence”?
5. Why does Clifford assert that, “No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.”? Do you agree with Clifford?

William James The Will to Believe

Review Questions

1. Explain in detail what James means by a “live hypothesis.”
2. Explain in detail what James means by a “dead hypothesis.”
3. Explain what James means when he says, “Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire.”
4. Explain what James means by a forced option.
5. Explain what James means by a momentous option.

5A

René Descartes Mind and Body

Review Questions

1. Explain Descartes’s reasoning for his claim that he has a clear and distinct idea of “mind.” Are Descartes’s arguments strong or weak?
2. Explain Descartes’s reasoning for his claim that he has a distinctidea of “body.” Are Descartes’s arguments strong or weak?
3. How does Descartes define “mind”?
4. How does Descartes define “body”?
5. Why does Descartes assert that corporeal objects exist, but that they are not exactly such as we perceive by the senses? How does God figure in Descartes’s assertion? Do you agree with Descartes? Explain your answer.

Margaret Cavendish A Double Perception

Review Questions

1. Explain why Cavendish claims that the “natural mind and soul of man, not the supernatural or divine,” cannot be separated from matter. Do you agree with Cavendish?
2. Explain Cavendish’s distinction between “rational perception” and “sensitive perception.” Do you agree with Cavendish’s arguments? Explain your answer.
3. According to Cavendish, there is a “double perception” and a “double knowledge.” Explain what Cavendish means by these terms.
4. Cavendish criticizes Descartes’s claim that all other animals besides man lack reason since other animals cannot express their mind, thoughts or conceptions, either by speech or any other signs, as man can do. According to Cavendish, “although they cannot talk or give intelligence to each other by speech, nevertheless each has its own peculiar and particular knowledge.” Explain Cavendish’s arguments in support of her position.
5. 5.. According to Cavendish, “perception, observation, and intelligence do not make reason—reason being the cause, and they the effects.” What does Cavendish mean by this claim?

Anne Conway One and the Same Thing

Review Questions

1. Explain what Conway means when she says that “In every visible creature there is a body and a spirit, or a more active and more passive principle.”
2. Explain what Conway means when she says that “spirit and body differ not essentially, but gradually, I shall deduce an argument from the intimate band or union, which intercedes between bodies and spirits.” Do you agree with Conway? Explain your answer.
3. Conway says, “if spirit and body are so contrary one to another, so that a spirit is only life, or a living and sensible substance, but a body a certain mass merely dead; a spirit penetrable and indiscerpible [having no separate parts], but a body impenetrable and discerpible [having separate parts], which are all contrary attributes.” Conway then asks the following question: What is that which joins or unites them together? Explain Conway’s point.
4. Conway asks a series of questions about the spirit: “Why does it require a corporeal eye so wonderfully formed and organized, that I can see by it? Why does it need a corporeal light, to see corporeal objects? Why is it requisite, that the image of the object should be sent to it, through the eye, that it may see it?” Conway uses this to support what claim? Do you agree with Conway?
5. Conway says that if the substance dualists are correct, then how does the mind, which is a non-physical substance, feel pain? Do you think that this is a strong argument against substance dualism? Explain your answer.

Lisa Shapiro The Correspondence

Review Questions

1. Shapiro argues that in Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes, Elisabeth’s main challenge is to move Descartes to think more carefully about what issue?
2. Elisabeth argues that a substance dualist must hold that no matter what condition the body finds itself in—if, for example, a person has fainted—the mind should still be able to exercise its power of thought. Why is this an important issue for substance dualism?
3. Explain Elisabeth’s implication that there are certain limits to or conditions on the soul’s autonomy. Does Descartes agree with Elisabeth?
4. Explain Shapiro’s suggestion that “we can read Elisabeth as here working towards an intermediary position, one between the substance dualism she originally identified with Descartes’ own and the materialism which she then seemed to take to be the only alternative.”
5. Explain why Shapiro thinks that Elisabeth is arguing the following: “For maintaining that thought is an autonomous activity does not require us to claim that it is an independent substance; we need not think of thought as an entity subsisting in and by itself.”

5B

William James Does Consciousness Exist?

Review Questions

1. James says, “I believe that consciousness, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.” Do you agree with James?
2. Explain what James means when he says about consciousness, “Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.”
3. James says, “There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing.” Do you agree with James’s claim that this is what constitutes “knowing”?
4. James says, “ My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another.” Do you agree with James’s “supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world”?
5. Explain what James means when he says, “a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of consciousness, while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective content. In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing.”

Thomas Nagel What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Review Questions

1. Explain the main idea behind reductionist theories of mind.
2. Nagel claims that “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.” Why does Nagel believe this? Do you agree with Nagel?
3. Nagel says of consciousness, “No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” Explain what Nagel means by the phrase “there is something it is like to be that organism.”
4. Explain what Nagel means when he says, “It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness.”
5. Explain what Nagel means when he says, “If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.” Do you agree with Nagel?

Patricia Smith Churchland The Hornswoggle Problem

Review Questions

1. Explain what is meant by the Hard Problem of consciousness.
2. Explain Churchland’s argument against the idea that “problems such as the nature of short-term memory, long-term memory, autobiographical memory, the nature of representation, the nature of sensory-motor integration, top-down effects in perception—not to mention such capacities as attention, depth perception, intelligent eye movement, skill acquisition, planning, decision-making, and so forth,” are the so-called Easy Problems. Do you agree with Churchland?
3. What are qualia and how do they figure in the Hard Problem argument?
4. According to Churchland, “There is a vast psychological literature, and a nontrivial neuroscientific literature, on this topic. Some of it powerfully suggests that attention and awareness are pretty closely connected. The approach might of course be wrong, for it is an empirical conjecture.” Explain what Churchland means by “an empirical conjecture.”
5. Churchland says, “What drives the left-out hypothesis? Essentially, a thought-experiment, which roughly goes as follows: we can conceive of a person, like us in all the aforementioned Easy-to-explain capacities (attention, short term memory, etc.), but lacking qualia.” What is Churchland’s argument against this thought-experiment?

Max Velmans How to Define Consciousness—and How Not to Define Consciousness

Review Questions

1. Velmans says, “Following the success of the brain sciences and related sciences, 20th century theories of mind in the West became increasingly materialistic.” What does Velmans mean by this? Give some examples.
2. Explain what it means to be a “property dualist.” What are some criticisms of this position?
3. Explain what it means to be a “reductionist.” What are some criticisms of this position?
4. What does Velmans mean when he says, “we can say that when consciousness is present, phenomenal content (consciousness of something) is present”?
5. Explain what Velmans means when he says, “To allow a clear distinction between consciousness of oneself and consciousness of things other than oneself, it makes more sense to reserve the term self-consciousness for a special form of reflexive consciousness in which the object of consciousness is the self or some aspect of the self.”

5C

John Locke Identity and Diversity

Review Questions

1. Explain Locke’s definition of “personal identity.”
2. Explain Locke’s meaning when he says, “we see the substance whereof personal self consisted at one time may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity; there being no question about the same person, though the limbs which but now were a part of it, be cut off.”
3. Explain Locke’s meaning when he says, “it must be allowed, that, if the same consciousness can be transferred from one thinking substance to another, it will be possible that two thinking substances may make but one person.”
4. Explain Locke’s meaning when he asserts that if the same consciousness is preserved, whether in the same or different substances, then the personal identity is preserved. Do you agree with Locke?
5. Explain Locke’s meaning when he says, “For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same man.” Do you agree with Locke?

David Hume I Am a Bundle of Perceptions

Review Questions

1. Explain Hume’s point when he asks, “Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For from what impression could this idea be derived?”
2. According to Hume, “It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea.” Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.
3. Hume asserts that “Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time.” Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.
4. Explain Hume’s point when he says, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.”
5. According to Hume, “When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.” Do you agree with Hume? Explain your answer.

J. David Velleman So It Goes

Review Questions

1. What is the main question that Velleman wants to explore?
2. Explain the difference between “endure” and “perdure” as they refer to a “self.” Which of these ideas do you most agree with? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Velleman means when he says that an effect produced by “experiential anticipation, in which I prefigure a future experience from the perspective that I expect to occupy in it. A single self appears to have its full existence both now and later, because I who anticipate the experience and the ‘I’ of the anticipated experience become superimposed.”
4. Explain what Velleman means when he says, “I want to suggest that the existence of an enduring self, if it is indeed an illusion, is one of two illusions that go hand-in-hand. A consequence of shedding the one illusion would be to shed the other as well. The other illusion of which I speak has to do with the nature of time.”
5. Explain the difference between what an “eternalist” believes and what a “presentist” believes. Which position do you agree with? If you don’t agree with either one, then state why.

John Locke Free Agents

Review Questions

1. Locke says that the “power which the mind has thus to order the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice versa, in any particular instance, is that which we call the Will.” Do you agree with Locke’s definition of “Will”?
2. Explain what Locke means by the “Understanding.” How does it differ from the “Will”? Do you agree with Locke’s distinctions? Explain your answer.
3. Locke says, “All the actions that we have any idea of reducing themselves, as has been said, to these two, namely, thinking and motion; so far as a man has power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free.” Do you agree with Locke’s definition of “freedom”?
4. Locke says, “the idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other.” Do you agree with Locke’s definition of “liberty”?
5. According to Locke, “willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it.” Do you agree with Locke’s definition of “willing”?

Baruch Spinoza Everything Happens Out of Necessity

Review Questions

1. In the Spinoza reading we find the claim that “In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.” Do you agree with Spinoza?
2. Explain what Spinoza means when he says, “The mind is a fixed and definite mode of thought, therefore it cannot be the free cause of its actions; in other words, it cannot have an absolute faculty of positive or negative volition.”
3. Explain what Spinoza means when he says, “there is in the mind no absolute faculty of understanding, desiring, loving, etc. Whence it follows, that these and similar faculties are either entirely fictitious, or are merely abstract and general terms, such as we are accustomed to put together from particular things.”
4. Spinoza says, “Thus the intellect and the will stand in the same relation to this or that idea, or this or that volition, as ‘man’ to Peter and Paul.” Analyze Spinoza’s analogy.
5. According to Spinoza, since everything that happens in our minds is determined by some cause, which has been itself determined by another cause, therefore, everything happens out of necessity. Do you agree with Spinoza?

Paul-Henri d’Holbach A Series of Necessary Moments

Review Questions

1. Why does d’Holbach say, “They have believed that the soul is mistress of its own conduct, is able to regulate its own peculiar operations, has the faculty to determine its will by its own natural energy; in a word, they have pretended that man is a free agent”?
2. Explain why d’Holbach says, “The faculties which are called intellectual, and those qualities which are styled moral, have been explained in a manner purely physical and natural.”
3. Explain why d’Holbach says, “Society has been believed interested in this system; because an idea has gone abroad, that if all the actions of man were to be contemplated as necessary, the right of punishing those who injure their associates would no longer exist.” Do you agree with this position?
4. d’Holbach says, “if at this moment it is announced to him that the water he so ardently desires is poisoned, he will, notwithstanding his vehement thirst, abstain from drinking it: and it has, therefore, been falsely concluded that he is a free agent. The fact, however, is, that the motive in either case is exactly the same: his own conservation.” Do you agree with d’Holbach? Explain your answer.
5. 5.. Explain what d’Holbach means when he says, “It has been believed that man was a free agent because he had a will with the power of choosing; but attention has not been paid to the fact that even his will is moved by causes independent of himself; is owing to that which is inherent in his own organization, or which belongs to the nature of the beings acting on him.”

Jean-Paul Sartre Condemned to Be Free

Review Questions

1. What is Sartre’s definition of existentialism?
2. Explain what Sartre means when he says that what existentialists “have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence, or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.” Do you agree with Sartre? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Sartre means when he says, “If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.” Do you agree with Sartre? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Sartre means when he says, “Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence.” Do you agree with Sartre? Explain your answer.
5. Explain what Sartre means when he says, “Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be . . . Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is”; in other words, man is responsible for what he is.”Do you agree with Sartre? Explain your answer.

Richard Taylor I Can

Review Questions

1. Taylor says that the three statements, “A billiard ball can be both round and red (but not round and square); (Lucretius thought that) atoms can swerve from their paths; and This can be the restaurant we ate in long ago” are “all the philosophically significant senses of ‘can’ as applied to physical objects, and these are, respectively, three senses of contingency, which I shall call logical, causal, and epistemic.” Explain why Taylor asserts that the three senses are logical, causal, and epistemic.
2. Explain why Taylor says that the statement “This stone is so hot it can fry an egg,” is a philosophically significant sense of “can” as a “causal capacity or, better, of hypothetical possibility.”
3. Explain what Taylor means when he says, “In the first place, then, and most obviously, a state or event is logically impossible if the description of its occurrence is self-contradictory, like ‘a ball’s becoming square while still spheroid.’”
4. Explain what Taylor means when he says, “an epistemically contingent state or event is therefore one concerning which it is not known whether it occurred, or will occur, or not.”
5. Explain Taylor’s criticism of the position that says, “if I am asked by the physician whether I can move my finger and I reply that I can, then what I am telling him, if ‘can’ here (as in the stone and egg case) expresses a hypothetical possibility, is that if there should occur within me a certain (unnamed) event or state, then the finger motion would at once follow as a causal consequence.”

Raymond Smullyan Take My Free Will, Please!

Review Questions

1. In the reading, when God says, “Why would you wish not to have free will?” the mortal says, “Because free will means moral responsibility.” Why does the mortal worry about having moral responsibility?
2. In the reading, the mortal says that “Evil temptations come along, and try as I can, I cannot resist them.” To which God responds, “If it is really true that you cannot resist them, then you are not sinning of your own free will and hence (at least according to me) not sinning at all.” Explain why God says that it would be “not sinning at all.”
3. In the reading, when God says, “I will grant you a very, very special dispensation to sin as much as you like, and I give you my divine word of honor that I will never punish you for it in the least. Agreed?” To which the mortal responds that he has “an abhorrence of sinning, quite apart from any punishments it may entail.” Explain the mortal’s concern here.
4. In the reading, the mortal says, “You mean there is nothing satisfactory you can now do, that does not mean that there is nothing you could have done.” To which God responds, “What could I have done?” To this the mortal says “You should never have given me free will in the first place.” Why does the mortal feel this way?
5. In the reading, God tells the mortal that he has created a new universe in which a being just like the mortal may or may not have free will. God then asks the mortal what he hopes God chose to do. God says, “Remember now, the responsibility for the decision falls entirely on my shoulders, not yours. So you can tell me perfectly honestly and without any fear, which way do you hope I have decided?” To which the mortal says, “I hope you have decided to give him free will.” Why did the mortal change his mind from his earlier position?

Philippa Foot Free Will as Involving Determinism

Review Questions

1. Explain the following claim: “that so far from being incompatible with determinism, free will actually requires it.” Do you agree with this claim? Explain your answer.
2. Explain how the following passage offers a definition of the concept of “determinism: “if human action is subject to a universal law of causation . . . there will be for any action a set of sufficient conditions which can be traced back to factors outside the control of the agent.”
3. Explain what Foot means when she relates that “an action which is not determined cannot properly be called an action at all, being something that happened to the agent rather than something he did.” Do you agree with this claim? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Foot means when she says, “to explain an action is not necessarily to show that it could have been predicted from some fact about the agent’s character—that he is weak, greedy, sentimental, and so forth. We may if we like say that an action is never fully explained unless it has been shown to be covered by a law which connects it to such a character trait.”
5. Foot says, “We hold responsible only a man who is a rational agent; if someone were always to do things out of the blue, without having any reason to do them, we should be inclined to count him as a lunatic, one who could not be held responsible for his actions, so that even if he did things he would do things for which he could not be held responsible.” Do you agree with this claim? Explain your answer.

7A

Plato Why Should We Be Good?

Review Questions

1. In the first half of the dialogue, who is argued to be happier: the perfectly just person or the perfectly unjust person? Explain the reasoning involved.
2. Explain the argument that “the origin and nature of justice; it is a mean or compromise . . .”
3. Explain the argument against Socrates that “those who practice justice do so involuntarily . . .”
4. Explain how the story of the Ring of Gyges relates to the discussion of justice and injustice.
5. For the purposes of his argument, Socrates describes a metaphor of the human soul. Explain how and why it relates to justice and injustice.

Aristotle Virtues

Review Questions

1. Aristotle says, “Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit.” Do you agree with Aristotle?
2. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “if the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and every passion and every action is accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains.” Do you agree with Aristotle?
3. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.”
4. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “Now neither the virtues nor the vices are passions, because we are not called good or bad on the ground of our passions, but are so called on the ground of our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions (for the man who feels fear or anger is not praised, nor is the man who simply feels anger blamed, but the man who feels it in a certain way), but for our virtues and our vices we are praised or blamed.”
5. According to Aristotle, virtue “is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.” Do you agree with Aristotle?

David Hume Morality Is Determined by Sentiment

Review Questions

1. Hume says, “Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy, and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation.” Do you agree with Hume?
2. Explain what Hume means when he says, “The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.”
3. Explain what Hume means when he says, “No satisfactory answer can be given to any of these questions, upon the abstract hypothesis of morals; and we must at last acknowledge, that the crime or immorality is no particular fact or relation, which can be the object of the understanding, but arises entirely from the sentiment of disapprobation.”
4. Hume says, “It appears evident that the ultimate ends of human actions can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependence on the intellectual faculties.” Do you agree with Hume?
5. Explain what Hume means when he says, “It is impossible there can be a progress in infinitum; and that one thing can always be a reason why another is desired. Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection.”

Immanuel Kant Duty

Review Questions

1. Explain what Kant means when he says, “as man is a free (moral) being, the notion of duty can contain only self-constraint (by the idea of the law itself), when we look to the internal determination of the will (the spring), for thus only is it possible to combine that constraint (even if it were external) with the freedom of the elective will. The notion of duty then must be an ethical one.”
2. Explain what Kant means when he says, “Accordingly, general deontology [duty or rule-based ethics], in that part which brings not external, but internal, freedom under laws is the doctrine of virtue.”
3. Explain what Kant means when he says, “An end is an object of the elective will (of a rational being) by the idea of which this will is determined to an action for the production of this object.”
4. Explain what Kant means when he says, “I may be forced by others to actions which are directed to an end as means, but I cannot be forced to have an end; I can only make something an end to myself.”
5. Explain what Kant means when he says, “That ethics contains duties to the observance of which one cannot be (physically) forced by others, is merely the consequence of this, that it is a doctrine of ends, since to be forced to have ends or to set them before one’s self is a contradiction.”

John Stuart Mill The Principle of Utility

Review Questions

1. Explain what Mill means when he says, “Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.”
2. Explain what Mill means when he says, “Happiness is not an abstract idea, but a concrete whole.”
3. Explain what Mill calls the “Greatest Happiness Principle.” Do you agree with Mill’s position?
4. Explain what Mill means when he says, “Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so.”
5. Explain what Mill means when he says, “Now there is absolutely no reason in the nature of things why an amount of mental culture sufficient to give an intelligent interest in these objects of contemplation, should not be the inheritance of every one born in a civilized country.”

Friedrich Nietzsche A Free Spirit

Review Questions

1. Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, “The angry and reverent spirit peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion upon them: youth in itself even, is something falsifying and deceptive.”
2. Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, “To be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out of an intention; people were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention.”
3. Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, “At whatever standpoint of philosophy one may place oneself nowadays, seen from every position, the erroneousness of the world in which we think we live is the surest and most certain thing our eyes can light upon.”
4. Explain what Nietzsche meansby Will to Power.
5. Explain what Nietzsche means when he says, “Will they be new friends of ‘truth,’ these coming philosophers? Very probably, for all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths. But assuredly they will not be dogmatists.”

Thomas H. Huxley Evolution and Ethics

Review Questions

1. Explain what Huxley means when he says, “civilized man brands all these ape and tiger promptings with the name of sins; he punishes many of the acts which flow from them as crimes; and, in extreme cases, he does his best to put an end to the survival of the fittest of former days by axe and rope.”
2. Explain what Huxley means when he says, “the practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”
3. Explain what Huxley means when he says, “the inevitable penalty of over-stimulation, exhaustion, opened the gates of civilization to its great enemy, ennui; the stale and flat weariness when man delights not, nor woman neither; when all things are vanity and vexation; and life seems not worth living except to escape the bore of dying.”
4. Explain what Huxley means when he says, “In every family, in every polity that has been established, the cosmic process in man has been restrained and otherwise modified by law and custom; in surrounding nature, it has been similarly influenced by the art of the shepherd, the agriculturist, the artisan.”
5. Explain what Huxley means when he says, “Thus, brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos might well seem to stand condemned. The conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature, and the microcosmic atom should have found the illimitable macrocosm guilty. But few, or none, ventured to record that verdict.”

Rosalind Hursthouse Virtue Ethics

Review Questions

1. Explain what Hursthouse means when she says, “A virtue such as honesty or generosity is not just a tendency to do what is honest or generous, nor is it to be helpfully specified as a ‘desirable’ or ‘morally valuable’ character trait . . . It is concerned with many other actions as well, with emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities.”
2. Hursthouse says, “Another problem for virtue ethics, which is shared by both utilitarianism and deontology, is the justification problem.” Explain what is meant by the term “justification problem.”
3. Explain what Hursthouse means when she says, “It is part of practical wisdom to be wise about human beings and human life. (It should go without saying that the virtuous are mindful of the consequences of possible actions. How could they fail to be reckless, thoughtless and short-sighted if they were not?)”
4. Explain what Hursthouse means when she says, “Like other social animals, our natural impulses are not solely directed towards our own pleasures and preservation, but include altruistic and cooperative ones. This basic fact about us should make more comprehensible the claim that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of human flourishing and also undercut the objection that virtue ethics is, in some sense, egoistic.”
5. Hursthouse says of virtue ethics that “its critics maintained that it was unable to provide action-guidance and hence, rather than being a normative rival to utilitarian and deontological ethics, could claim to be no more than a valuable supplement to them.” How does Hursthouse respond to this criticism?

David B. Wong Moral Relativism

Review Questions

1. In the reading, a critic of “descriptive relativism might argue that it fails to account for important moral similarities across cultures such as prohibitions against killing innocents and provisions for educating and socializing the young.” How might a relativist respond to this criticism?
2. Explain what Wong means when he says, “In offering alternative explanations of moral disagreement, morality-specific relativists tend to adopt a ‘naturalistic’ approach to morality in the sense that they privilege a scientific view of the world and fit their conceptions of morality and moral disagreement within that view.”
3. Wong says, “Morality-specific relativism divides into cognitive and non-cognitive versions.” Explain the two versions.
4. Explain what Wong means when he says, “Moral judgments implying that the subjects have a reason to do what is prescribed make sense only as prescriptions based on what the speakers and subjects (and the intended audience of the judgments) have agreed to do.”
5. Wong says, “There are radical and moderate versions of meta-ethical relativism.” Explain the two versions.

7B

James Rachels Active and Passive Euthanasia

Review Questions

1. Rachels says, “The doctrine that says that a baby may be allowed to dehydrate and wither, but may not be given an injection that would end its life without suffering, seems so patently cruel as to require no further refutation. The strong language is not intended to offend, but only to put the point in the clearest possible way.” Do you agree with Rachels? Explain your answer.
2. Rachels says, “One reason why so many people think that there is an important moral difference between active and passive euthanasia is that they think killing someone is morally worse than letting someone die. But is it? Is killing, in itself, worse than letting die?” What is Rachels’s position on these questions? Do you agree with Rachels?
3. Explain what Rachels means when he says, “The bare difference between killing and letting die does not, in itself, make a moral difference. If a doctor lets a patient die, for humane reasons, he is in the same moral position as if he had given the patient a lethal injection for humane reasons.”
4. Explain what Rachels means when he says, “it is very easy to conflate the question of whether killing is, in itself, worse than letting die, with the very different question of whether most actual cases of killing are more reprehensible than most actual cases of letting die.”
5. Explain what Rachels means when he says, “However, if it has been decided that euthanasia—even passive euthanasia—is desirable in a given case, it has also been decided that in this instance death is no greater an evil than the patient’s continued existence. And if this is true, the usual reason for not wanting to be the cause of someone’s death simply does not apply.”

Judith Jarvis Thomson A Defense of Abortion

Review Questions

1. In the reading, we encounter this case: “the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it?” What is Thompson’s position on this case?
2. Explain what Thomson means when she says, “Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you are a product of a rape.”
3. Thomson says, “If directly killing an innocent person is murder, and thus is impermissible, then the mother’s directly killing the innocent person inside her is murder, and thus is impermissible. But it cannot seriously be thought to be murder if the mother performs an abortion on herself to save her life. It cannot seriously be said that she must refrain, that she must sit passively by and wait for her death.” Do you agree with Thomson?
4. Explain what Thomson means when she says, “In our case there are only two people involved, one whose life is threatened, and one who threatens it. Both are innocent: the one who is threatened is not threatened because of any fault, the one who threatens does not threaten because of any fault. For this reason we may feel that we bystanders cannot interfere. But the person threatened can.”
5. Explain what Thomson means when she says, “It's rather a shocking idea that anyone’s rights should fade away and disappear as it gets harder and harder to accord them to him.”

Don Marquis Why Abortion Is Immoral

Review Questions

1. Explain what Marquis means when he says, “if any of these arguments concerning abortion is a good argument, it requires not only some claim characterizing fetuses, but also some general moral principle that ties a characteristic of fetuses to having or not having the right to life or to some other moral characteristic that will generate the obligation or the lack of obligation not to end the life of a fetus.”
2. Explain what Marquis means when he says, “The moral generalizations of both sides are not quite correct. The generalizations hold for the most part, for the usual cases. This suggests that they are all accidental generalizations, that the moral claims made by those on both sides of the dispute do not touch on the essence of the matter.”
3. Marquis says, “When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ultimately what makes killing me wrong. This being the case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of his other future.” Do you agree with Marquis?
4. Explain what Marquis means when he says, “It is possible that there exists a different species from another planet whose members have a future like ours. Since having a future like that is what makes killing someone wrong, this theory entails that it would be wrong to kill members of such a species.”
5. Explain what Marquis means when he says, “Obviously, if it is the continuation of one’s activities, experiences, and projects, the loss of which makes killing wrong, then it is not wrong to kill fetuses for that reason, for fetuses do not have experiences, activities, and projects to be continued or discontinued. Accordingly, the discontinuation account does not have the anti-abortion consequences that the value of a future-like-ours account has.”

Peter Singer Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Review Questions

1. Singer says, “I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes.” Do you agree with Singer’s assumption. Explain your answer.
2. Singer offers a simple principle: “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” Singer then goes on to say that the principle takes “no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.” Do you agree with Singer’s principle? Do you agree with the second part of Singer’s claim?
3. Explain what Singer means when he says, “Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation. From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation.” Do you agree with Singer?
4. Singer says, “When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look ‘well-dressed’ we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving . . . [it follows that] we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.” Do you agree with Singer?
5. Singer says, “The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society. Previously, as I have already mentioned, this may hardly have been feasible, but it is quite feasible now.” Explain why Singer holds this view. Do you agree with Singer?

John Harris The Survival Lottery

Review Questions

1. Harris says, “Many philosophers have for various reasons believed that we must not kill even if by doing so we could save life. They believe that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die.” Explain what accounts for the difference, and give an example.
2. In the reading, we find this passage: “Y and Z readily agree that a man ought not to do what he ought not to do, but they point out that if the doctors, and for that matter society at large, ought on balance to kill one man if two can thereby be saved, then failure to do so will involve responsibility for the consequent deaths.” Do you agree with this argument? Explain your answer.
3. In the reading, we find this passage: “to remove the arbitrariness of permitting doctors to select their donors from among the chance passers-by outside hospitals . . . Y and Z put forward the following scheme: they propose that everyone be given a sort of lottery number.” Explain how the scheme will be implemented. Do you think that this is an acceptable scheme?
4. In the reading, we find this passage: “If we respect individuality and see every human being as unique in his own way, we might want to reject a society in which it appeared that individuals were seen merely as interchangeable units in a structure, the value of which lies in its having as many healthy units as possible. But of course Y and Z would want to know why A’s individuality was more worthy of respect than theirs.” Do you agree with Y and Z’s position?
5. Harris says, “if we really want to counter proponents of the lottery, if we really want to answer Y and Z and not just put them off, we cannot do so by saying that the lottery involves killing and object to it for that reason, because to do so would, as we have seen, just begs the question as to whether the failure to save as many people as possible might not also amount to killing.” Do you agree with Harris?

Richard Hanley A Wolf in Sheep’s Cloning?

Review Questions

1. Hanley mentions “two very common intuitions concerning the putative wrongness of human cloning.” What are they?
2. Explain what Hanley means when he says, “So it might be thought that God’s approval is the missing ingredient: He gave us the gift of sexual reproduction, and does not approve of alternatives. This claim is interesting if it is true, but (as is always the case where God’s approval is concerned), the best way for God-fearers to discover whether it is true is by seeking independent grounds for whether or not human cloning is unethical.”
3. Hanley says, “Whatever one’s favored view of persons—whether one equates persons with human animals, or continuing unbranching psychologies, or God-given souls, or virtual machines, or whatever—developed, functioning clones have a claim to personhood equal to that of any normal human individual produced by sexual reproduction.” Do you agree with Hanley?
4. Hanley considers the following claim: “many people apparently think that human clones will be not only genetically but physically and psychologically identical with the donor.” What is Hanley’s criticism of this claim?
5. Explain what Hanley means when he says, “Clones are no more likely to be turned into brainwashed armies than we non-clones are (sadly, they will be no less likely to, either). Clones are no more or less likely to lack autonomy.”

Plato Apology

Review Questions

1. How did Socrates interpret the oracle of Delphi’s claim that no one was wiser than Socrates? What did this prompt Socrates to do? Was Socrates successful in determining whether the oracle’s claim was true?
2. In the reading, Socrates says, “When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows, I neither know nor think that I know.” Explain what Socrates means when he says, “I neither know nor think that I know.”
3. In the reading, Socrates says, “young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and examine others themselves; there are plenty of persons, as they soon enough discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing: and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me.” Discuss how this might have contributed to the judgment against Socrates.
4. In the reading, Socrates says, “But I shall be asked, Why do people delight in continually conversing with you? I have told you already, Athenians, the whole truth about this: they like to hear the cross-examination of the pretenders to wisdom; there is amusement in this.” Discuss how this might have contributed to the judgment against Socrates.
5. In the reading, we find this passage: “Socrates, this time we will not mind Anytus, and will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing this again you shall die; if this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.” Did Socrates purposely force the hand of the jury? Why might he do this?

Plato Should I Obey the Laws?

Review Questions

1. What are some of Crito’s arguments that Socrates should escape prison? How does Socrates respond to Crito’s arguments?
2. In the reading, Crito worries that many people “will believe that I might have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not care. Now, can there be a worse disgrace than this—that I should be thought to value money more than the life of a friend?” To which Socrates responds, “But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many?” Do you agree with Crito or with Socrates? Explain your answer.
3. Explain some of Socrates’s reasons for claiming that doing evil in return for evil is never justified. Do you agree with Socrates? Explain your answer.
4. Discuss some of the reasons why Socrates claims that by living in Athens his entire life, he has entered into an implied contract that he will obey the laws.
5. Explain what Socrates means when he says that if he stays and accepts his punishment, then he dies “in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men.”

Aristotle A Political Animal

Review Questions

1. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “When several families are united, and the association aims at something more than the supply of daily needs, the first society to be formed is the village.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficient, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
5. Explain what Aristotle means when he says, “A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.

Thomas Hobbes Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short

Review Questions

1. Explain what Hobbes means when he says, “when taking a journey, he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there are laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries that are done to him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words?”
2. Explain what Hobbes means when he says, “And in this law of nature consists the fountain and origin of justice. For where no covenant has preceded, no right been transferred, and every man has right to every thing. Consequently, no action can be unjust. But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust. The definition of injustice is no other than the lack of performance of covenant. And whatsoever is not unjust is just.”
3. Explain what Hobbes means when he says, “When the transferring of right is not mutual, but one of the parties transfers in hope to gain friendship or service from another, or from his friends, or in hope to gain the reputation of charity or magnanimity, or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion, or in hope of reward in heaven,” then this is called a gift. Do you agree with Hobbes? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Hobbes means when he says, “Whoever transfers any right transfers the means of enjoying it as far as it lies in his power. As he that sells land is understood to transfer whatever grow upon it. Nor can he that sells a mill turn away the stream that drives it. And they that give to a man the right of government in sovereignty are understood to give him the right of levying money to maintain soldiers, and of appointing magistrates for the administration of justice.” Do you agree with Hobbes? Explain your answer.
5. Explain what Hobbes means when he says, “a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, ‘I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition: that you give up your right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.’ This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a commonwealth.” Do you agree with Hobbes? Explain your answer.

John Locke For the Good of the People

Review Questions

1. Explain what Locke means when he says, “it is evident, that absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society.” Do you agree with Locke? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Locke means when he says, “Hence it is evident, that absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form of civil-government at all: for the end of civil society, being to avoid, and remedy those inconveniencies of the state of nature, which necessarily follow from every man's being judge in his own case, by setting up a known authority, to which every one of that society may appeal upon any injury received, or controversy that may arise, and which every one of the society ought to obey; wherever any persons are, who have not such an authority to appeal to, for the decision of any difference between them, there those persons are still in the state of nature; and so is every absolute prince, in respect of those who are under his dominion.”
3. Explain what Locke means when he says, “If man in the state of Nature be so free, if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest and subject to nobody, why will he part with his freedom, this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer, that though in the state of Nature he has such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain and constantly exposed to the invasion of others.”
4. Explain what Locke means when he says, “And so, whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any commonwealth, is bound to govern by established standing laws, promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees, by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws; and to employ the force of the community at home only in the execution of such laws, or abroad to prevent or redress foreign injuries and secure the community from inroads and invasion. And all this to be directed to no other end but the peace, safety, and public good of the people.”
5. Explain what Locke means when he says, “Whenever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”

Catharine Macaulay Observations on Revolution

Review Questions

1. Explain what Macaulay means when she tells us that “we cannot with any grounds of reason or propriety, set up our own constitution as the model which all other nations ought implicitly to follow, unless we are certain that it bestows the greatest possible happiness on the people which in the nature of things any government can bestow.”
2. Explain what Macaulay means when she tells us that “Our parliaments ought to have been eminently distinguished for their integrity, and a total independence of any corrupt influence.” Do you agree with Macaulay? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Macaulay means when she tells us that “when the old vessel of a commonwealth is torn to pieces by the shocks it has sustained from contending parties; when the people, disdaining and rejecting all those fond opinions by which they have been enslaved to misery,” then they can “assert their native right of forming a government for themselves.”
4. Explain what Macaulay means when she tells us that “for the rich, when possessed of the whole authority of the state, would be sure to take the first care of themselves, if they should not be tempted to secure an exoneration of all burthens, by dividing the spoils of the public; and that the abuse of such high trusts must necessarily arise, because to act by selfish considerations, is in the very constitution of our nature.”
5. Explain what Macaulay means when she tells us that “I know of no rational objection; nor can I think of any expedient to remove the well grounded apprehensions of the different interests which compose a commonwealth, than a fair and equal representation of the whole people, a circumstance which appears very peculiarly necessary in a mixed form of government, where the democratic part of the constitution will ever be in danger of being overborne by the energy attending on its higher constituent parts.”

John Stuart Mill Liberty

Review Questions

1. Mill explores the “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual,” which he calls Social Liberty. Explain what Mill means by the term Social Liberty.
2. Explain what Mill means when he says, “there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” Do you agree with Mill?
3. Explain what Mill means when he says, “Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first.” Do you agree with Mill?
4. Explain what Mill means when he says, “The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle . . . that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” Do you agree with Mill?
5. Explain what Mill means when he says, “What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be identified with the people; that their interest and will should be the interest and will of the nation. The nation did not need to be protected against its own will. There was no fear of its tyrannizing over itself.” Do you agree with Mill?

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Workers of the World, Unite!

Review Questions

1. Marx and Engels say, “We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.” Discuss some of the “series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange” that are mentioned in the reading.
2. Explain what Marx and Engels mean when they say, “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” Do you agree with their assessment?
3. Explain what Marx and Engels mean when they say, “In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”
4. Marx and Engels claim that, “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.” Do you agree with their assessment?
5. Explain what Marx and Engels mean when they say, “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.” Do you agree with their assessment?

John Dewey Democratic Habits of Thought and Action

Review Questions

1. Explain what Dewey means when he says, “The key-note of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together: which is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals.”
2. Explain what Dewey means when he says, “the idea that no man or limited set of men is wise enough or good enough to rule others without their consent; the positive meaning of this statement is that all those who are affected by social institutions must have a share in producing and managing them.”
3. Explain what Dewey means when he says, “The very fact of exclusion from participation is a subtle form of suppression. It gives individuals no opportunity to reflect and decide upon what is good for them. Others who are supposed to be wiser and who in any case have more power decide the question for them and also decide the methods and means by which subjects may arrive at the enjoyment of what is good for them.”
4. 4, Explain what Dewey means when he says, “Every autocratic and authoritarian scheme of social action rests on a belief that the needed intelligence is confined to a superior few, who because of inherent natural gifts are endowed with the ability and the right to control the conduct of others; laying down principles and rules and directing the ways in which they are carried out.”
5. Explain what Dewey means when he says, “Unless freedom of individual action has intelligence and informed conviction back of it, its manifestation is almost sure to result in confusion and disorder. The democratic idea of freedom is not the right of each individual to do as he pleases, even if it be qualified by adding ‘provided he does not interfere with the same freedom on the part of others.’ While the idea is not always, not often enough, expressed in words, the basic freedom is that of freedom of mind and of whatever degree of freedom of action and experience is necessary to produce freedom of intelligence.”

Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Review Questions

1. Explain what Wollstonecraft means when she says, “true voluptuousness must proceed from the mind—for what can equal the sensations produced by mutual affection, supported by mutual respect? What are the cold or feverish caresses of appetite, but sin embracing death, compared with the modest overflowings of a pure heart and exalted imagination?”
2. Explain what Wollstonecraft means when she says, “To render women truly useful members of society, I argue, that they should be led, by having their understandings cultivated on a large scale, to acquire a rational affection for their country, founded on knowledge, because it is obvious, that we are little interested about what we do not understand.”
3. Explain what Wollstonecraft means when she says, “children will never be properly educated till friendship subsists between parents. Virtue flies from a house divided against itself—and a whole legion of devils take up their residence there.”
4. Explain what Wollstonecraft means when she says, “Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose, that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense.”
5. Explain what Wollstonecraft means when she says, “But that noble simplicity of affection, which dares to appear unadorned, has few attractions for the libertine, though it be the charm, which, by cementing the matrimonial tie, secures to the pledges of a warmer passion the necessary parental attention; for children will never be properly educated till friendship subsists between parents.”

Karen Green Parity and Procedural Justice

Review Questions

1. Explain what Green means when she says, “The argument that Okin developed began with the observation that the family is, according to Rawls, a major social institution. Hence the principles of justice should apply to it. Yet, as Okin points out, Rawls never raises the question of whether a traditional family structure would be chosen from behind the veil of ignorance.”
2. Explain what Green means when she says, “In so far as it is the business of the state to require those who are responsible for children to give them the care necessary for them to develop into morally motivated citizens, the state has a right to interfere in family affairs. But there is little reason not to expect that quite a variety of family formations are satisfactory in this regard, and those who claim otherwise often appear to be doing no more than attempting to impose their conception of the good life on others.”
3. Explain what Green means when she says, “It may be that the family is a major social institution in any society, but the forms of family that one would expect to find in liberal societies are surely not predetermined.”
4. Explain what is meant by this passage: “We should therefore tackle the issue of feminism and the family from the top down. Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness is represented by him as using the idea of pure procedural justice. ‘Pure procedural justice obtains when there is no independent criterion for the right result: instead there is a correct or fair procedure such that the outcome is likewise correct or fair.’”
5. Explain what Green means when she says, “However, the assumption of innate sexual difference is not essential to the argument for parity. Nor is the assumption that gender differences are not natural. Parity can be argued for independently of whether one thinks that gender is merely socially constructed, and the means of imposing sexual inequality, or whether one thinks that it is grounded in valuable or ineliminable differences between the sexes. Either way, parity provides a just procedure.”

Richard Rorty Love and Money

Review Questions

1. Rorty quotes from the novel Howard’s End: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.” Explain what is meant by this passage. Do you agree with the idea?
2. Rorty quotes from the novel Howard’s End: “As long as Bast had enough money to keep up the pretension to gentility, he was conversable; Margaret and the others could make connections with him. But when he lost his job and had no money left he became unconversable. This was not because of the snobbery of the gentlefolk but because Bast himself, obsessed with the need to feed himself and his wife, could think and talk of nothing else. No money, no conversability and no connectability.” Explain what is meant by this passage. Do you agree with the idea?
3. Explain what Rorty means when he says, “that tenderness only appears, that the shy crabwise movement only continues, when there is enough money to produce a little leisure, a little time in which to love. His decency consists in his confidence that tenderness will, in fact, appear when there is money enough. But he shares enough of Wells’s and Shaw’s realism to admit that money is the independent, and tenderness the dependent, variable.”
4. Summarize Rorty’s story about his first trip to India where he met a fellow philosophy professor who is also a politician. What did the Indian politician determine?
5. Explain what Rorty means when he says, “I think that the sudden popularity of anti-technological talk among us Northern liberals, our turn over the last 20 years from planning to dreaming, and from science to philosophy, has been a nervous, self-deceptive reaction to the realization that technology may not work. Maybe the problems our predecessors assumed it could solve are, in fact, too tough. Maybe technology and centralized planning will not work.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah Identity: Political Not Cultural

Review Questions

1. Explain what Appiah means when he says, “There are tensions between the concepts of culture and of civilization. Nothing requires, for example, that an American culture should be a totality in any stronger sense than being the sum of the things we make and do.”
2. Explain what Appiah means when he says, “Anthropologists, on the whole, tend now to avoid the relative evaluation of cultures, adopting a sort of cultural relativism, whose coherence philosophers have tended to doubt. And they do not take values to be more central to culture than are, for example, beliefs, ideas, and practices.”
3. Explain what Appiah means when he says, “To share a language is to participate in a complex set of mutual expectations and understandings.” Specifically, what are some of the “mutual expectations and understandings” that Appiah mentions?
4. Explain what Appiah means when he says, “The citizens of a nation need not have a common culture, in this sense. There is no single shared body of ideas and practices in India or in most contemporary African states. I think it is fair to say that there is not now and there has never been a common culture in the United States, either.”
5. Explain what Appiah means when he says, “It would be natural to assume that the primary subgroups to which these subcultures are attached will be ethnic and racial groups (with religious denominations conceived of as a species of ethnic group). It would be natural, too, to think that the characteristic difficulties of a multicultural society arise largely from the cultural differences between ethnic groups. I think this easy assimilation of ethnic and racial subgroups to subcultures is to be resisted.”

Aristotle Tragedy

Review Questions

1. Aristotle says, “Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities . . . for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves, and these, thought and character, are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Aristotle means when he tells us that “the plot is the imitation of the action; by ‘plot,’ I here mean the arrangement of the incidents.”
3. For Aristotle, “that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents” is called character. According to Aristotle, what role does character play in tragedy? Do you agree with Aristotle?
4. According to Aristotle, “A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.” Explain why Aristotle thinks that this is important to tragedy.
5. Aristotle says, “Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.” Do you agree with Aristotle? Explain your answer.

Henri Bergson An Animal Which Laughs, and Is Laughed At

Review Questions

1. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.”
2. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of a runner who falls—he is comical for the same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.”
3. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comical, but surely it is contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one of the great natural watersheds of laughter.”
4. Explain what Bergson means when he says, “Here, too, it is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh—an automatism, as we have already remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To realize this more fully, it need only be noted that a comic character is generally comical in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comical person is unconscious. As though wearing the Ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world.”
5. Bergson says, “Several have defined man as ‘an animal which laughs.’ They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.” Do you agree with Bergson? Explain your answer.

George Santayana A Pledge of the Possible

Review Questions

1. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Psychology attempts what is perhaps impossible, namely, the anatomy of life.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Feelings are recognized by their outer expression, and when we try to recall an emotion, we must do so by recalling the circumstances in which it occurred.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Santayana means when he says that we can “distinguish the material of things from the various forms it may successively assume; we can distinguish, also, the earlier and the later impressions made by the same object; and we can ascertain the coexistence of one impression with another, or with the memory of others. But aesthetic feeling itself has no parts, and this physiology of its causes is not a description of its proper nature.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.” Do you think that beauty can be described? Explain your answer.
5. Explain what Santayana means when he says, “Beauty exists for the same reason that the object which is beautiful exists, or the world in which that object lies, or we that look upon both. It is an experience: there is nothing more to say about it.” Do you agree with Santayana? Explain your answer.

Arthur Schopenhauer Art Takes Away the Mist

Review Questions

1. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “Now to desire to communicate such a conception by means of a work of art is a very useless circumlocution, indeed belongs to that playing with the means of art without knowledge of its end which has just been condemned. Therefore a work of art which has proceeded from mere distinct conceptions is always ungenuine.”
2. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “Certainly the artist ought to think in the arranging of his work; but only that thought which was perceived before it was thought has afterwards, in its communication, the power of animating or rousing, and thereby becomes imperishable.”
3. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “all such works, except the perfect masterpieces of the very greatest masters (as, for example, ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Faust,’ the opera of ‘Don Juan’), inevitably contain a mixture of something insipid and wearisome, which in some measure hinders the enjoyment of them. Proofs of this are the ‘Messiah,’ ‘Paradise Lost,’ and the ‘Aeneid.’ But that this is the case is the consequence of the limitation of human powers in general.”
4. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “all the arts speak only the naive and childish language of perception, not the abstract and serious language of reflection; their answer is therefore a fleeting image: not permanent and general knowledge.”
5. Explain what Schopenhauer means when he says, “Thus all the other arts hold up to the questioner a perceptible image, and say, ‘Look here, this is life.’ Their answer, however correct it may be, will yet always afford merely a temporary, not a complete and final, satisfaction. For they always give merely a fragment, an example instead of the rule, not the whole, which can only be given in the universality of the conception.”

Amie L. Thomasson Ontological Innovation in Art

Review Questions

1. Explain what Thomasson means when she says, “As I shall understand it here, the ontological status of a work of art is fundamentally fixed by its existence, identity, and persistence conditions; these fix what category of object it is.”
2. Thomasson says that “the purpose of this paper is to discuss an interesting consequence . . . namely, that there is no set answer to the question of the ontological status of a work of art.” Do you agree with Thomasson? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Thomasson means when she tells us that “Showing how works of art of ontologically new kinds can be introduced is itself revealing, as it once again will give support to the general idea that such facts as there are about the ontological status of works of art are, at bottom, determined by human intentions and practices.”
4. Explain what Thomasson means when she says, “I have argued elsewhere that the ontological status of paintings, sculptures, symphonies and other familiar kinds of art is at bottom established stipulatively by the beliefs and practices of those who ground and reground the reference of the relevant sortal terms.”
5. Explain what Thomasson means when she says, “It seems that the generic term ‘art’ or ‘work of art’ is like ‘gift’ in this regard: ‘work of art’ appears not to be category-specifying, since it is applied indifferently to physical individuals, processes, performances, abstract works of music, and so on.”

Epicurus In Waking or in Dream

Review Questions

1. Explain what Epicurus means when he argues that life should be directed to happiness “since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be all our actions are directed toward attaining it.” Do you agree with Epicurus? Explain your answer.
2. Explain what Epicurus means when he says that happiness can be achieved by pleasure, but only if it is sought in moderation. Do you agree with Epicurus? Explain your answer.
3. Explain what Epicurus means when he says that “pleasure” means the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. Is Epicurus’s definition of “pleasure” typical of what most people believe? Do you agree with Epicurus? Explain your answer.
4. Explain what Epicurus means when he says, “death is nothing to us, because good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness.” Do you agree with Epicurus? Explain your answer.
5. Epicurus wants us to realize that an awareness of our mortality allows us to enjoy life as long as we have it, and that “a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality.” Do you agree with Epicurus? Explain your answer.

Arthur Schopenhauer The Vanity of Existence

Review Questions

1. Schopenhauer says, “A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.” Do you agree with Schopenhauer? Explain your answer.
2. Schopenhauer says, “In the first place, no man is ever happy; he spends his entire life striving after something which he thinks will make him happy; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone.” Do you agree with Schopenhauer? Explain your answer.
3. According to Schopenhauer, “Time is that in which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will to live, the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable, has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess.” Do you agree with Schopenhauer? Explain your answer.
4. According to Schopenhauer, “The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present.” Furthermore, “It lies, then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always striving.” Do you agree with Schopenhauer? Explain your answer.
5. According to Schopenhauer, “In a world where all is unstable, and nothing can endure, but is swept onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like an acrobat on a rope—in such a world happiness in inconceivable.” Do you agree with Schopenhauer? Explain your answer.

Sören Kierkegaard What Then Would Life Be?

Review Questions

1. According to Kierkegaard, “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but ideas?” Do you agree with Kierkegaard? Explain your answer.
2. According to Kierkegaard, “if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw” then life would be empty. Do you agree with Kierkegaard? Explain your answer.
3. According to Kierkegaard, “The poet cannot do what that other does, he can only admire, love and rejoice in the hero. Yet he too is happy, and not less so, for the hero is as it were his better nature, with which he is in love, rejoicing in the fact that this after all is not himself, that his love can be admiration.” Do you agree with Kierkegaard? Explain your answer.
4. Explain the meaning of Kierkegaard’s extended discussion of the poet and the hero. Can anyone be a poet? Can anyone be a hero? Explain your answer.
5. According to Kierkegaard, there are levels of greatness: “For he who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his selfless devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.” Do you agree with Kierkegaard? Explain your answer.

Thomas Nagel The Absurd

Review Questions

1. Explain Nagel’s point when he says, “It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter.”
2. Nagel says, “Another inadequate argument is that because we are going to die, all chains of justification must leave off in mid-air: one studies and works to earn money to pay for clothing, housing, entertainment, food, to sustain oneself from year to year, perhaps to support a family and pursue a career—but to what final end? All of it is an elaborate journey leading nowhere.” Why does Nagel think that the argument is inadequate?
3. Nagel says, “Skepticism begins when we include ourselves in the world about which we claim knowledge. We notice that certain types of evidence convince us, that we are content to allow justifications of belief to come to an end at certain points, that we feel we know many things even without knowing or having grounds for believing the denial of others which, if true, would make what we claim to know false.” Do you agree with Nagel? Explain your answer.
4. What is Nagel’s point when he says, “What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute”?
5. Explain what Nagel means when he says, “No further justification is needed to make it reasonable to take aspirin for a headache, attend an exhibit of the work of a painter one admires, or stop a child from putting his hand on a hot stove. No larger context or further purpose is needed to prevent these acts from being pointless.” Do you agree with Nagel? Explain your answer.

Richard Taylor The Meaning of Life

Review Questions

1. Explain Taylor’s point when he asks us to “suppose that the gods, while condemning Sisyphus to the fate just described, at the same time, as an afterthought, waxed perversely merciful by implanting in him a strange and irrational impulse; namely, a compulsive impulse to roll stones.” Furthermore, “suppose that is Sisyphus’ condition. He has but one obsession, which is to roll stones, and it is an obsession that is only for the moment appeased by his rolling them—he no sooner gets a stone rolled to the top of the hill than he is restless to roll up another.”
2. Explain Taylor’s point when he asks us to imagine the worms in certain caves in New Zealand. “Each dot of light identifies an ugly worm, whose luminous tail is meant to attract insects from the surrounding darkness. As from time to time one of these insects draws near it becomes entangled in a sticky thread lowered by the worm, and is eaten. This goes on month after month, the blind worm lying there in the barren stillness waiting to entrap an occasional bit of nourishment that will only sustain it to another hit of nourishment until . . . Until what?”
3. Explain Taylor’s point when he says, “Meaninglessness is essentially endless pointlessness, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite.” Do you agree with Taylor? Explain your answer.
4. Explain Taylor’s point when he says, “Activity, and even long, drawn out and repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant culmination, some more or less lasting end that can be considered to have been the direction and purpose of the activity.” Do you agree with Taylor? Explain your answer.
5. Explain Taylor’s point when he uses the examples of worms, birds, and fish to say “that there is no point to it at all, that it really culminates in nothing, that each of these cycles, so filled with toil, is to be followed only by more of the same. The point of any living thing’s life is, evidently, nothing but life itself.” Do you agree with Taylor? Explain your answer.

Susan Wolf The Meanings of Lives

Review Questions

1. According to Wolf, “Though there may well be many things going on when people ask, ‘What is the meaning of life?’, the most central among them seems to be a search to find a purpose or point to human existence.” Do you agree with Wolf? Explain your answer.
2. Wolf says that some people have held that if “there is no God, then there can be no meaning, in the sense of a point or purpose to our existence. We are simply a product of physical processes—there are no reasons for our existence, just causes.” Does Wolf agree with this view? Do you agree with this view?
3. Wolf asks, “Are those of us who suspect there is no meaning to life deluding ourselves in continuing to talk about the possibility of finding meaning in life? (Are we being short-sighted, failing to see the implications of one part of our thought on another?)” Do you agree with Wolf? Explain your answer.
4. According to Wolf, “For me, the idea of a meaningless life is most clearly and effectively embodied in the image of a person who spends day after day, or night after night, in front of a television set, drinking beer and watching situation comedies.” Do you agree with Wolf? Explain your answer.
5. Wolf asserts that the “cases of the idle rich, the corporate executive and the pig farmer are in some ways very different, but they all share at least this feature: they can all be characterized as lives whose dominant activities seem pointless, useless, or empty.” Do you agree with Wolf? Explain your answer.

Brooke Alan Trisel Intended and Unintended Life

Review Questions

1. Trisel says, “a distinction should be made between whether human life has a purpose and whether one’s individual life is purposeful.” Explain the distinction that Trisel mentions.
2. According to Trisel, “in regard to whether one’s individual life can be meaningful, it does not matter whether life was intended or arose by chance.” Explain some of Trisel’s arguments in support of his claim.
3. According to Trisel, many people believe that “If chance was involved in the emergence of life, this suggests that life was unintended and that it was not inevitable that life would develop.” What is Trisel’s position regarding this claim?
4. Trisel says, “Albert Einstein is often mentioned as someone who led a meaningful life. In judging whether his life was meaningful, no one would ever ask ‘Was his existence intended?’ Whether or not a person’s existence was intended is irrelevant to whether this person’s life is meaningful.” Do you agree with Trisel? Explain your answer.
5. Trisel says, “If there is no superior being to provide us with this affirmation, it does not mean that our lives are bad or not truly meaningful. Rather, it simply means that our judgments about our lives cannot be confirmed. However, if we conclude, using objective criteria, that our lives are good and that one’s life can be meaningful, the lack of a confirmation from a superior being does not, in any way, undermine or invalidate this judgment.” Do you agree with Trisel? Explain your answer.

Bertrand Russell The Value of Philosophy

Review Questions

1. Explain Russell’s meaning when he says, “If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it. It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must be primarily sought.” Do you agree with Russell?
2. According to Russell, “The practical man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind.” Do you agree with Russell? Explain your answer.
3. Russell says, “It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.” Do you agree with Russell? Explain your answer.
4. Russell says, “the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science.” What examples does Russell give in support of this claim? Can you think of other examples?
5. Russell says, “The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.” Why does Russell use the term “uncertainty” here? Do you agree with Russell? Explain your answer.