Spring 2009 201 Student Practice Page

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1. Notice the effect of four dashes:

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1. And use four "~" marks to insert your name:

Alfino 19:29, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

1. Finally notice how some students below use "equal signs" to create section headings. Alfino 19:29, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

It's good to meet you all! - Angela W.

Here is some content [1]

Oh, hey. - Jamil

Hello. - Lauren W

Hello, all. -Catherine

Here is some more content. -Shannon

Hey! [2] -Kristina

Hi! --Elise

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More content- Kieran

STUDY QUESTIONS

9/2-10/26 - Just a note: I did skip a couple questions (part of #6 of 9/9, #2 on 9/23, #3 and 4 on 9/28, first part of #2 on 9/30) just because they were either very repetitive, untestable, or just super obscure. I just wanted to let everyone know that in advance in case it concerns you.

9/2 1. How are the culture areas of Logos, Theos, and Mythos related? • Logos, theos, and mythos help us to make sense of the world through reason (philosophy), revelation (religion), and stories (mythology), respectively.

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2. How would you go about defining or identifying the Real? • Plato’s answer: The real is what persists through all changes and manifestations. Things "participate" in reality to different degrees. Mathematics is a tool for seeing the deep structure of reality. –-- Hierarchy of reality: Allegory of the Cave and the Divided Line

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9/9 3. What is at stake in Euthyphro 10? • “ Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is it pious because it is loved by the gods”? • Do the gods have to discern what is good like the rest of us or do they make something good? • If piety is objective, then whether the gods love it is an “accident.” • If piety is subjective, then the gods loving it makes it pious.

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4. How does the Euthyphro have bearing on Socrates’ upcoming trial? • Socrates was tried for heresy - encouraging people to not believe in the gods. Which is impious. So determining what is pious and what is not (the dialogue of Euthyphro) has a great bearing!

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5. What does Socrates claim, in the Apology, in his defense of his activities? Evaluate. • Socrates’ defense: his wisdom consists in knowing that he doesn’t know • He also uses the horse metaphor: he is not harming, but helping them. As a horse trainer, he knows what is best for the youth, to turn them away from the social norm and to be constantly questioning everything before them. He does not charge for sharing his knowledge like other instructors, and as a philosopher, does his teaching simply for the love of knowledge. I accept and agree with Socrates’ reasonable defense because he is not forcing the youth to listen to him. He is only opening their minds to new ideas. He doesn’t force them to participate in debates, but they have the free will to do so. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

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6. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the image of the philosopher which Plato presents us in the Apology. • Strengths: • Weaknesses: he’s always telling people that they’re wrong, so he makes a lot of enemies, and people don’t want to listen to him anymore. The philosopher fits in or doesn’t fit in with his community.

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9/14 7. How do definitions and hypotheses work together in creating philosophical theories (example of theories of love)? • You have to define the terms you’re dealing with before you construct your hypothesis. From this combination of definitions and hypotheses, you can create a philosophy theory.

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8. How does Plato establish his view that ideas are more real than objects? • Theory of Forms (Ideas) – argument of human perception (blue sky/jeans) – argument of perfection (circle/straight line) • The real is what persists through all changes and manifestations. – persistent reality • Mathematics is a tool for seeing the deep structure of reality

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9. What is Plato's model of enlightenment? • Hierarchy of reality (see Allegory of the Cave and the Divided Line below)

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10. Be prepared to explain the Allegory of the Cave and the Divided Line. • Allegory of the Cave: gives us an image of the implications of Plato's metaphysics for his view of human existence --- Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. • The Divided Line: a literary device that teaches basic philosophical ideas about the four levels of existence (the intelligible world [with higher and lower forms] and the visible world [with ordinary visible objects and other representations such as their shadows or reflections) and the corresponding ways we come to knowledge about what exists, or come to mere opinions about what exists. – The different segments are unequal, representing their comparative clearness & obscurity and reality & truth

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9/21 11. How do philosophers use "questioning presuppositions" as a method? • All rationales involve premises which themselves depend upon other claims that are assumed within the rationale. While presuppositions are inevitable, philosophers like to articulate them to make them explicit and then question some of them if they appear unfounded or weak in some way.

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12. Review and comment on Kant & Russell on the value of philosophy. • Kant: a lack of Enlightenment is because of people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage. All church and state paternalism should be abolished and people be given the freedom to use their own intellect • Russell: without philosophy, it’d be a “flat world.” It’s valuable even though it doesn’t answer big questions. It’s the knowledge that gives unity and system to sciences.

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13. How does Plato think about the nature of the soul, its division into three parts? • Rational (reason..trust), Appetitive (cravings.. thirst, hunger, sex), & Vegetative (spirited..honor & victory) • Harmony of the soul achieved through realization of virtues: courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom • Individual justice = maintaining 3 parts in correct balance where reason (aided by spirit) controls the appetite

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9/23 14. How do the first four speeches in the Symposium reflect various cultural understandings and issues connected with love? • Phaedrus - Love is a great God. There is One Love. Love motivates the lovers to virtue. It’s all good, never bad because no lover wants to look bad in front of their beloved. • Pausanias - There are two loves: Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite) and Pandemos (Common Aphrodite). Love itself is neither good nor bad. Defends Greek practice. Love's character depends on the behavior it gives rise to. Love separates the "wheat from the chaff," heavenly from common. • Erixymachus - Love is a broader phenomenon and force. Medicine is the science of of the effects of love on the body. Music is science of the effects of love on harmony and rhythm. But not all love is good. Love also at work in destruction. • Aristophanes - Story of first people, challenged the gods, split. Love is the search for your "other half". Interest in your partner not just for sex, but some kind of completion. Need to respect the gods or we'll be split again!

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9/28 15. Follow conceptual distinctions basic to Epistemology: • knowledge as justified, true, belief (account, demonstration, or weight of evidence) • types of knowledge – propositional (I know that..), know-how, and knowledge by acquaintance • basic positions in epistemology – skepticism, empiricism, and rationalism

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9/30 16. What is the "brain in a vat" thought experiment? What is Putnam's objection to it? • Simulated reality: a mad scientist might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.

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• Putnam claims that the thought experiment is inconsistent on the grounds that a brain born in a vat could not have the sort of history and interaction with the world that would allow its thoughts or words to be about the vat that it is in 17. What is Descartes argument (in stages) for radical doubt? Why does he want to do this? • Stages: • Descartes resolved to systematically doubt that any of his beliefs were true, in order to build, from the ground up, a belief system consisting of only certainly true beliefs

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18. How does Descartes think he has established certainty? Is he successful? • “I think; therefore, I am.” Descartes tried to doubt his own existence, but found that even his doubting showed that he existed, since he could not doubt if he did not exist.

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19. What is the point (and substance) of Socrates’ questioning of Agathon? • Is Love love of something? Does Love desire that of which it is the love? When we desire something, do we possess it? • If something needs beauty and does not have it, it cannot be beautiful. • Love is not a possession but the desire of the beloved (or desire of the continuation of love) • it has the benefit of making sure Agathon follows and confirms that he agrees step by step after every new argument. Once this is accomplished a new avenue has opened for a better examination of what is Love

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10/5 20. How do the different varieties of empiricism (naive, indirect, idealist) reflect specific problems or issues with empiricism as an epistemology? • Empiricism needs a theory to support “If we perceive an object P to have a property A, then object P has indeed property A.” This is best supported by naïve realism. But under closer scrutiny, naïve realism gives way to indirect realism (primary/secondary qualities; the world is a little different than what we perceive), which collapses into idealism (no primary qualities; all you see are sensory ideas; everything is a collection of perceptions)

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21. What is the problem of induction? • Our experiences of the world can only confirm or disconfirm particular facts, but not general and universal claims (the problem of inferring a universal claim from a set of observations)

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22. How did the Positivists criticize traditional rationalism? • Analytic statements (including axioms of mathematical systems) are trivially true. Not new information about the world; a prior reasoning only allows us to grasp analytic truths

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10/7 23. What is Diotima's view of love? How are body and soul related in this theory? • he is the son of "resource and need." In her view, love is not delicate, but beggarly and harsh. He sleeps in doorways, and is a master of artifice and deception. The beloved boy is delicate, but the old lover looking for the boy is poor but resourceful and manipulative. It is hinted that Diotima's thesis about love is that it is a longing for immortality. The instinct to breed that you observe in animals and men who are attracted to women is an expression of this. She says that every one of us longs for endless fame, but that the wise know the difference between bodily and spiritual procreation. Socrates says that he learns from her that it is far better for men and boys to give birth to ideas than to children. Physical love is second to spiritual love, because the goal of spiritual love is to give birth to ideas. Ultimately love helps us to ascend to knowledge of the divine. SCALA AMORIS

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24. What is the meaning of Alcibiades' entrance and speech? • He enters in a jealous, drunken rage and compares Socrates to a Silenus statue (ugly, hollow, full of tiny golden statues of the gods) – “My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I'm doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should” - it’s a story of failed seduction; Socrates famously turns him down. Alcibiades only wanted the physical!

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25. Read the Locke excerpt with a view to identifying what makes it a work of an empiricist. Can you notice specific parts of his theory that lend themselves to his empirical approach. What sorts of things does he have relatively more difficulty in explaining? • describes the mind at birth as a blank slate filled later through experience; he offers a distinction between passively acquired simple ideas, such as "red," "sweet," "round," etc., and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us" such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. • He has more difficulty explaining empiricism in relation to concepts, logic, and math.

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26. What is the solution to the problem of induction, according to Hospers? • Pragmatism – if we want to attempt any predictions at all (and we do if we want to stay alive), then the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature is the only sound basis for such prediction. It’s this or nothing.

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10/12 27. According to Epicurus, should we fear the gods? NO! They aren’t thinking or worrying about us.

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28. According to Epicurus, should we fear death? NO! When we are, death is not. If death is, we are not.

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29. According to Epicurus, what approach should we take to desire? (compare to Plato – three parts of the soul) • Pursue natural desires (not groundless ones). Seek katastematic pleasures (tranquility, friendship, intimacy, accomplishment) primarily but also seek kinetic pleasures (hunger, thirst, sex).

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30. What does Bloom mean by the "duality of experience"? • Persons and bodies (psychological vs. physical) – we see people as separate from their bodies

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31. What was the point of Jesse Bering's experiments with children's responses to the Brown Mouse story? • Kids consolidate “folk physics” at a very young age – folk (intuitive) psychology and biology too • Our minds are predisposed to think of bodies with heads just as readily as bodies without heads.

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32. From Barrett Ch. 1: What is belief and how is it related to "mental tools"? What is the distinction between reflective and non-reflective belief? • Reflective beliefs ( 2+2=4) and non-reflective (I’m hungry) – we operate on both levels • Mental tools help to distinguish agents from objects

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10/14 33. What is the "quietism" criticism of Epicureanism? How might an Epicurean defend him or herself from this objection? • Quietism – withdrawal/resignation from life • Epicurean would say that it’s striving/achieving to a point of tranquility – ancient wellness

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34. Is it possible that a form of asceticism might heighten one's experience of pleasure? Or, what is involved in savoring? • Yes. If you are abstaining from pleasures, you’ll heighten your awareness/attentiveness to the situation (pleasures) when it arises – this is mindfulness. If you’re savoring, you appreciate something fully.

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35. Learn the main positions in the Personal Identity issue, along with the strengths and weaknesses of each. • Illusion theory – identity is a construct, no real basis – no self that persists through time • The Self as Substance o Body theory –same body, same person; qualitative identity (strengths: we are continuous through time; weaknesses: “locked in “ syndrome, identical twins, cosmetic surgery) o Soul theory –same soul, same person; numeric identity (weaknesses: hard to demonstrate; not clear that we use this to identify persons) • The Self as Psychic Continuity: Memory theory – same person as we were in the past as long we can remember at least something from that past (strengths: fits well with cognitive impairment cases, memory loss; weaknesses: ambiguous..how much do I need to recall?, non-reflective beliefs)

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10/21 36. Compare Epicurus and Epictetus on the goal of life, the greatest good, their view of the gods, epistemology, and metaphysics. Epicurus Epictetus • Goal of life - pursue virtue to obtain pleasure (happiness) pursue virtue for virtue’s sake • Greatest good - pleasure virtue • Gods - don’t fear them, distant, don’t care about you pantheism; God is in ALL things • Epistemology - empiricism rationalism • Metaphysics - atomism (everything’s made up of atoms) wholism (everything is united in rational whole)

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37. How might a Stoic defend him or herself from the criticisms that Stoicism: a) has an unnatural view of the emotions, b) has an unrealistic view of our reactions to loss, and c) requires too much faith in the rationality of the cosmos? • A) It’s a restructuring of emotions. Correct judgments about how things work lead to good emotions. • B) We’d be happier if we appreciated mortality. • C) A life of virtue is enough.

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38. What is your hegemonikon and why should you make sure not to let anyone mess with it? • My integrity, virtue, ruling/guiding principle – I don’t want to let anyone mess with it because that would corrupt me, and I wouldn’t be ME anymore.

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11/18 1.Mackie’s Three Arguments on the problem of Evil

According to Mackie, there are possible solutions to the problem of evil. The first is qualifying God’s omnipotence. The second is that evil is just an allusion. The third is that the disorder that we perceive to be bad is just harmony misunderstood. For Mackie, solutions that do not remove the contradiction are pseudo-solutions. (Pseudo-solutions meaning false solutions) Examples of these solutions are 1) Evil is due to Human Free Will, 2) The Universe is Better with Some Evil in it, and 3) Evil is necessary as a means to Good. 

EXPLANATION OF SOLUTIONS Evil is due to human free will: Couldn’t God have made it so that we freely choose the good? If it was logically possible to freely choose the good in one case, why not every case? Also, if men’s will’s are free, is God omnipotent? Maybe if is omnipotent, he refuses from controlling us even though he could. Maybe he does this because we would not be living a life true to ourselves if someone controlled it. Everyone would be the same and choose good decisions and we would not learn from our mistakes or suffering. We would never grow. The universe is better with some evil in it: aesthetic analogy (the sense that allows us to see beauty in the things we see) or progress dynamism. Then there is the order of 1st and 2nd order goods. The 1st order good (evil) is necessary for the 2nd order good. You need to know pain in order to gain. Mackie: “no way in minimizing 1st order good. But the biggest problem we have is there is no way to explain 2nd order evils like malevolence, cruelty, and cowardice. Evil is necessary as a means to good: is god then subject to this necessity? If God can self-bind, then yes. But why would he? What is your personal opinion? Mine is that God experiences evil through people on earth, but not literally. God is an omnipotent spirit; he does not physically experience evil. Bt what is your opinion?

2. Be prepared to distinguish the logical and evidentiary forms of the problem of evil. The logical problems of evil are 1)every good being tries everything in its power to prevent innocent beings from suffering unnecessary evil, 2) if God exists, and if God is all-good, omniscient, and omnipotent, then innocent beings should not suffer from unnecessary evils (like land mines, diseases, or starvation), 3)and/but they do suffer from these evils. And the evidentiary problems of evil are 1) God's existence is compatible with unnecessary suffering and 2)the existence, kinds, and amounts of suffering in the world make the existence of (or our idea of) God highly implausible.

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12/7 1. What are the motives and strategies for defending religion today? Assess the strategies. Religion needs to be defended because the rise of science has changed the standards for objective knowledge and the displacement of literal truth for many religious claims has occurred. There are 3 main strategies for defending religion and those are to have a strong traditionalist position, a NOMA hypothesis, and a naturalizing religion that modifies NOMA. The strong traditionalist position are religious truths that are rational in just the same way that scientific truths are, but in taking religion seriously you are regarding it as true. However, this is hard because humans have a hard time accepting religious beliefs as true knowledge since they are hard to prove. In the NOMA hypothesis of defending religion, the NOMA principle is taken into account which is the magisterium of science that covers the empirical realm. This is when science/facts and religion/ethics overlap and this is just thought of as communal knowledge. This strategy simply says that science and religion are non-overlapping majisteria, which humans find difficult to understand since they do not relate. Lastly, in modifying NOMA, religion and science address related truths, but may justify distinct forms of knowledge. However, they have different validity claims which is a problems since they do not relate religion and science to each other.

Midterm Questions

• 1. How does the subject of the Euthyphro have bearing on Socrates upcoming trial? (One sentence)-Angela W.

It has bearing on Socrates upcoming trial for two reasons: The subject questions weather the pious is loved or it is the act of loving that makes something pious, which is an important distinction considering Socrates is about to be tried for impiety and heresy, and secondly it exposes Socrates somewhat rude manor of questioning and illustrates how he has made so many enemies.

• 4. How does Descartes think he has established certainty? Identify two potential criticisms of his claim? Ernesto O

The goal of the Meditations is to secure a foundation of absolute certainty, which can serve as a basis for reconstructing scientific knowledge, demonstrating the truth of the natural philosophy of mechanism and its consistency with Catholic theology. The two potential criticisms of his claim are the dreaming doubt and the omnipotent deceiver doubt which lead Descartes to reject all his former beliefs, both those based on sense experience, which led him to posit an external world of objects with properties resembling those he perceives them to have (dreaming doubt), and those based on reason or intellect, such as mathematical beliefs (omnipotent deceiver).

• 7. What is the problem of induction and what is Hospers proposed solution? (One paragraph) Lauren W

The problem involves giving foundation to inductive inferences based on prior experience and poses the question of how can we know that just because something happened in the past, that it will happen in the future the same way. Hospers gives a pragmatic justification for the adoption of these principles. He says that we cannot prove that the principle which enables us to do this is true, but if we want to attempt any predictions at all, then the laws of nature are the only sound basis for such prediction. We cannot prove deductively that these laws are true, for we cannot prove that the uniformities will hold in the future, and this is what every law implicitly asserts; but if nature is uniform, and if these is an order of nature which extends into the future, then the inductive method is the way in which to gain knowledge of this order. (Page 103-104 in Readings on the Ultimate Questions)