Final Exam

Philosophy Final Exam Name:


Part 1: Matching
Match the following names with the sentence that describes them.

Copernicus, Socrates, Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johan Gutenberg, Robespierre, Soren Kierkegaard , George Berkley, Olympia De Gouges, Rene Descartes, Aristotle, Francis Bacon


_________________ demanded equal rights for women.Olympia De Gouges


_________________ believed that the earth orbited the sun. His view ran contrary to the teachings of the church.Copernicus


_________________ invented movable type, thereby ending the church's monopoly on information.Johan Gutenberg


_________________ was an Irish bishop who believed that the soul was more important than the physical body.George Berkley


_________________ was accused of corrupting youth. He tried to make people think for themselves.Socrates


_________________ a Frenchman who involved himself in many scientific fields at the highest level. “I think, therefore I am.”Rene Descartes


_________________ was an early creator of highly advanced political philosophy.Plato


_________________ was supposedly the last person to contain all of human knowledge. Although it would have been impossible for this to be true, he is the only person about whom this claim could be made. Aristotle


Part 2. True or False

_________________ The Ionians were the second school of Greek philosophers.True


_________________ The Sophists were public teachers in ancient Greece.True


_________________ Socrates said, “The only real wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.” True



_________________ The “special sciences” were all born from the study of philosophy.True


_________________ In the movie, Sophie's World, the main character meets many famous philosophers. From their teachings, she determines that she is not real.False


_________________ Human senses can be trusted at all times.False


_________________ Karl Pearson teaches us that we cannot get any closer to the outside world than the point where our nerves connect to our brains.True



Part 3: More Matching

moral nihilism, nihilism, purpose nihilism, moral universalism, moral objectiveism, relativism

_______________There are no truths, moral or otherwise.Nihilism
_______________Moral claims are meaningless.Moral Nihilism
_______________“Even if you achieve all your goals, in the end, your life must necessarily come to nothing”Nihilism
_______________Life is without any objective or universal meaning.Purpose Nihilism
_______________Certain facts or truths are not universal and objective.Relativism
_______________Moral facts or truths are the same everywhere.Moral Universalism
_______________Moral facts are given by the universe (not humans).Moral Objectivism

Part 4: More True/False

__________ “Everything is permissible if God doesn't exist” -Kierkegaard, justifying the idea of universalism.False
__________ Sartre wrote that universalism requires people to make a “Leap of faith.”False
__________In Streetwise, Lulu was a tough girl who defended the other girls that were on the street.True
__________Rat's depression led him to commit suicide.false

__________Tiny's mother was trying to get her off of the street, but the girl would not listen.False
__________Shadow considered himself to be a playboy.True




Which of the following options would you associate with the ideas listed below? You will use some of the names more than once. Some of them might not need to be used.

Robert Nozik, Plato, The Skeptics, Descartes, Karl Pearson, Socrates



1.By declining to give assent or dissent from any proposition, __________________ thought we could achieve “ataraxia,” a state of untroubled mental calm.
The Skeptics

2._______________ “The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.”
Descartes

3._______________ “We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.
Robert Nozik

4._______________ “What am I? A thing that thinks”
Descartes

5._______________ “We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by
immagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it.”
Robert Nozik

6._______________ “We can't get any closer to the outside world than the point where our nerves connect to our brains.”
Karl Pearson

7._______________ “When he returns, the transformed prisoner is eager to tell of his remarkable journey and discoveries. In dismay, the other prisoners threaten to take his life if he persists in interrupting their entertainment.”
Plato

8._______________ “All that I know is that I know nothing.”
Socrates

9._______________“let him decieve me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing as long as I think that I am something”
Descartes

10._______________ The nature of things is beyond our grasp; as a result, none of our beliefs (or experiences) are either true or false.
The Skeptics

Third Partial Study Guide

Review the following names and terms from your notes:

nihilism, moral nihilism, purpose nihilism, relativism, moral universalism, moral objectivism, Sartre, and Kierkegaard

Review the names of the people in the movie Streetwise.

Understand the moral beliefs of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction and the Sicario from our reading.

That is it. This should be easy. Just don't forget to take this seriously, I do not want to fail anyone from this class, and some of you need to get a really good grade on this to make up for poor performances on the second partial or on the Streetwise quiz.

The Sicario

Post questions about The Sicario here.

Pulp Fiction

Post questions about Pulp Fiction here.

Streetwise Test

Streetwise Test

Be sure to answer every part of every question. Many people lose points because they only partly answer questions.
1.What are some of the things that Rat does to get food?
2.Describe the Funeral and he events that led to it.
3.Describe six people from the movie, with names if possible. Tell me something that each one said or did. Be specific.
4.Rat explained why the girls in Streetwise work as they do. What did he say? Why does he think they do it? What do you think?
5.Who is in love with Rat?
6.Choose someone from the movie and tell me what advice you would give them if you could.
7.Do you think that you could do a better job of living on the street than the kids in the movie? What do they do that you would do differently?
8.Do you think that Rat is intelligent? Why or why not?
9.What did Dewayne say that he expected out of life? What do you think about his goals?

Here are the links for the film Streetwise. Watch at least three parts by Tuesday. Take notes while you watch. Note the kid's names and describe them. If their names are not mentioned, just describe them, maybe their names will be mentioned later. You wont be able to note every person shown, but note the ones that get a lot of time in the frame. Note anything interesting that they say. I will be collecting your notes on the whole movie Friday.

Part one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h-scpQ_szM

Part two:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mn_H648Q60&feature=related

Part three:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktgew6yTyj8&feature=related

Part four:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQIpLZHLFU&feature=related

Part five:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRarRa1Tg54&feature=related


Part six:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAP9TZZ8mY&feature=related

Part seven:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o-pDiWoajc&feature=related

Part eight A:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy1lh0X2XkE&feature=related

Part eight B:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3y-isG1AUc&feature=related

Part nine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHnnlZL43wA&feature=related

Part ten:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYJQa2cGMpo&feature=related

Prepare Yourselves For Another Enjoyable Test

Use the ideas of Robert Nozik, Plato, The Skeptics, Descartes, Karl Pearson, and Socrates to answer the following questions:


Can a life be meaningful if it is fake or counterfeit? Can "you" be real, while the life you are living is not?

In The Truman Show, Christof believes that humans would rather live in a safe cell than seek freedom in an unknown world. Do you agree or disagree? Why? Which option would you prefer?

In what ways is Christof like God? In what ways is he different?

What does American Beauty tell us about our responsibility for our own happiness? Is our happiness completely within our control?

Describe the types of transcendence that the characters, Lester and his wife Carolyn, in American Beauty are trying to attain.

Relate Lester and his wife to the figures in Plato's Allegory Of The Cave. Give an example of a point in American Beauty when a character acted like one of the permanently chained prisoners in the cave. Have you yourself ever acted like those prisoners?

Nozik and Descartes

Wikipedia post about Robert Nozik's Experience Machine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_Machine

Think about how this experience machine is similar to the life Christof created for Truman in the town of Seahaven.


In his Meditations On First Philosophy, Descartes locked himself in a romm and imagined that the entire world, outside of himself, was an illusion created by a cleaver and malicious demon. He concluded that if such a demon existed, all assumptions would have to be called into question. (Kimberly A. Blessing)

"The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands, or eyes, or flesh, or blood, or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things" (Descartes)

Descartes concluded that the demon could never make him doubt his own existence as a thinking being. "What am I?-A thing that thinks." (Kimberly A. Blessing)

What are the similarities between Christof and Descartes' "cleaver and malicious demon?"
Is Truman's struggle to understand his world similar to the struggle that Descartes undertook during his meditations?

Read This: From Fullerton pages 37 and 38

But what shall we say of [the plain man's] claim that the tree is really green, and only looks blue under certain circumstances? Is it not just as true that the tree only looks green under certain circumstances? Is color any part of the touch thing? Is it ever more than a sign of the touch thing? How can one color be more real than another?

Now, we may hold to Berkeley's analysis and maintain that, in general, the real world, as contrasted with the apparent, means to us the world that is revealed in experiences of touch and movement; and yet we may admit that the word "real" is sometimes used in rather different senses.

It does not seem absurd for a woman to Say: This piece of silk really is yellow; it only looks white under this light. We all admit that a white house may look pink under the rays of the setting sun, and we never call it a pink house. We have seen that it is not unnatural to say: That tree is really green; it is only its distance that makes it look blue.

When one reflects upon these uses of the word "real," one recognizes the fact that, among all the experiences in which things are revealed to us, certain experiences impress us as being more prominent or important or serviceable than certain others, and they come to be called real. Things are not commonly seen by artificial light; the sun is not always setting; the tree looks green when it is seen most satisfactorily. In each case, real color of the thing is the color that it has under circumstances that strike us as normal or as important. We cannot say that we always regard as most real that aspect under which we most commonly perceive things, for if a more unusual experience is more serviceable and really gives us more information about the thing, we give the preference to that. Thus we look with the naked eye at a moving speck on the table before us, and we are unable to distinguish its parts. We place a microscope over the speck and perceive an insect with all its members. The second experience is the more unusual one, but would not every one say: Now we perceive the thing _as it is_?

There Will Be No Test Friday

There will be no test on Friday, April 23rd. Instead we will start watching the next movie.

Reading Assignment, Monday April 19

Please read Section 19, Things and Their Appearances, in Fullerton. Those are pages 36 and 37.

Questions Related to The Truman Show

Post your Truman show questions here.

Plato: The Allegory Of The Cave

Here is a link to a page with a section of Plato's Republic called The Allegory Of The Cave.

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html

South Park Episode Based on Truman Show

http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/704/

This is an episode of South Park that has a similar premise to The Truman Show (which you will be watching in class). You may have to have an updated Adobe Flash Player to watch it. Hope you can handle getting your computers to run this...

I hope your vacation time is going well. See you next Friday.
-Mr. James

Don't Think That Neo's Powers Are Realistic?

Based on the responses on our first partial exam, it seems that many people in the class are still very sure that the world we live in is just as it seems. Some people said that the world is too complex to be a mere illusion. I thought maybe some videos might help our imaginations.

Here are some videos that show powers that are similar to those of the character Neo in the matrix. You can doubt the validity of the things shown in the video if you like, but don't think for one second that you can that these powers do not exist.

The first video shows a man who can set paper on fire with his hands using the power of Chi. He can also stop pellets, shot from an air rifle, with his hand. The pellets are deformed after he catches them. As if they had hit thick steel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F3ovb2kZ9Q&feature=related

The second video is short and it shows a monk who can use his chi to throw a needle through a piece of glass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU7qAtFFXxY


Here are some monks doing a demonstration. This is performance, but it is undeniably impressive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llqup1Uir6k&feature=related

Exam Will Be Friday

The exam will be on Friday. Here is a study guide that will help you get a perfect score.

Know who these people are and what they did. They have all been mentioned in our book and in the movie.
Copernicus, Socrates, Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johan Gutenberg, Robespierre, Soren Kierkegaard , George Berkley, Olympia De Gouges, Rene Descartes, Aristotle, Francis Bacon

Essay 1:

Describe Karl Pearson's Telephone Exchange thought experiment. Explain its significance.


Essay 2.

In The Matrix, the main character is shocked when he is taught that his whole life has been an illusion. The matrix in which his mind had been living was not physical reality, but only a simulation of it created by machines.
How do we know that the lives we are living are real? Can we be sure that we are not living inside of a similar matrix? Explain at length.

Essay 3.

In The Matrix, the main character is given a choice between two pills, a blue pill and a red pill. One pill will cause him to forget everything and go back to his comfortable life, the other pill offers to give him knowledge of the truth.
If you were given this option, which pill would you choose? Why? Explain the philosophical implications of your decision.

An Activity Related to The Martix

http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/matrix.htm

Please follow this link and complete the activity. It will be very helpful when you take the exam.

Red Pill or Blue Pill, Which Would You Choose?

Here is an article that elaborates on the significance of Neo's dilemma: Red pill or blue pill?

http://www.arrod.co.uk/essays/matrix.php

Questions Related to The Matrix

Please post questions related to the movie we are watching in class: The Matrix.

Reading for Monday, March 8

Please read pages 29-31.

This section is about sense and imagination. It relates our current movie The Matrix.

Test Rewrites Due Monday

Just to remind everyone, rewrites for the first test are due Monday. I will not accept them late. You must type and print the rewrites. You only have to rewrite questions on which you hope to recoup points. In other words, if you got all the points for a question, you do not have to rewrite that answer.

Reading Assignment, Friday March 5

Please read pages 26-29 by Monday.

Reading, Tuesday, March 2

Please read pages 23-26 before Friday's class.

Reading Assignment, Friday Feb 26

By Monday March 1, please read pages 21-23.

You may stop reading when you arrive near the bottom of page 23 at Chapter III.


NOTICE!!!!

On Monday we will be having our first test. The test will not be too difficult for those students who have both read the book and stayed awake during the movie. Those students who have not been reading, and those students who used the movie time to copy work for other classes may be exposed.

Reading For Tuesday, Feb 23

Please read pages 17-20 before Friday's class.

Sophie's World

Please post any questions that you have about Sophie's World.

Include your initials so that I know who you are. Posting well thought out questions and responses is a form of class participation. Participation, positive and negative, will be taken into account when grades are calculated.

Reading Assignment, Monday Feb. 22

Please read pages 14-16 before Tuesday's class.

We will continue with Sophie's World in class, but it is important for you to keep up with the assigned readings. You are responsible for the information contained in the pages that are assigned. You will be tested on this information.

If you have questions about information from these pages, make a comment under the associated post. For example, if you have a question about page 15, post the question in the comments under this post. If you have a question about page 13, post your question under the post where page 13 was assigned.

I will address questions in class more effectively this way.

First Day of Class

For Friday, please read pages 10-13 of Fullerton's book(a link to the book can be found in the post below). Stop reading when you arrive at:

Bacon holds that philosophy has for its objects God, man, and nature, and he regards it as within his province to treat of "_philosophia prima_" (a sort of metaphysics, though he does not call it by this name), of logic, of physics and astronomy, of anthropology, in which he includes psychology, of ethics, and of politics. In short, he attempts to map out the whole field of human knowledge, and to tell those who work in this corner of it or in that how they should set about their task.

As for Descartes, he writes of the trustworthiness of human knowledge, of the existence of God, of the existence of an external world, of the human soul and its nature, of mathematics, physics, cosmology, physiology, and, in short, of nearly everything discussed by the men of his day. No man can accuse this extraordinary Frenchman of a lack of appreciation of the special sciences which were growing up. No one in his time had a better right to be called a scientist in the modern sense of the term. But it was not enough for him to be a mere mathematician, or even a worker in the physical sciences generally. He must be all that has been mentioned above.

Fullerton, An Introduction to Philosophy

Download An Introduction to Philosophy, by George Stuart Fullerton and save it on your computer.
Go to:
www.manybooks.net

Search for the title I have listed above and it will appear.

You could also try to copy and paste this link:
http://manybooks.net/titles/fullertonge16401640616406-8.html