Chapters 8

  

1- What are some of the main themes of Existentialism? 

  

2- How did Camus describe the existential predicament?

 

3- What did Camus think the best solution is to the existential predicament?

 

4- What did Sartre mean when he said that. For man, existence precedes essence?

 

5- What is anguish, according to Sartre?

 

6- What are the two ways of dealing with anguish, according to Sartre?

 

7- What, in general, does phenomenology attempt to do?

 

8- Why is modem man so alienated, alone, unhappy, according to Martin Heidegger in Being and Time?

 

9- What do the concepts of everydayness and chatter have to do with each other, according to the early Heidegger?

 

10- How did the later Heidegger recommend that we cope with the existential predicament?

 

 

SPECIAL PROJECT:

This one is a personal project with yourself. Perhaps you have experienced something called déjá vu. It's the experience of having experiencing what we are currently doing or experiencing, and it can be a very eerie feeling while it lasts. What if what you have done you have done countless times before? This is one of the thoughts Nietzsche had back in the 19th century, and explains why he is regarded (along with Kierkegaard) as one of the founders of 20th century existentialism. Is the idea of eternal recurrence frightening, troublesome, or uncomfortable to you? If so, why? If not, why not? Are them any things in your life you definitely wouldn't want to have eternally recur?

 

Chapter 9

 

1- How did Charles Pierce and William James differ in their ideas about what truth is?

 

2- What are some of the main features of John Dewey's instrumentalism?

 

3 - What was the verifiability criterion of meaning employed by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists?

 

4- What were the essential features of Bertrand Russell's logical atomism?

 

5- What attracted analytic philosophers like Russell and Wittgenstein to phenomenalism?

 

6- Describe the disagreement in epistemology between foundationalists and antifoundationalists?

 

7- What is the representational theory of truth, and why does Richard Rorty reject it?

 

8- Describe the philosophy of mind called interactionist dualism.

 

9- What does philosophical behaviorism maintain?

 

10- Distinguish identity theory from functionalism.

 

SPECIAL PROJECT:

Rent the 1977 movie Demon Seed (on video) by Julie Christie. In the movie, a brilliant scientist of the future creates a computer with almost limitless intelligence. The super-machine gets out of hand, however, when it decides that it wants to produce offspring and stalks the scientist's wife. If machines could do whatever people can do that convinces us that they are conscious and intelligent, should we accord them the same inner mental states or not? What is your impression in the movie and the possibility of artificial intelligence?

 

 

Chapter 10

 

1- What is the good life for Plato?

 

2- What is the good life, for Aristotle?

 

3- What is the good life, for an Epicurean?

 

4- Describe two components of Heloise's ethics.

 

5- How did St. Thomas Aquinas incorporate Aristotle's ethics with Christian ethics.

 

6- How does morality come into being, according to Thomas Hobbes.

 

7- What is the connection between facts and values, according to David Hume?

 

8- What determines the moral worth of an act, according to Immanuel Kant?

 

9- What is the difference between Bentham's utilitarianism and that of John Stuart Mill?

 

10- Describe Friedrich Nietzsche's distinction between master morality and slave morality.

 

SPECIAL PROJECT:

Most people are strongly motivated to do what they perceive to be in their own best interest. Isn't this a good thing? This view is called universal ethical egoism, in contrast with personal or individual ethical egoism, which says that I (the speaker) should do whatever is in my own best interest and says nothing of what people should do. Shouldn't a full-fledge ethical theory be about more than just how I should act? Think of a situation where your own view on ethics is at stake. A situation where you may act or not act but one choice seems better than another. Assess this action through the eyes of different moral theorists. Which one do you prefer and why?

 

 

Chapter 11

 

1 - How do Plato and Aristotle differ in their conceptions of what the sate is for and what forms it should take?

 

2- How does natural law differ from human law, according to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas? Which takes precedence, and why?

 

3- What's the point in forming a state, according to Thomas Hobbes, and what form should it take?

 

4- Why did John Locke, unlike Hobbes, favors a divided government and a right to revolution?

 

5- Compare Rousseau's early views on freedom and the state with his later ones.

 

6- How did Mary Wollstonecraft's views on women differ from Rousseau?

 

7- Briefly describe two central issues of constitutional law.

 

8- What are the mains tenets of classic liberalism?

 

9- How is 19th century utopianism both like and unlike classic liberalism?

 

10- Describe the main tenets of Marxism.

SPECIAL PROJECT:

What is your favorite political state? Do you favor a stronger or a weaker government? Try to come up with a different system of your own, but try to justify it from the point of view of the better justice (what is fair for the most people). In case you may not agree with such view, explain why is that the case.

Chapter 12

1- What argument did G.E. Moore give to support his claim that goodness can't be identical with pleasure (or any other natural property for that matter)?

 

2- What's a prima facie duty? How much such duties differ from your actual duty and what you do in a situation where they conflict, according to W.D. Ross?

 

3- What's the connection between justice, fairness, agreement, rationality, and self-interest for John Rawls?

 

4- What are you entitled to and what is a just society, according to the libertarian Robert Nozick?

 

5- What is Alasdair Mclntyre's narrative concept of the self, and how does it tie into his communitarian virtue ethics?

 

6- What's the basic difference between the first and the second waves of feminist thought?

 

7- Why do some feminists (like Ann Ferguson) support monoandrogyny, whereas others (like Joyce Trebilcot) support polyandrogyny, and still others (like Marilyn Frye) reject the angrogynous ideal completely?

 

8o What's the difference between the way boys and girls (and men and women) approach moral decision making, according to Caron Gilligan?

 

9- What makes some feminists suspicious of a care-centered feminist ethics?

 

10- Why doesn't Susan Moller Okin think the modern, middle-class family is a just institution?

 

Chapter 13

1- Why did St. Anselm think atheists contradict themselves?

 

2- What do St. Thomas Aquinas' first three ways have in common? Explain.

 

3- What objections can be made to Descartes' first proof?

 

4- Why did David Hume reject the design argument for the existence of God?

 

5- Why did Immanuel Kant reject the ontological argument?

 

6- Why did Leibniz think the principle of sufficient reason shows that there must be a God?

 

7- What's the basic similarity and the basic difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche when it comes to the issue of belief in God?

 

8- What did James mean when he described the issue of God's existence as live, momentous, and forced?

 

9- Why did logical positivists reject religious statements as meaningless?

 

10- Why does Mary Daly reject the traditional image of God as Father, and what new image does she recommend?