Final Exam    

The final exam will consist of

  • A handful of true/false, fill-in-the-blank, and multiple choice, etc. questions.

  • A handful of passage identifications (you identify the author and briefly describe the philosophical significance of the passage).

  • A handful of short answer questions. (Some short answer questions may be about passages you will have before you.)

  • One or two essays.

 

 

I strongly suggest that you take a look at the paper topics for the second writing assignment.

Though the exam is comprehensive, almost all questions will come from material in the second half of the course. (There will be just a few questions to check that you haven't forgotten everything from the first half.)

If you have been doing the readings, coming to class, and taking good notes, I don't think you'll find the exam too difficult.

I will be posting more material Wednesday afternoon.

 

     
 
sample passage identification questions

“Suppose two brothers quarrel. Suppose that the quarrel becomes violent and then bitter and that finally they come to hate each other. Suppose that their mother prays to God that He restore their mutual love–and not by any gradual process, but immediately, right on the spot. What is she asking God to do? I can think of only one thing: to grant her request, God would have to wipe away all memory of everything that had happened between them since just before the moment the quarrel started. …[B]ut God would not do such a thing, because, as Descartes has pointed out, God is not a deceiver, and such an act would constitute a grace deception about the facts of history.”

“There is still doubt of the correctness of the metaphysical principle that a quality must have a real opposite: I suggest that it is not really impossible that everything should be, say, red, that the truth is merely that if everything were red we should no notice redness, and so we should have no word ‘red'; we observe and give names to qualities only if they have real opposites.”

“Now if one chooses thus to limit one's self to the rôle of external observer, it is, I think, perfectly true that one can attach no meaning to an act which is the act of something we call a ‘self’ and yet follows from nothing in that self's character. But then why should we so limit ourselves, when what is under consideration is a subjective activity? For the apprehension of subjective acts there is another standpoint available, that of inner experience , of the practical consciousness is its actual functioning.”

“That all inferences, Cleanthes, concerning fact are founded on experience, and that all experimental reasonings are founded on the supposition that similar causes prove similar effects, and similar effects similar causes, I shall not at present much dispute with you. But observe, I entreat you, with what extreme caution all just reasoners proceed in the transferring of experiments to similar cases. Unless the cases be exactly similar, they repose no perfect confidence in applying their past observation to any particular phenomenon. Every alteration of circumstances occasions a doubt concerning the event; and it requires new experiments to prove certainly that the new circumstances are of no moment or importance. A change in bulk, situation, arrangement, age, disposition of the air, or surrounding bodies; any of these particulars may be attended with the most unexpected consequences. And unless the objects be quite familiar to us, it is the highest temerity to expect with assurance, after any of these changes, an event similar to that which before fell under our observation. The slow and deliberate steps of philosophers here, if anywhere, are distinguished from the precipitate march of the vulgar, who, hurries on by the smallest similitude, are incapable of all discernment or consideration.”

“It may be said, for instance, that, if voluntary actions be subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, there is a continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all, to every single volition of every human creature. No contingency any where in the universe; no indifference; no liberty. While we act, we are, at the same time, acted upon. The ultimate Author of all our volitions is the Creator of the world, who first bestowed motion on this immense machine, and placed all beings in that particular position, whence every subsequent event, by an inevitable necessity, must result. Human actions, therefore, either can have no moral turpitude at all, as proceeding from so good a cause; or if they have any turpitude, they must involve our Creator in the same guilt, while he is acknowledged to be their ultimate cause and author. For as a man, who fired a mine, is answerable for all the consequences whether the train he employed be long or short; so wherever a continued chain of necessary causes is fixed, that Being, either finite or infinite, who produces the first, is likewise the author of all the rest, and must both bear the blame and acquire the praise, which belong to them.”

“I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not on accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type . It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view – to understand the ascription in the first person, as well as in the third, so to speak. ”

“Could we discover that gold was not in fact yellow? Suppose an optical illusion were prevalent, due to peculiar properties of the atmosphere in South Africa and Russia and certain other areas where gold minds are common… Would there on this basis be an announcement in the newspapers: ‘It has turned out that there is no gold. Gold does not exist.'…It seems to me that there would be no such announcement.…The reason is, I think, that we use ‘gold' as a term for a certain kind of thing.…The kind of thing is thought to have certain identifying marks. Some of these marks may not really be true of gold. ”


 
sample short answer questions
  1. Explain why the Preference Problem is supposed to be “devastating” for the suggestion of non-intentional biasing.

  2. What does Mackie's objection to the "evil is a necessary means to good" reply to the problem of evi?

  3. How is fatalism different from determinism?

  4. Van Inwagen tries to explain the magnitude, duration, and distribution of evil. Which of these explanations do you think is the weakest?

  5. What is a possible world? Use the notion of a possible world to describe what a rigid designator is, and how rigid designators figure in the demonstration of a posteriori necessities.

  6. In Meditation IV, Descartes presents a view of the will and the intellect. What problem is he trying to solve? What is his solution?

  7. Why does Jackson think it is important to focus on Mary's knowledge of what it is like for other people to taste chocolate, or see red? (You may assume your reader is familiar with Mary in the black and white room example, so you don't need to rehearse it. You should lay out his argument, and emphasize why he focuses on what it's like for other people.)

  8. Explain the difference between epistemic and metaphysical possibility.

  9. What is Kripke's view of conceivability and possibility?

  10. White uses the following example: map publishers deliberately introduce a few errors in each map to thwart copying. What is this example supposed to show?

 

 
Midterm Exam    

The midterm exam will consist of

  • A handful of true/false, fill-in-the-blank, and multiple choice, etc. questions.

  • A handful of passage identifications (you identify the author and briefly describe the philosophical significance of the passage).

 

 
  • A handful of short answer questions. (Some short answer questions may be about passages you will have before you.)

If you have been doing the readings, coming to class, and taking good notes, I don't think you'll find the exam too difficult.

 

     
sample true/ false questions
  1. The following argument is valid.

    If I'm dreaming then I don't know that I have hands.
    I'm not dreaming.
    _____________________________________________
    I know I have hands.

  2. The external world skeptic may allow that we know some things, e.g., things about logic or mathematics.

  3. A constructivist about truth thinks there are no facts.

  4. Propositions are sentences. When Dana says, “Justin is a formidable singer” and Yves says, “Justin est un chanteur formidable,” they must be expressing different propositions with their utterances.

  5. According to the KK principle, to know something you must possess the concept of knowledge.

  6. Boghossian claims that Cardinal Bellarmine's epistemic system is not a genuine, competing alternative system to our own, though the Azande's is.

 

sample passage identification questions

“The global relativist thinks that there are no truths of the form

  1. There have been dinosaurs

but only truths of the form

  1. According to a theory that we hold and that it pays for us to hold, there have been dinosaurs.

Well and good. But are we now supposed to think that there are absolute facts of this latter form, facts about which theories we hold and which theories it pays for us to hold?

There are three problems for the relativist who answers ‘yes' to this question. First, and most decisively, he would be abandoning any hope of expressing the view he wanted to express, namely that there are no absolute facts of any kind, but only relative facts.”

“Indeed, these hands and the rest of my body—on what grounds might I deny that they exist?—unless perhaps I liken myself to madmen whose brains are so rattled by the persistent vapors of melancholy that they are sure they are kinds when in fact thaey are paupers, or that they wear purples robes when in fact they are nakes, or that they are gourds, or that they are made of glass. But these people are insane, and I would seem just as crazy if I were to apply what I say about them to myself.”

“These doubts are all to be allayed by means of recognized procedures (more or less roughly recognized, of course), appropriate to the particular type of case. There are recognized ways of distinguishing between dreaming and waking…, and of deciding whether a thing is stuffed or live, and so forth.”

“Now someone might say this: '…I needn't accept the premise that God has all perfections. …This is wrong, however. For while it's not necessary that the idea of God occurs to me, it is necessary that I attribute all perfections to him…whenever I think of the primary and supreme entity and bring the idea of Him out of my mind's treasury.”

“For this sort of deference to science to be right, however, scientific knowledge had better be privileged – it had better not be true that there are many equally valid ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. For if it was true, we might well have to accord equal credibility to archeology as to Zuni creationism, equal credibility to evolution as to Christian creationism.”


 
sample short answer questions

Consider the following two cases:

Case #1:
P = I have hands.
H = I am dreaming that I have hands.

Case #2:
P = I have hands.
H = I lost my hands yesterday in a threshing accident and I am merely dreaming that I have hands.

  1. What is the principle of epistemic closure? Explain how, in Case #2, the skeptic can use the epistemic closure principle to defend the Cartesian Premise:

    Cartesian Premise: If you do not know that not-H, then you do not know that P. (This principle is equivalent to: If you know that p, then you know that not-H.)

  2. Why does the explanation for Case #2 not work in Case #1? Explain.

  3. How does a contextualist like David Lewis attempt to dissolve the skeptical paradox?

  4. What is epistemic non-factualism, and why does Boghossian think that it cannot be right?

  5. What is Stroud's alternative explanation of the data Austin uses to support his "special reasons" principle?

  6. What is Stroud's plane spotter example, and how is it supposed to pose a problem for Austin's "special reasons" principle?

  7. What is the principle of sufficient reason? Explain why we should think the principle is true.

  8. How does St. Thomas Acquinas confuse modality (possibility and necessity) with duration?