Introduction to Philosophy Final Exam

Introduction to Philosophy Final Exam StraighterLine

According to David Hume, why can't past experience justify claims about the future?

• Our knowledge of past experience depends on memory, which cannot

be known to be accurate.

• Tricky question! Hume does think that past experience can justify claims

about the future.

• Because we can never know if we are the same person as the person

we seem to remember being, past experience cannot be a guide to claims about our future.

• We can never know whether or not the future will be like the past.

(Ans- d. We can never know whether or not the future will be like the past.

According to the philosophy of Absolute Idealism, what is the relationship between "being real" and "being knowable"?

• No reality is knowable.
• All reality is knowable.
• Some reality is knowable and some aren't.
• Only God is ultimately unknowable.

(Ans- b. All reality is knowable.

According to David Hume, the self is a(n) _____.

• sequence of perceptions
• immaterial, unchanging substance
• physical body
• social entity

(Ans- a. sequence of perceptions

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According to Hegel, the highest reality (the absolute) is _____.

• the entire material world
• a God who exists beyond the world
• an infinite thought thinking of itself
• a vast group of independent particulars

(Ans- c. an infinite thought thinking of itself

Identify a true statement about Søren Kierkegaard.

• He scorned Hegel's system, in which the individual dissolves into a kind

of abstract unreality.

• He read Arthur Schopenhauer and became convinced that the world is

driven by cosmic will, not by reason.

• He believed that systematic philosophy, with its grandiose schemes, with

its mind-body and other dualistic splits, with its metaphysics and metaphysical traditions, must give way to more original kind of thinking.

• He agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche as to the nature of the cosmic will.

(Ans- a. He scorned Hegel's system, in which the individual dissolves into a kind of abstract unreality.

What did Michel Foucault claim concerning epistemes?

Select one:

• They form a continuous series leading to the advancement of truth over

superstition.

• They are "created realities" that are the ground of true and false in each

era.

• They are discovered, not made.
• They can be the basis of objective truth claims.

(Ans- b. They are "created realities" that are the ground of true and false in each era.

• / 3

For French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, what is culture?

Select one:

• a system of signs
• a conversation
• a common heritage
• a common language

(Ans- a. a system of signs

An authentic existence can be found, according to Heidegger, only if one can _____.

• believe in God
• believe in the superior man
• take responsibility for one's choices
• understand oneself as a totality

(Ans- d. understand oneself as a totality

Who searched for a group of rules that accounts for the social complexities of even so-called primitive cultures?

• Jacques Derrida
• Michel Foucault
• Martin Heidegger
• Claude Levi-Strauss

(Ans- d. Claude Levi-Strauss

Which of the following statements is true about Martin Heidegger?

• He was sympathetic to the Marxist worldview.
• He believed that, as a consequence of the nonexistence of God, nothing

about Being is necessary.

• He abandoned his belief in Being as the basic principle of philosophy.
• He believed that people are basically ignorant about the thing that

matters most—the true nature of Being.

• / 3