Classical Western Epistemology and Metaphysics Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The saying is Protagoras's.

Protagoras of Abdera, the leading Sophist of the fifth century BCE, declared that man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not. The saying expresses relativism: what appears true to each person is true for that person.

Plato reports and criticises it in the Theaetetus. Socrates sought universal definitions against such relativism. Parmenides held that only unchanging Being is real, and Gorgias, another Sophist, is known for his nihilistic thesis that nothing exists.

Answer: D

Parmenides rejects all of them: All of the above.

Parmenides argued that only Being is, and non-being is not and cannot even be thought. From this he concluded that Being is one, eternal, unchanging and motionless. Change would require something to come from or pass into non-being; motion would require empty space, which is non-being; and multiplicity would require something (non-being) to separate the many things.

So motion, multiplicity and change are all, for Parmenides, illusions of the senses, and choosing any one alone would leave out the other two.

Answer: A

Socrates was mainly concerned with ethics.

Socrates turned philosophy from the study of nature to the study of human life. His questioning in the Athenian marketplace sought the definitions of virtues such as justice, courage and piety, and his central concern was how one ought to live. He held that virtue is knowledge and that no one does wrong willingly, and said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

He used a method of inquiry with epistemological implications, but knowledge interested him for the sake of right living. Metaphysics was developed by Plato and Aristotle, and psychology was not a separate subject for him.

Answer: A

The recollection theory was put forth by Plato.

In the Meno and the Phaedo, Plato argues that learning is recollection (anamnesis). The soul existed before birth and knew the Forms; at birth it forgot them, and what we call learning is the soul's recovering of that knowledge, prompted by experience. In the Meno, Socrates draws a geometrical truth out of an untaught slave boy by questioning alone.

Aristotle held that knowledge begins with sense experience and rejected innate knowledge of Forms. Aquinas followed Aristotle on this point, and Thales was an early natural philosopher who held that everything comes from water.

Answer: C

Doxa means opinion.

In the Republic, Plato distinguishes doxa (opinion or belief) from episteme (knowledge). Opinion is about the changing world of sensible particulars, which lies between being and non-being; knowledge is of the unchanging Forms. In the divided line, opinion covers the two lower sections, imagination and belief.

Knowledge is episteme, the opposite of doxa. 'Doctrine' and 'theory' are modern words that do not render doxa, which in Greek is the ordinary word for an opinion or what seems to be the case.

Answer: C

For Plato, particulars are not identical with forms.

Plato separates two worlds: the eternal, perfect Forms and the changing particulars of sense. Particulars participate in the Forms and resemble them, but always imperfectly; a beautiful thing is beautiful only by sharing in Beauty itself, and it can lose its beauty, while the Form cannot. Particulars therefore can never be identical with the Forms.

Plato does describe particulars as copies, imitations and, in the allegory of the cave, shadows of the Forms. These are the ways he expresses their dependence on and inferiority to the Forms, so those options describe what particulars are.

Answer: B

For Aristotle, universals are immanent in the particulars.

Aristotle rejected Plato's separate world of Forms. For him the universal, the form or essence, exists only in individual things: humanity exists in individual human beings, not apart from them. The mind grasps the universal by abstracting it from the particulars in which it exists.

'Transcendent to particulars' is Plato's view, which Aristotle criticised. 'Concepts in the mind' is conceptualism, and 'names in language' is nominalism, both later positions associated with medieval and modern thinkers such as Ockham.

Answer: C

The third man argument criticises the philosophy of Plato.

The argument, raised in Plato's own Parmenides and named by Aristotle, targets the theory of Forms. If a man is a man because he resembles the Form of Man, then the man and the Form share something, which requires a third Form, a 'third man', to explain their resemblance, and so on to infinity. The theory thus seems to lead to an infinite regress.

Aristotle used the argument against Plato; he was its user, not its target. The Sophists and the Atomists held no theory of separate Forms for it to attack.

Answer: D

Substance for Aristotle is not that which exists in the other world.

In the Categories, primary substance is the individual thing, this man or this horse, which is neither said of a subject nor present in a subject. It is the ultimate logical and grammatical subject of predication, and it exists independently, while qualities and other categories exist only in substances.

So the first three options describe Aristotle's substance. A substance 'in the other world' would be a Platonic Form, existing apart from sensible things, which is exactly what Aristotle denied.

Answer: A

The ontological argument is based on God as a perfect being.

St. Anselm defines God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and Descartes as a supremely perfect being. The argument then claims that a being which exists in reality is greater, or more perfect, than one that exists only in the mind, so the most perfect being must exist. Everything turns on the concept of perfection.

Creator of the world and unmoved mover belong to the cosmological arguments, which start from the existence or motion of the world. Necessary being figures in the argument from contingency, though later versions of the ontological argument also use it; the classical argument starts from perfection.