Classical Western Epistemology and Metaphysics Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Hobbes is a nominalist.

In Leviathan (chapter 4) Hobbes argues that there is nothing universal in the world except names: a general word such as 'man' is a name applied to many individual things, and there is no universal thing or universal idea corresponding to it.

Conceptualism, the view that universals exist as general ideas in the mind, is associated with Locke and Abelard. Hobbes was a materialist, so not an idealist, and although he admired geometrical method, he grounded knowledge in sense and names rather than in innate ideas, so he is not classed as a rationalist.

Answer: D

The view that Being is one and indivisible belongs to Parmenides.

In his poem, Parmenides argues that what is cannot come from or pass into what is not. So Being is ungenerated, imperishable, unchanging and continuous: it is 'all alike', and therefore not divisible, since there is no not-being to separate one part from another.

Heraclitus stands at the opposite pole, holding that everything is in flux. Plato posits many Forms, and Aristotle holds that being is said in many ways and that there are many individual substances, so none of them holds Being to be one and indivisible.

Answer: C

It is Hume who speaks of feigning identity.

In the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6, 'Of personal identity'), Hume finds no constant impression of a self, only a bundle of perceptions in perpetual flux. The identity we ascribe to the mind is a fiction: the imagination, moving smoothly along resembling and causally related perceptions, leads us to feign a continued, identical self or substance.

Locke grounds personal identity in sameness of consciousness, Berkeley treats the self as a real spiritual substance, and Kant speaks of the transcendental unity of apperception. None of them calls identity feigned.

Answer: A

Knowledge with no source in experience is a priori.

Since Kant, a priori knowledge is knowledge whose justification is independent of experience, such as mathematical truths or 'every event has a cause' on Kant's account. A posteriori knowledge is derived from or justified by experience.

'Synthetic' concerns the content of a judgment (the predicate adds to the subject concept) and can be either a priori or a posteriori, so it does not answer the question. 'Tentative' describes how firmly a belief is held, not its source.

Answer: B

The condition that connotes objectivity is truth.

On the traditional analysis, S knows that p if p is true, S believes that p, and S is justified in believing it. Belief is a subjective condition (a state of the knower), and justification concerns the knower's reasons or evidence. Truth is the condition that depends on how things are, independently of the knower: one cannot know what is not so.

Correspondence is one theory of what truth consists in, not a separate condition of knowledge, and verification is a method of checking claims, not part of the definition of knowledge.

Answer: A

They are known as the physikoi.

Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, the three thinkers of Miletus in the sixth century BCE, asked what the basic stuff (physis) of all things is: water for Thales, the boundless (apeiron) for Anaximander, air for Anaximenes. Aristotle called such thinkers physikoi, students of nature, because they explained the world by natural principles rather than by stories of the gods.

That is exactly why 'myth-makers' is wrong: the Milesians are remembered for breaking with the mythical accounts of Homer and Hesiod. They were not mystics, and although Thales was credited with practical advice to the Ionian cities, they are not classed as politicians.

Answer: C

The view was held by Homer.

In the Homeric epics the gods are powerful and immortal but behave with the passions of human beings: they quarrel, deceive, take sides in the Trojan war and use mortals for their own ends. Standard histories of Greek philosophy cite this picture of humans as playthings of strong but morally weak deities as the background against which philosophy began.

The philosophers named in the other options reacted against it. Thales sought a natural first principle instead of divine caprice. Heraclitus saw the world governed by the logos, a rational law. Aristotle's god is the unmoved mover, pure thought thinking itself, with no interest in using human beings.

Answer: A

For Plato mathematics provides a bridge from the sensible would to the intelligible (the paper prints 'would' for 'world').

In the Divided Line and the education of the guardians in the Republic, mathematical thinking (dianoia) occupies the stage just below knowledge of the Forms. The mathematician uses visible diagrams but reasons about the square itself and the diagonal itself, so mathematics turns the soul from the changing objects of sense towards the unchanging objects of thought. That is why arithmetic and geometry form the long preparation before dialectic.

So mathematics is not a discontinuity or an obstacle between the two worlds, and it is not illusory: for Plato it is the main road from one to the other.

Answer: A

According to Aristotle, form is not for the sake of matter.

The relation runs the other way: matter is for the sake of form. Matter is potentiality and form is actuality, and potentiality exists for the sake of its actualisation, as bronze exists for the statue and the seed for the plant. Form is also the final cause, the end towards which the process tends.

The other descriptions fit Aristotle's form. Against Plato, he holds that form is immanent in matter, not separate from it. Form is what makes a thing function as the kind of thing it is, as the soul is the form of the living body. And form is what differentiates one kind of thing from another within the same matter.

Answer: B

The answer is (A) is true but (R) is false.

Locke distinguishes the nominal essence of a substance, the complex idea by which we sort it (for gold: yellow, heavy, malleable), from its real essence, the internal constitution of insensible parts on which those qualities depend. He holds that the real essence is unknown to us, so the Assertion is true.

The Reason says the opposite of Locke's ground for this. The internal constitution is beyond the reach of our experience: our senses are too coarse to perceive the minute particles and their arrangement. That is precisely why the real essence is unknown. So the Reason is false, and options that call it true fail.