Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Strawson's metaphysics is descriptive.

In Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), Strawson distinguished descriptive metaphysics, which describes the actual structure of our thought about the world (material bodies and persons as basic particulars), from revisionary metaphysics, which aims to produce a better structure. He placed himself, with Aristotle and Kant, on the descriptive side.

Revisionary is the opposite type, which he attributed to Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley. His metaphysics is neither idealistic nor nihilistic.

Answer: D

Philosophical Investigations was written by the later Wittgenstein.

Published posthumously in 1953, it sets out Wittgenstein's later philosophy: meaning as use, language-games, family resemblance, rule-following and the private language argument. It is a criticism of his own earlier picture theory.

The early Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Russell and Frege wrote neither book.

Answer: A

Dilthey introduces the concept of categories of life.

Wilhelm Dilthey, in his late work on the human sciences (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt), argued that understanding lived experience and history needs its own categories, such as meaning, value, purpose and development. These categories of life (Lebenskategorien) are drawn from life itself, in contrast to the categories of the natural sciences.

The categories of understanding are Kant's twelve pure concepts. 'Categories of consciousness' and 'categories of objects' are not Dilthey's terms.

Answer: A

The major problem of hermeneutics is the conflict of interpretations.

A text or a human action can be interpreted in many ways, and different interpretive schools (for example a psychoanalytic and a phenomenological reading) may reach incompatible results with no neutral standpoint to decide between them. Paul Ricoeur made this the title of his book The Conflict of Interpretations (1969).

Meaning in hermeneutics is not transparent, so B names the opposite of the problem. The interdependence of understanding and interpretation, the hermeneutic circle, is treated by Heidegger and Gadamer as the productive structure of understanding rather than its main defect, and the role of grammar is only one aspect of interpretation.

Answer: A

The one that is not part of the phenomenological method is dialectics.

Husserl's method uses the epoché, the suspension or bracketing of belief in the natural world; the phenomenological and eidetic reductions, which lead back to pure consciousness and to essences; and intentional analysis, the description of how consciousness is directed to its objects.

Dialectics, the movement of thought through opposition and synthesis, is the method of Hegel and Marx. Husserl's phenomenology is descriptive, not dialectical.

Answer: B

Husserl wanted philosophy to become a rigorous science.

In his essay 'Philosophy as Rigorous Science' (1911), Husserl argued that philosophy must become a strict science grounded in the intuitive description of essences, free of naturalism and historicism.

He opposed making philosophy an empirical science, since that is the naturalism he criticised, and his phenomenology rejects speculative system-building. Logic was sometimes called a normative science in his day, but that was not his aim for philosophy as a whole.

Answer: A

The one that is not a task of the reduction is To enable the naturalistic point of view.

Husserl's phenomenological reduction begins with the epoche, the bracketing of the natural attitude: the everyday and scientific assumption that the world exists independently and can be explained naturalistically. Its purpose is to suspend that standpoint, not to enable it, so that the phenomena can be described as they are given to consciousness.

The other aims belong to the method. Phenomenology aspires to be a presuppositionless science; it seeks to ground the meaning and being of entities in the constituting activity of consciousness; and it aims at a whole, intuitively grounded knowledge rather than piecemeal causal explanation.

Answer: A

A category mistake is committed when a fact belonging to one category is presented in the idiom appropriate to another.

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle describes the Cartesian 'dogma of the ghost in the machine' as a category mistake: it represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to the same logical type or category as physical events, when they belong to another. His example is the visitor who sees the colleges, libraries and offices of Oxford and then asks where the University is, as if it were one more building.

The mistake is one of presentation in the wrong idiom. It is not a reduction of one category to another (that is what Ryle is sometimes accused of), not a denial that the facts exist, and not a wrong account of how two categories are related.

Answer: A

Sartre's humanism orients itself towards an open future of collective responsibility.

In Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Sartre argues that since existence precedes essence, man is nothing but what he makes of himself, and his future is open. But in choosing for himself he chooses for all: by choosing, each person creates an image of man as he believes man ought to be. So the individual is responsible not only for his own individuality but for all men.

That universal responsibility rules out 'solitary responsibility'. Ecological and scientific responsibility are not the frame of Sartre's lecture.

Answer: A

For Heidegger the proper response to technology is to understand it within Being (Sein).

In 'The Question Concerning Technology' (1954), Heidegger argues that the essence of modern technology is nothing technological: it is Gestell (enframing), a way in which Being reveals beings as standing reserve, resources to be ordered and used. The danger lies in mistaking this mode of revealing for the only one. The response he calls for is to think the essence of technology, to understand it as a destining of Being, which opens a free relation to it.

He explicitly rejects both blindly pushing technology forward and rebelling against it as the work of the devil, so 'abandon' and 'accelerate' are wrong, and 'manipulate' is the instrumental attitude he criticises.