Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Russell considered logic to be the essence of philosophy: in Our Knowledge of the External World he said that logic is the essence of philosophy, and that its method is logical analysis. He did not give that place to aesthetics, ethics or axiology, the theory of value, on which he wrote less systematically. The answer is Logic. His view is that philosophy is distinguished by its method of logical analysis, and that the problems of knowledge and the world are to be clarified by it. Aesthetics and ethics are branches of philosophy that he treated as less central, and axiology is the general study of value.

Answer: C

The author of the article On Denoting is Russell, option C. Bertrand Russell published it in 1905 in the journal Mind, setting out his theory of definite descriptions.

Quine (option A) wrote On What There Is, which draws on Russell's theory. Davidson (option B) is known for his work on the philosophy of action and the semantics of natural language. Frege (option D) wrote On Sense and Reference, which Russell criticises in the article. The article is the one that analyses such phrases as the present King of France.

Answer: B

Frege distinguishes between sense and reference, option B. In his paper of 1892 he held that an expression has a reference, the object it stands for, and a sense, the mode of presentation, which explains why the morning star and the evening star differ in meaning though they have the same reference.

Common sense (option A) and nonsense (option D) are not terms of his distinction. Truth condition (option C) is related to the sense of a sentence, but the paired terms of his famous distinction are sense and reference.

Answer: A

According to Austin the locutionary act is the act of saying something grammatically and meaningfully, option A (the paper prints locationary). It is the act of uttering a sentence with a sense and a reference.

Doing something in making the utterance (option B) is the illocutionary act, such as promising or warning, and doing something by saying something (option C) is the perlocutionary act, such as persuading. Option D, all the above, would merge the three acts, which Austin distinguishes in How to Do Things with Words.

Answer: D

The keyed answer is Quine, option D. Quine's holism holds that our sentences face the test of experience not one by one but as a whole body, a web of belief, and so language functions as a whole and not sentence by sentence.

Frege (option A) is known for the context principle and compositionality and treats the sentence as the unit of sense. Russell (option B) analyses sentences one at a time through descriptions. The early Wittgenstein (option C) holds a picture theory in which each proposition is a picture of a fact. The answer follows the key and the Quinean thesis.

Answer: A

P. F. Strawson's metaphysics is called descriptive, option A. In Individuals (1959) he distinguishes descriptive metaphysics, which describes the actual structure of our thought about the world, from revisionary metaphysics, which tries to produce a better structure.

Revisionary (option B) is the kind he contrasts with his own and associates with Descartes, Leibniz and Berkeley. Idealistic (option C) and nihilistic (option D) are not terms by which he describes his own approach.

Answer: D

The philosopher who is not a phenomenologist is Quine, option D. Quine is an American analytic philosopher, known for naturalised epistemology and the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, who stands outside the phenomenological movement.

Husserl (option C) founded phenomenology. Brentano (option A), whose theory of intentionality Husserl took up, and Meinong (option B), who worked on the theory of objects, belong to the school of thought from which phenomenology grew and are counted with it in the key.

Answer: B

The author of the Logical Investigations is Husserl, option B. He published the work in 1900 and 1901, and it is regarded as the beginning of phenomenology, with a critique of psychologism in logic.

Wittgenstein (option A) wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, and the second title resembles this one. Dummett (option C) is a philosopher of language, and Heidegger (option D) wrote Being and Time. The similar title of Wittgenstein's work is the trap.

Answer: D

The transcendental-phenomenological reduction aims at discovering the transcendental ego, option D. By suspending the natural attitude (epoché) Husserl brackets the existence of the world and arrives at pure consciousness, the transcendental subject in which the world is constituted.

The empirical ego (option A) is the person in the world, which is bracketed. The phenomenological ego (option B) is not the usual name for the result. The intersubjective ego (option C) comes later, in his treatment of other minds and the community of monads. The key names the transcendental ego.

Answer: C

Hermeneutics covers both understanding and interpretation of text, option C. The word names the theory and practice of interpretation, from the study of the Bible to Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and in the later tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer it is also the theory of understanding.

Option A alone leaves out interpretation and option B alone leaves out understanding, and so each is incomplete. Option D is wrong since both belong to it. The spelling hermneutics is the paper's.