Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: D

For Nietzsche the assumption of identity underlying logic is fictitiously fulfilled.

Nietzsche argues that logic rests on the assumption that there are identical cases and self-identical things, which reality, a world of becoming, does not supply. The law of identity is therefore a useful fiction: a simplification that living beings impose on the flux so that they can calculate and survive. Logic holds only of a world we have first falsified to fit it.

So the assumption is not rationally, culturally or spiritually fulfilled in Nietzsche's account; it is satisfied only by a fiction we create.

Answer: A

For Levinas the face of the other is a moral summon for responsibility.

In Totality and Infinity (1961), Emmanuel Levinas makes ethics first philosophy. The face of the other person confronts me before any knowledge or choice, and in its vulnerability says 'thou shalt not kill'. The face calls me to an infinite responsibility for the other that I cannot refuse.

Levinas sets this ethical relation against the attempt of knowledge, science and reason to grasp the other as an object, so the epistemological and intellectual options reverse his point, and the face is not an object of aesthetic pleasure.

Answer: B

James replaced 'the truth' with a diversified plurality of truths.

In Pragmatism (1907), William James rejects the idea of one absolute, static Truth. For the pragmatist, truth happens to an idea: ideas become true as they are verified and work in experience. There are therefore many truths, in the plural, each made in particular situations and open to revision.

Appearances, percepts and concepts are the materials truths are made from or about, not what James puts in the place of 'the truth'.

Answer: C

According to Ryle the Cartesian theory rests on a confusion between mental and physical properties.

Ryle's charge in The Concept of Mind is that the 'official doctrine' commits a category mistake: it treats mental conduct as if it belonged to the same logical category as physical things and processes, only private and non-spatial. Because it models the mental on the physical, it invents a ghostly mind with its own hidden causes behind the body's movements.

Ryle's own remedy is to analyse mental concepts as dispositions, so a confusion between description and disposition is not his diagnosis of Descartes. The mind-brain question belongs to later identity theory, and logical versus psychological properties is not the distinction he draws.

Answer: B

The distinction is upheld by Ayer.

In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), A. J. Ayer distinguishes practical verifiability from verifiability in principle, and the strong sense of verification, in which experience conclusively establishes a proposition, from the weak sense, in which experience can only make it probable. He adopts the weak criterion: a statement is meaningful if some observation is relevant to its truth or falsity. This is the distinction between actual and probable verification the question refers to.

Schlick, Carnap and Wittgenstein are all linked with the verification principle in the Vienna Circle period, but the strong and weak senses of verification, conclusive against merely probable, are Ayer's own formulation in that book, which is why the paper names him.

Answer: A

Russell's incomplete symbols are those whose contribution to meaning did not consist in denotation.

In his theory of descriptions, Russell argues that a definite description such as 'the present King of France' has no meaning in isolation and does not stand for any object. It contributes to the meaning of the whole sentence in which it occurs, which analysis shows to be a complex quantified statement. Such expressions are incomplete symbols.

The other options state the opposite. Incomplete symbols are precisely not names, their contribution does not consist in denoting, and they are susceptible of analysis: the theory of descriptions is that analysis.

Answer: D

The one Quine does not criticise as a dogma is Totality of our so called beliefs is man-made.

In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951), Quine attacks the analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some construct of terms referring to immediate experience. Phenomenalism, the attempt (as in Carnap's Aufbau) to construct the world from sense experience, is the radical form of that reductionism he targets.

The last option is not a dogma but Quine's own conclusion: 'the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs ... is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges'. That holism is what he puts in place of the two dogmas.

Answer: A

The answer is facticity and responsibility.

For Sartre, human freedom is always situated. Facticity is the set of given facts about me that I did not choose: my body, my past, my place and time. I cannot escape these, but I am free in how I take them up, and because I choose, I am wholly responsible for what I make of myself and, Sartre adds, answerable for humanity in my choices. Freedom is worked out between what is given and the responsibility of choosing.

The other pairings do not describe Sartre's account. He rejects nihilism as an excuse, his freedom is not mere indeterminism (random uncaused events), and immanence is not his term for the other pole of freedom, which he calls transcendence.

Answer: A

The tenet under attack is "All relations are internal to their terms."

British idealists such as F.H. Bradley held the doctrine of internal relations: every relation a thing has enters into its nature, so that to know anything fully one must know its relations to everything else. This supported the monistic conclusion that reality is a single whole.

In 'The Refutation of Idealism' (1903) and especially in 'External and Internal Relations' (1919), G.E. Moore argued that at least some relations are external, not part of the nature of their terms. So the external-relations thesis is Moore's own view, and the other two options are not the idealist doctrine he targeted.

Answer: B

Ryle attributed the view to Descartes.

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle called the 'official doctrine', which he traced chiefly to Descartes, the dogma of the ghost in the machine: the idea that a person is a body (the machine) inhabited by a non-physical mind (the ghost). Ryle argued that this rests on a category mistake, treating the mind as a thing of the same logical type as the body.

Aristotle treated the soul as the form of the body, not a ghost within it. Strawson and Wittgenstein were Ryle's contemporaries and also critics of Cartesian dualism.