Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The key gives perspectivism.

For Nietzsche every living thing is will to power, and each such will interprets the world from its own standpoint and according to its own needs. There are therefore no facts, only interpretations: all knowing is perspectival.

Nietzsche diagnoses nihilism as the collapse of values, which the will to power is meant to overcome rather than lead to. He rejects universalism and rationalism as claims to a view from nowhere.

Answer: D

For Levinas the Other relates to the self in infinity.

In Totality and Infinity (1961), Levinas argues that the face of the Other cannot be comprehended or absorbed into the self's totality of knowledge. The Other overflows every idea I have of him, so the relation is one of infinity, which places an ethical demand on me.

Numerical or qualitative difference would make the Other one more item in a totality, which is exactly what Levinas denies, and finitude describes the self's own limits rather than its relation to the Other.

Answer: C

A proposition shares pictorial form with the state of affairs it represents.

In the Tractatus (1921), Wittgenstein's picture theory holds that a proposition is a logical picture of reality. Its elements stand for objects, and their arrangement shows how objects are arranged in the state of affairs; this shared logical (pictorial) form is what lets the proposition represent it.

Meaning as use in a context is the later Wittgenstein of the Investigations. Apparent content and other propositions of the same class are not what the picture theory requires.

Answer: C

Russell's object of knowledge by acquaintance is sense data.

In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Russell distinguishes knowledge by acquaintance, direct awareness without inference, from knowledge by description. We are acquainted with sense data (colours, shapes, sounds), with our own thoughts and feelings, probably with the self, and with universals.

Physical objects (the world) and other minds are known only by description, through inference from sense data. 'Particulars' is too broad, since most particulars are known by description.

Answer: B

The argument is Russell's.

Bertrand Russell gives it in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940): naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false; therefore naive realism, if true, is false, and therefore it is false. It argues from science against the view that we perceive things as they are.

Moore defended common sense against such arguments, Wittgenstein's work does not contain it, and Bradley argued from contradictions in appearance, not from physics.

Answer: C

For Strawson, the concept of a person is logically primitive.

In Individuals (1959), P. F. Strawson argues that a person is a type of entity to which both states of consciousness and bodily characteristics are ascribed. The concept cannot be analysed into a mind plus a body; it is prior to, not built out of, the concepts of mind and body.

Option D is the Cartesian picture Strawson rejects. Calling material bodies or minds primitive leaves the person derivative, which is again what he denies.

Answer: C

For Levinas the other is presented to the self as a face.

In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas argues that the other person cannot be reduced to an object of my knowledge. The other appears as the face, which addresses me and commands 'thou shalt not kill', placing an ethical demand on me before any theory. This is why he calls ethics first philosophy.

A thought or a sensation would make the other a content of my own consciousness, which is precisely the reduction Levinas rejects. Sound is not his term for the encounter.

Answer: D

The statement that is not true is Philosophy should copy the methods of exact sciences.

In his 1911 essay Philosophy as Rigorous Science, Husserl argues that philosophy must become a strict science, but in its own way. It must be free of presuppositions (A), a radically self-responsible and self-grounding inquiry (B), and it must reject naturalism, the attempt to treat consciousness and ideas as natural facts (C).

He did not want philosophy to imitate the natural sciences. Rigour, for Husserl, comes from the phenomenological study of essences given in consciousness, not from borrowing the experimental and mathematical methods of the exact sciences, which themselves rest on unexamined presuppositions.

Answer: C

For the early Wittgenstein, the truth value of a molecular proposition is determined by simple propositions.

In the Tractatus, every complex (molecular) proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. Its truth or falsity depends entirely on the truth values of the elementary propositions it is built from, as truth tables show; for example 'p and q' is true only when both p and q are true.

Correspondence with facts is how an elementary proposition gets its truth value, by picturing a state of affairs, not how a molecular one does. A network of objects is what a state of affairs consists of, and syntactical form alone does not fix truth except in the limiting cases of tautology and contradiction.

Answer: C

The distinction between positive and negative facts is mainly associated with Bertrand Russell.

In his 1918 lectures The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Russell argued that, besides positive facts, there must be negative facts to make negative propositions such as 'Socrates is not alive' true. He reported that defending this view in a lecture at Harvard 'nearly produced a riot', and the question became a standard topic of his logical atomism.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus mentions positive and negative facts in passing, but treats the world as the totality of existing atomic facts and does not defend negative facts as Russell did. Moore and Ryle are not associated with the distinction.