Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Nagel's monograph is closely related to the Unity of Sciences project.

Ernest Nagel's Principles of the Theory of Probability (1939) was published as a number of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the series launched by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris to carry forward the logical empiricists' programme of a unified science.

The verification principle and the elimination of metaphysics are related themes of logical positivism, but the monograph's home and purpose belong to the unified science project. It is a study of the foundations of probability, not of theories of truth.

Answer: A

The keyed pair is Physicalism and unity of Science.

Quine was a physicalist who held that the physical sciences give the most basic account of what there is. His naturalism treats philosophy as continuous with science and epistemology as 'a chapter of psychology', so that all knowledge forms one connected web, a unified science.

He did not hold the verification principle in its positivist form: in Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) he rejected the reductionism behind it, arguing that statements face experience as a whole body, not one by one. He also rejected phenomenalism, and did not aim to eliminate metaphysics, since he treated ontology as a legitimate question of what our best theory says exists.

Answer: D

The statement that is not true of Ryle is There can be a wholesale transference of the mental to the physical.

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle attacks the Cartesian 'ghost in the machine', but he also refuses materialism. He says that the contrast between mind and matter will be dissolved, but not by absorbing mind into matter or matter into mind. So he does not hold that the mental can be wholly transferred to, or reduced to, the physical.

The other statements are his. He argues that a person's life is not a double series of events in two worlds (C), and that talk of mental states refers to dispositions and performances rather than to an inner life of hidden episodes (A). He also grants that much of our ordinary thinking goes on as silent soliloquy accompanied by visual imagery (B).

Answer: A

Husserl's method is centred on the first person point of view.

Phenomenology studies experience as it is lived and given to consciousness. Through the epoche, Husserl brackets the natural attitude and examines the intentional acts of consciousness from the inside, from the standpoint of the experiencing subject. Even his account of other minds begins from how others are given to me.

A third person point of view is the outside, objective standpoint of the natural sciences that phenomenology suspends. A second person point of view is the perspective of address between I and you, not the starting point of his method, and an absence of point of view is impossible on his account of consciousness as always the consciousness of a subject.

Answer: D

The keyed answer is Responsible freedom.

In Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard's 'knight of faith', modelled on Abraham, makes a lonely, inward decision before God that no rule or institution can make for him. He chooses it in fear and trembling because he must answer for it himself, without the security of universal moral rules, which is the sense of a free choice for which the individual alone is responsible.

Conventional morality is the ethical stage, the 'universal', which faith suspends in the teleological suspension of the ethical. Aesthetic pleasure is the lowest of Kierkegaard's stages of life, and doctrinal, established religion ('Christendom') is what he attacked as a substitute for genuine faith.

Answer: D

Rorty holds that knowledge is legitimised through social practice.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Richard Rorty rejects the picture of the mind as a mirror representing reality. He defends 'epistemological behaviourism': to call a belief justified is to say that it can be defended in the conversation of one's community, according to the norms of its social practices, and not that it has some privileged link to reality.

Introspection and intuition are exactly the private, privileged sources of knowledge that Rorty attacks, and reason understood as a faculty that grounds knowledge independently of social justification is the foundationalist idea he rejects.

Answer: D

For Merleau-Ponty, our unreflective being-in-the-world is a source of meaning.

In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that perception through the lived body is our primary, pre-reflective contact with the world. Before any explicit thought or judgement, the body already grasps the world as meaningful: things show up as graspable, near or far, inviting or threatening. Reflection and science build on this perceptual meaning.

Essence is the object of Husserl's eidetic method, which Merleau-Ponty grounds in perception rather than the reverse. Emotion is part of embodied life but not the claim being made, and dogma is the opposite of the open, lived experience he describes.

Answer: C

The keyed answer is wider than observation.

For William James, the meaning and truth of a thesis lie in the difference it makes in experience. Those experiential consequences include not only what can be observed through the senses but also effects on conduct, expectation, feeling and the satisfactory working of our beliefs as a whole; James's radical empiricism counts relations and inner experience as part of experience too.

Saying the consequences are limited to or narrower than observation would reduce pragmatism to a narrow verificationism, which James did not hold. Consequences removed from observation altogether would cut the link with experience on which his pragmatism rests.

Answer: C

For Frege the sense of a sentence is the thought it expresses.

In 'On Sense and Reference', Frege distinguishes the sense (Sinn) of an expression, its mode of presentation, from its reference (Bedeutung). For a declarative sentence, the sense is the thought (Gedanke) and the reference is its truth-value.

So the truth-value is the reference, not the sense, and 'the object it denotes' describes the reference of a name. 'True object' is not a Fregean notion.

Answer: D

The basic proposition is Body exists.

Moore's 'A Defence of Common Sense' begins its list of truisms he knows with certainty with the proposition that there exists at present a living human body, which is his body. Common sense propositions like this are more certain than any philosophical argument against them.

'Material substance' and 'mental substance' are philosophers' theses, not common sense truisms, and Moore did not claim to know that God exists.