Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The example is the locomotive engine.

In Philosophical Investigations section 12, Wittgenstein compares words to the handles in the cab of a locomotive: they all look more or less alike, yet one is a crank, one a switch, one a brake lever. The uniform appearance of words hides the difference in their uses.

The tool box (section 11) makes the opposite point, the diversity of the functions of words. The five red apples (section 1) shows words in use in a shop, and the pictorial model belongs to the earlier Tractatus.

Answer: B

For Ayer, knowledge is dispositional.

In The Problem of Knowledge, Ayer rejects the view that knowing is a special, infallible state of mind. Most of what we know we are not thinking about at any moment, so to know something is not to be in an occurrent mental state but to have a capacity, to be able to say what is true and to have the right to be sure of it.

That rules out 'a unique mental state' and 'intuitional', and knowledge is not merely verbal, since it concerns facts and not just words.

Answer: A

Quine finds problematic the view that each statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation.

In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', the second dogma is reductionism, the belief that each statement taken by itself has its own range of confirming experiences. Quine replies that our statements face the tribunal of experience not individually but as a corporate body.

Options B and C state Quine's own holism: statements cannot be tested singly, and a recalcitrant experience can be met by redistributing truth-values across the system. Option D is not his thesis; he wants an empiricism without the dogmas.

Answer: C

Husserl aimed to discover the foundations of knowledge and experience.

Husserl wanted philosophy to be a rigorous science. Phenomenology suspends natural assumptions (the epoche) and describes the structures of consciousness and its intentional objects, so as to ground all knowledge in what is given in experience.

He began with the philosophy of arithmetic and logic, but these were stages of a wider project, not its whole aim, and he did not seek to found speculative metaphysics.

Answer: B

For Heidegger, Dasein is existing being.

In Being and Time, Dasein ('being-there') is the being for whom its own being is an issue. Its essence lies in its existence: it is always already in the world, projecting its possibilities, rather than a thing with fixed properties.

Heidegger chose the term to avoid the traditional language of the subject, consciousness or self, so 'philosophical subject', 'phenomenological self' and 'subjective being' all bring back what he set aside.

Answer: B

On the key's reading, Sartre's bad faith is a conscious lie.

In Being and Nothingness, bad faith is a lie to oneself: the deceiver and the deceived are one and the same consciousness. Sartre rejects the Freudian explanation through an unconscious and a censor, arguing that the censor would have to know what it hides, so the deception happens within consciousness itself.

Hence 'unconscious lie' and 'censored lie' are the views he rejects, and bad faith need not be spoken; it is a way of being, not an utterance.

Answer: D

A proposition is true if it can be assimilated, validated, corroborated and verified.

In Pragmatism (lecture 6), William James writes that true ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify; false ideas are those we cannot. Truth happens to an idea; it is made true by events.

Options A, B and C each give only part of the four-term formula, so they are incomplete statements of James's view.

Answer: C

Nietzsche claims that the 'real' world is a lie.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says that the 'apparent' world is the only one, and that the 'real' world has merely been lied into it; he narrates how the 'true world' finally became a fable. His target is the two-world picture of Plato and Christianity.

So the real world is not 'the only truth', and he rejects the appearance and reality pairing. Once the true world is abolished, he adds, the apparent world goes with it, so 'nothing but appearance' is not his claim either.

Answer: C

In Russell's metaphysics material objects are constructed.

Following the maxim that wherever possible logical constructions should be substituted for inferred entities, Russell treated material objects as logical constructions out of sense-data (and, later, out of events). A table is not an unknowable substance behind our experiences but a system of actual and possible appearances.

So material objects are neither mere ideas in Berkeley's sense nor illusions; and 'not constructed' denies the very thesis of logical construction.

Answer: B

In the Tractatus, simple objects are existing entities.

Wittgenstein says that objects are simple and form the substance of the world (2.02, 2.021). They exist necessarily, whatever is the case, and states of affairs are configurations of them. Names in fully analysed propositions stand for these objects.

They are not non-existent, they are not abstract entities like numbers or classes, and they are not linguistic items; names are the linguistic counterparts that refer to them.