Recent Western Philosophy Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The founder of modern phenomenology was Husserl, so the answer is C.

Edmund Husserl set out the programme in the Logical Investigations (1900-01) and later in Ideas (1913), and the movement of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty grew from his work.

Brentano (A) was his teacher and taught intentionality, and Meinong (B) was a pupil of Brentano known for the theory of objects. Peirce (D) was an American pragmatist with a different 'phaneroscopy'.

Answer: A

The thinker according to whom hermeneutics is an ontology is Heidegger, so the answer is A.

In Being and Time Heidegger treated understanding and interpretation not as methods for reading texts but as the basic way of being of the human being (Dasein). Hermeneutics thus becomes the analysis of existence, that is, ontology.

Schleiermacher (B) and Dilthey (D) treated hermeneutics as a method or as an epistemology of the human sciences, and Ranke (C) was a historian.

Answer: B

The contributor to critical hermeneutics is Habermas, so the answer is B.

Jurgen Habermas, in his debate with Gadamer, argued that understanding tradition must be joined with a critique of ideology, because tradition may carry hidden relations of power and distorted communication. This position is called critical hermeneutics.

Heidegger (A) and Gadamer (D) belong to the philosophical hermeneutics which defends the authority of tradition, and Rorty (C) developed a pragmatic hermeneutics, so the option that fits is Habermas.

Answer: C

The philosopher who defended common sense philosophy is G.E. Moore, notably in his paper A Defence of Common Sense, where he listed truisms, such as that the earth has existed for many years, which he held to be certain. Berkeley is the idealist who denied matter, Hegel the absolute idealist, and T.H. Green an idealist, so none of them defended common sense in this way. The answer is Moore. Moore's paper lists many things, such as that he has a body and that other people exist, which he says he knows to be true and which philosophical sceptics cannot overturn.

Answer: D

The statement 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent' was propounded by Wittgenstein; it is the final proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 'To be is to be perceived' is Berkeley's saying, 'I think therefore I am' is Descartes's cogito, and 'I am therefore I think' is not a recognised statement of any of them. The answer is Where of one cannot speak, there of one must remain silent. The Tractatus ends with the line that what can be said can be said clearly, and that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence.

Answer: C

The doctrine of language-games is associated with the later Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, where he says that the meaning of a word is its use in a form of life and compares the uses of language to games with different rules. Moore and Russell worked on analysis and logical atomism, and William James is the pragmatist. The answer is Wittgenstein. For him the meaning of a word is not an object it names but the way it is used in the activity of which it is part.

Answer: B

The verifiability theory of meaning was introduced by the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, who held that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic or can in principle be verified by experience. Existentialists, phenomenologists and pragmatists have their own concerns and did not make verifiability the criterion of meaning. The answer is Logical Positivists. The criterion was stated in the slogan that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification, and Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic brought it to English readers.

Answer: D

The philosopher who called the Cartesian dualism the 'Doctrine of the Ghost in the Machine' is Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949). He argued that treating the mind as a ghostly thing inside the body is a category mistake. A.J. Ayer was a logical positivist, G.E. Moore defended common sense, and Bertrand Russell was a logician; none of them coined the phrase. The answer is Gilbert Ryle. Ryle's point is that mental words describe dispositions and behaviour and not a hidden inner theatre, so the mind is not a second thing in the body.

Answer: C

The pragmatic theory holds that truth depends upon practical consequences: an idea is true if it works, as William James put it. The correspondence theory says truth is agreement with facts, the coherence theory that it is consistency within a system of beliefs, and the semantic theory, of Tarski, defines truth for a language. The answer is Pragmatic theory. William James said that the true is only the expedient in our way of thinking, which shows the link between truth and consequences.

Answer: A

The Vienna Circle is associated with Logical Positivism. It was a group of philosophers and scientists in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, including Schlick, Carnap and Neurath, who argued that only verifiable statements or logical truths are meaningful. Pragmatism, existentialism and the phenomenological movement belong to other groups of thinkers. The answer is Logical Positivism. Their writings, the Manifesto of 1929 among them, set out a scientific world-view in which metaphysics is rejected as meaningless.