Deck 5: The Sources of Knowledge

Question 1

Personal memory,according to your textbook,is

A) our ability to remember how to do something that we learned in the past.
B) is our ability to remember all the facts that make up our knowledge of the world.
C) our ability to bring into our present consciousness a representation of events that we directly experienced in the past.
D) our ability to bring into our present consciousness a representation of imaginary beings.

Answer 1

C

Question 2

Carried to an extreme Berkeley's thinking can become

A) Rationalism
B) Atheism
C) Solipsism
D) Materialism

Answer 2

C

Question 3

George Berkeley called his position

A) skepticism.
B) rationalism.
C) materialism.
D) immaterialism.

Answer 3

D

Question 4

Who was a Romantic philosopher?

A) Kant
B) Copernicus
C) Hegel
D) Humboldt

Question 5

Who offered a view now termed transcendental idealism?

A) Kant
B) Berkeley
C) Hume
D) Locke

Question 6

What philosopher argued that scientific claims or hypotheses must be capable of being falsified through empirical observations?

A) William Whewell
B) John Stuart Mill
C) Karl Popper
D) Isaac Newton

Question 7

What philosopher argued that hallucinations,dreams and other illusions give rise to errors that we "sublate" when we see that they are contradicted by other things our senses show us in the world around us?

A) G. W. F. Hegel
B) Rene Descartes
C) Shankara
D) John Locke

Question 8

What,according to Shankara,was real?

A) The self
B) The world
C) Ultimate reality
D) Ultimate knowledge

Question 9

Who claimed that the claim that the world must conform to the mind was a kind of Copernican revolution in knowledge?

A) Hume
B) Locke
C) Descartes
D) Kant

Question 10

Descartes argued that human beings are born with innate ideas of the three fundamental kinds of things in the universe:

A) sense perception, ideas and concepts.
B) God, minds and material bodies.
C) understanding, sense perception and material bodies.
D) God, material bodies and properties of material bodies.

Question 11

According to Jainism,the practice of ____ is key to our future liberation.It basically means the avoidance of all aggression,injury,or harm to other living things.

A) ahimsa
B) empiricism
C) rationalism
D) satyagraha

Question 12

Rationalism is the view that

A) All knowledge is acquired through reason
B) No knowledge can be acquired through the senses
C) Reason can arrive at some knowledge
D) Reason can arrive at all knowledge

Question 13

The empricist believes that

A) the only source of genuine knowledge is sense experience.
B) apart from experience, reason is an unreliable and inadequate route to knowledge.
C) there is no evidence of innate ideas within the mind.
D) all of these choices

Question 14

The British empiricists,according to your text,are

A) John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume
B) Plato, Rene Descartes and John Locke
C) Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke and David Hume
D) Plato, Gottfried Leibniz and George Berkeley

Question 15

Descartes' methodological point of departure was

A) Empiricism
B) Rationalism
C) Skepticism
D) Theism

Question 16

Who compared the mind to a blank slate?

A) John Locke
B) Francis Bacon
C) Rene Descartes
D) Thomas Aquinas

Question 17

According to Kant,statements that give us information about the world are

A) Synthetic statements
B) Analytic statements
C) Skeptical statements
D) Agnostic statements

Question 18

What philosopher argues that space and time are structures within our minds?

A) Immanuel Kant
B) David Hume
C) John Locke
D) Gottfried Leibniz

Question 19

Who did not rely on God to save him from skepticism?

A) Descartes
B) Locke
C) Berkeley
D) Hume

Question 20

Innate ideas are ideas that

A) are acquired through experience.
B) based on an individual's cultural traditions.
C) can never be known to be true.
D) the mind possesses from birth.

Question 21

Martin Luther launched the Protestant revolution.

Question 22

Descartes believed that our knowledge of was derived from our senses.

Question 23

Berkeley was an atheist.

Question 24

Locke believed that there was no difference between primary and secondary qualities.

Question 25

Locke was an empiricist.

Question 26

Knowledge that does not depend on sense experience is ____________________ ____________________ knowledge.

Question 27

Empiricism is the view that ____________________ can be obtained only through sense experience.

Question 28

What philosopher argued that the language of each culture contains the basic categories and structures that the people of that culture use to understand and organize their experience?

A) Immanuel Kant
B) Wilhelm von Humboldt
C) Francis Bacon
D) John Stuart Mill

Question 29

Anne Conway was an empiricist.

Question 30

Shankara developed the idea of "sublation".

Question 31

The critical realists rejected Locke's epistemology.

Question 32

Leibniz held that innate ideas were tendencies.

Question 33

____________________ refers to the processes of seeing,hearing,smelling,touching,and tasting.

Question 34

Berkeley was an empiricist.

Question 35

"All triangles have three sides" is an example of a(n)____ statement.

A) analytic
B) synthetic
C) a posteriori
D) analytic a posteriori

Question 36

According to Locke's analysis,a primary quality of an apple might be

A) its red color.
B) its roundness.
C) its smoothness.
D) its smell.

Question 37

In Hume's philosophy,all the contents of our mind can be reduced to those given by the senses and experience.He calls these

A) perceptions.
B) images.
C) sense data.
D) brain waves.

Question 38

Descartes' methodological departure is an attitude of ____________________ and skepticism.

Question 39

The argument,"The three Toyota Corollas I've owned turned out to be pretty reliable,so I think all Toyota Corollas are going to be reliable." is an example of a(n)

A) deductive generalization.
B) inductive generalization.
C) genetic fallacy.
D) abusive ad hominem.

Question 40

____________________ ____________________ are ideas that are present in the mind from birth.

Question 41

In what way does Kant's account of knowledge combine elements of both rationalism and empiricism? Do you believe that Kant is successful in overcoming Humean skepticism? Explain your answer.

Question 42

Critical realists hold that only ____________________ ____________________ is present in the consciousness of objects.

Question 43

____________________ is the view that only I exist and that everything else is just a creation of my subjective consciousness.

Question 44

____________________ claimed that both rationalists and empiricists take partial notions for real parts.

Question 45

In what way does Descartes' rationalism require the existence of a benevolent God? Do you believe that Descartes has successfully established the existence of this God,or do you think that his arguments for God's existence are circular,resting as they do on his "clear and distinct" perceptions whose veridicality seems to be given by God's benevolence?

Question 46

Are there any differences between Descartes' skepticism and that of Hume? If you think that there are,outline them,and explain how they might have contributed to the different epistemological views of these two philosophers.If you think that there are no such differences between the skepticisms of these two philosophers,provide an explanation of how their respective epistemologies are so different from each other.

Question 47

Do you agree with Hume that we cannot know whether our ideas about reality are accurate? What assumption does Hume make when he makes this claim? Do you believe that this assumption is justified?

Question 48

How might the event described in Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" be used to undermine empiricism?

Question 49

____________________ developed the view that is now known as transcendental idealism.

Question 50

Locke held that ____________________ qualities are subjective.