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Question#1 Ancient Greek philosopher credited with creating the subject of logic, and did original work in marine biology....

(C) Aristotle

Aristotle, 384-322, pupil of Plato and founder of the Lyceum.






Question#2 A British empiricist and political philosopher,... the father of liberalism, the epitome of empiricism's reasonableness.
(A) John Locke.

John Locke, 1632-1704, wrote the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in answer to Descartes views, and also wrote two Treatises on Government, where he defended individual liberties and outlined the inalienable rights of all as Life, Liberty, and Property.





Question#3 "Intentionality is the hallmark of all consciousness," wrote this German philosopher of the early 20th Century.

(B) Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl, 1859-1938, set out the basic method of phenomenology in his Logical Investigations, where he aimed to transcend the actual objects and focus on the experience itself.





Question#4 This scholastic philosopher is famous his identificatio of five proofs for the existence of God, though his real contribution is to the development of Catholic theology.

(C) St. Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, 1224-1274, and Italian Dominican, who studied under Albert the Great, taught at the University of Paris, and wrote two "summa": the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae





Question#5 This German philosopher once said "What I understand by "Philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger."

(A) Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, famous for proclaiming that "God is dead," and advocating the emergence of a man of strength and hardness, the Superman (Ubermensch), who will bring about the total revaluation of all morals.





Question#6 Proclaimed as the "Father of modern philosophy," he developed four rules for the discovery of knowledge and once claimed that good sense is the most widely distributed thing among human beings.

(B) Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes, 1596-1650, a french scientist, mathematician, and philosopher, described his new vision as the product of a dream he had on November 10, 1619, convincing him that true knowledge must come from human reason alone. (It is not know who was the mother of modern philosophy.)





Question#7 Greek philosopher who developed the theory that all knowledge is of ideas separate in existence from this world, and is famous for describing ordinary life as like being chained in a cave.

(C) Plato

Plato, 428-354 BC, follower of Socrates, founder of the Academy, the first school of philosophy in Athens. His allegory of the cave appears in his dialogue, The Republic, and he believed that ideas were the true reality, and things were only pale replicas.





Question#8 "Nature," he argued, "has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure"; after his death and at his request, his stuffed body was placed in a glass box at the college he helped found.

(B) Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, an Englishman and first utilitarian, who argued all punishment was evil, yet helped design prisons.





Question#9 This philosopher was heavily influenced by the rationalism of Rene Descartes and argued that God is the only substance in existence, and God and Cosmos are one and the same.

(A) Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza, 1632-77, a dutch lens grinder, tried to demonstrate mathematically how to live a good and moral life in his book Ethics; he was excommunicated by his synagogue for his ideas, and many Christians accused him of atheism.





Question#10 This philosopher believed that the genuine method of metaphysics is the fundamentally the method which Newton brought to science; he once rhapsodized that: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...the starry heavens above and the moral law within."

(C) Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804, wrote his Critique of Pure Reason to discover the true capacities of human thought, and followed that with the Critique of Practical Reason, from which the quote is taken. He famously argued that only appearances (phenomena) are known, the attempt to go beyond appearance to reality (noumena) is unknowable and inevitably leads to paradoxes, fallacies, and actual contradiction.





Question#11 This 4th Century christian convert is famous for his idea that the human will is divided, and infamous for his suggestion that human beings are either for God or against Him.

(B) Augustine

Aurelius Augustine, or St. Augustine, 354-430, was one of the greatest fathers of the Catholic Church. Though everyone seems unusually fixated on his description of his early sinful life, he developed analyses of the nature of moral experience, free will, time and eternity. His most important work was the City of God, where he developed a "philosophy of history," and identified humans as either members of the city of man or the city of God.





Question#12 Another British philosopher, this man was an early researcher in logic and mathematics, and developed a paradox about "the class of all classes that are not members of themselves."

(C) Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell,





Question#13 Arguing that "mind has no sex," this English philosopher concluded that rights are not determined by gender, and that women should have complete personal and economic independence.

(A) Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797, was more reactionary and enlightened than the intellectuals of her day, who referred to her as a "hyena in petticoats" and a "philosophizing serpent." She wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Men," while living in France, later married William Godwin, and died at age 38 giving birth to her daughter, the writer Mary Godwin Shelley.





Question#14 He was probably the most famous philosopher of the 20th Century, though he argued that nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm, and accused many people of hiding the truth from themselves and living a bourgeois life of bad faith.

(B) Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-1980, a french existentialist, who wrote philosophical and literary works, and was involved in political activity. He was concerned with the a philosophy of decision, and wanted to bring the philosopher down into the street. With Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he editted a left-wing journal called Les Temps Modernes.





Question#15 Karl Marx referred this man as the "Prussian Aristotle," he once wrote that "history teaches us that people have never learnt anything from history."

(A) Georg W.F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831, one of the greatest teachers of his time, rejected Kant's metaphysics, arguing that all reality is one, and that the real is rational. He went on to describe a dialectic that he argued determined the whole process of human history and human thought.





Question#16 Thought he is classified as one of the British empiricists, this scotsman set out to create the foundations of a genuine empirical science of human nature, only end up undermining those foundations.

(B) David Hume

David Hume, 1711-1776, was seen as a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment, questioned our knowledge of the rules of nature, especially cause and effect, finally concluding that he was unable to disprove that these ideas are false and fantastic. This was thought to demolish induction as a scientific method.





Question#17 This famous proponent of utilitarianism argued that altruism was as important as self-interest, and once quipped that he would rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

(A) John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, defended the principle of utility, but also modified Bentham's original ideas, moving the standard of goodness towards something more subjective.





Question#18 This nineteenth century thinker was famous for the complaint that philosophers before him have only interpreted the world, when the point is to change it.

(C) Karl Marx

Karl Marx, xxxx-xxxx, was a complex philosopher who was influenced by German idealism, though he claimed to have turned Hegel on his head. He argued that capitalism only alienates people.





Question#19 This Roman stoic described the life of every man as a soldier's service that is long and various.

(A) Epictetus

Epictetus, 50-130 AD, was a freed Roman slave and famous teacher of Stoicism. His Handbook, a distillation of his work The Discourses, was widely admired and read by soldiers in the Roman legions.





Question#20 This french philosopher coined the phrase "noble savage," and described himself as the model of an estranged "modern man," cut off from his true nature.

(C) Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-78, argued for feeling rather than reason as the basis for an approach to theology and politics. His view was that man is naturally good, and institutions make him bad; however he sent all his five children to the Foundling Hospital, refusing to raise any of them himself.