Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Quiz Apr7

1. Kant said we can't know the _______ world of things-in-themselves, but we can know the _______ world of appearances as presented by our mental "spectacles." LH 111-12

2. If (and only if) you help an injured stranger because _________ (it's your duty, you feel sorry for him), Kant says, you've acted morally. LH 115-16



3. Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism affirms the Greatest ______ Principle, defining _____ as pleasure and the absence of pain. LH) 122


4. According to Nigel, the best way for a Benthamite to maximize pleasure and minimize pain would be to plug into what? OR, who was Bentham's famous pupil and critic, who said maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is not all there is to the good life? LH 125

5. What Irish-born critic of the French Revolution said it was a sham, proclaiming equality as a pretext for redistributing property? PB 129

6. According to Moore, where does Kant rank among philosophers? PB 142

BONUS: Who said Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable"?

BONUS+: Who did Kant say "awakened from his dogmatic slumbers”?

BONUS++: Who had a walking stick he called "Dapple" and a teapot called "Dick"?

DQ:

1. Do you think it would be possible to communicate with an intelligent alien, whose mental "spectacles" might not perceive space, time, cause-and-effect, etc., as we do? How? Or do you think such categories must be universal among all forms of intelligence? Why?

2. Have you ever gone out of your way to help a stranger? Did you do so because you thought it was the right thing to do, because you felt sympathetic for the stranger's plight, or for some other reason? Do you agree with Kant that dutifulness alone is morally relevant to such acts?

3. Do you agree that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain are the main (if not exclusive) criteria of ethical action? Why or why not?

4. There's a (false) old saying that he or she who finishes the game with the most toys wins. What about finishing with the most blissful experiences? Would that make you a winner? Would a lifetime of blissful experiences, "real" or not, be tempting to you?

5. What's so funny about liberty, equality, and fraternity? (An Elvis Costello question) 
OR, Is redistributivist activism a pretext, or a legitimate political program?

6. Who, in your opinion at this stage of your philosophical education, is #1 (in terms of insight, influence, wit and charm or whatever)?




“Dare to think!” 

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” 

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” 

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” 

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” 

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.” 



The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? 



“Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.” 

“No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.” 

“What is the source of this premature anxiety to establish fundamental laws? It is the old conceit of being wiser than all posterity—wiser than those who will have had more experience,—the old desire of ruling over posterity—the old recipe for enabling the dead to chain down the living.”

“The quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.”  


3 comments:

  1. H01
    FQ:(T/F) Kant believed the human mind acted as a filter through which we see the world. (LH 110)
    FQ: (T/F) Kant had peripatetic tendencies. (LH 111)
    FQ: In Kant's philosophical language, synthetic is the opposite of ________. (LH 112)
    FQ: Kant believed having emotions is largely a matter of ______. (LH 115)
    FQ: Bentham called his memorialized body an _____-______. (LH 121)
    FQ: The _______ _______ was the name Bentham gave to his method for calculating happiness. (LH 123)

    ReplyDelete
  2. DQ do you think that when you are sad, particularly for no express reason, you should try to do something that makes you happy and replace your sadness or learn to think you way out?

    ReplyDelete
  3. DQ Kant talks about how our emotions shouldn't be trusted in morality? Do you think that they can be trusted?

    ReplyDelete

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