Quizbowl Philosophy

Quizbowl Clues

This thinker claimed that lying to a man knocking on your door was not moral even if you knew he was a murderer looking for a potential victim.

Kant

Two “noble lies” discussed in this work are the “Myth of Metals” and a story about a man who witnesses divine judgement before coming back from the dead

The Republic

In one book, this philosopher said that even after The Buddha’s death, his shadow was still found on the walls of caves.

Nietzsche

A. J. Ayer analyzed this concept with the example of a serial lottery winner in his book titled for The Problem of this concept

Knowledge

Theatetus is a Platonic dialogue about this concept, whose definition causes "cow in the field" problems.

knowledge

Who coined the quote “knowledge is power”

Francis Bacon

justified true belief (aka)

knowledge

Derrick Bell promoted “critical” theories of this concept

race

One proponent of a “neo-” form of this school of thought rejects the correspondence theory of truth in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

pragmatism

This thinker outlined an encounter between self-conscious beings leading to a master-slave relationship

Hegel

This philosopher contended that we attain self-consciousness through mutual recognition in another work that culminated with a chapter on (*) “Absolute Knowledge”.

Hegel

This philosopher attacked “infidel” mathematicians in a book that ridicules calculus’s derivatives as (*) “ghosts of departed quantities.”

George Berkeley

This philosopher attacked the claim that a certain group should have a capability for refined emotion called "sensibility"

Mary Wollstonecraft

This philosopher's suggestion that an early childhood obsessed with "beauty" may transform the mind into a prison

Mary Wollstonecraft

This thinker divided twelve categories under headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality in one work that aims to show objects conform to our cognition.

Kant

A major idea in this man’s philosophy is the notion of distinction between phenomena and noumena

Kant

One of this man’s works uses the analogy of a layer of bad oranges at the top of a crate of oranges to explain why a scientific person would see injustice in one place as an indication of injustice elsewhere

Bertrand Russell

This man was fired from his professorship at the City College of New York for a book challenging Victorian notions of contraception and sex, Marriage and Morals.

Bertrand Russell

The Boeing 747 gambit is an argument against this position

the existence of god

name these short prose writings by Michel de Montaigne, who coined their French name meaning “attempt.”

the Essays

One character in this work jokingly suggests he should get free meals forever from the public dining hall for his service.

The Apology of Socrates

For 10 points, name this Platonic dialogue in which Socrates defends himself during his trial in Athens.

The Apology of Socrates

For 10 points, name this author of Critique of Dialectical Reason and Being and Nothingness

Sartre

The belief that there are two types of statements, those about ideas and those about the world, is known as this man’s fork.

Hume

This man’s guillotine is the concept that one cannot draw conclusions about what should be based on what there is, an idea he called the (*) is-ought distinction

Hume

In another work, this philosopher suggests that an entity’s substance is the subject from which it is predicated, and this philosopher claims that happiness arises not from virtue alone but from virtuous activity.

Aristotle

Simone Weil uses coming out of Plato’s cave as a metaphor for the “renunciation” of this concept.

time

name this spiritual autobiography of Augustine of Hippo.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine

For 10 points, name this UC-Berkeley feminist thinker who wrote Undoing Gender and Gender Trouble. Report Question

Judith Butler

According to this thinker, things that endure long enough to be experienced have “worldliness.” This thinker called the irreducible differences between humans “plurality” in a book that claims that all actions are rooted in the “new beginning inherent at birth,” natality

Hannah Arendt

In another book, this thinker describes how meekness became a Christian virtue, as well as the (*) master and slave form of the title concept, in his On the Genealogy of Morals.

Nietzsche

This thinker’s best-known work groups the study of geography with history, arguing that their significance comes from giving background and context to primary human activities

John Dewey

One philosopher from this country wrote a book based on his masters thesis on Husserl’s phenomenology, Speech and Phenomenon

France

thinker of this nationality wrote a book that states that the one “truly serious philosophical problem” is suicide in its chapter on “Absurd Reasoning”.

France

One thinker best known for positing this idea asked "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?,"

utilitarianism

This thinker wrote that all people are in sin due to (*) despair, and said some men lose everything but believe they will get it all back "by virtue of the absurd."

Kierkegaard

This man wrote of the Symparanekromenoi, who hear a lecture on ancient tragedy. He said that "The Self is a relation which relates itself to its own self."

Kierkegaard

In one work, this thinker argued that the only people who should seek truth are those who “love” truth in itself.

Locke

This author criticized the Patriarcha of Robert Filmer for supporting the (*) divine right of kings in a work which also claims that a monarch can be overthrown if he does not protect his people.

Locke

A thinker from this school asked whether an individual retains its identity through a change in its material substance in the “growing argument” and compared free will to pushing a cylinder down an incline.

Stoicism

One of this philosopher’s works contains books on the doctrines of being, essence, and notion

Hegel

He claimed that the purpose of art was to make good ideas stick and wrote that “art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.”

Hegel

A main idea of his work is that every era has wisdom to be gained from studying it and that parts of ourselves can be found in the past.

Hegel

A massive book from this movement argues that “practico-inert” reality is upheld by “seriality,” an idea that Iris Marion Young adapted to describe gender.

existentialism

A member of this movement used the example of a woman on a bad date to illustrate how denying one’s own “facticity” and “transcendence” results in (*) “self-deception.”

existentialism

In one work, this thinker defines the title concept as a conscious representation of an object.

Kant

This work considers sin to be passed through all souls due to Adam, akin to the concept of original sin.

Summa Theologica

This work’s author was inspired by the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo while detailing the conditions of a “just war.”

Summa Theologica

He and his close friend David Hume taught at Edinburgh.

Adam Smith

This book asserts "a true idea must correspond with its ideate" and "everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else" in outlining seven guiding propositions.

Ethics

One person associated with an early form of this movement used pseudonyms such as Judge (*) William, and described the dizziness of freedom in The Concept of Anxiety.

Existentialism

This philosopher countered the notion that ideas resemble material objects with his "likeness principle."

Berkeley

One philosophical school originating in this country promoted “impartial care,” while another taught that the selfishness of humans should be taken advantage of by rulers.

China

William James expressed this concept as “the expedient in our ways of thinking,” while Jurgen Habermas advocates its “consensus” form.

Truth

This thinker argued that the title concept should be extended to everyone except Catholics and atheists in A Letter Concerning Toleration.

Locke

This thinker is the main opponent criticized by George Berkeley in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.

Locke

Georg Hegel's teaching was compiled into "Lectures on the Philosophy" of this academic subject.

history

People known for writing in this academic field include Edward Gibbon, Stephen Ambrose, and David McCullough.

history

In one book, this thinker argued that analysis of a term could not be both informative and correct, an idea which was later dubbed the "paradox of analysis."

GE Moore

Ludwig Wittgenstein argued in the book On Certainty that one of this thinker's arguments had displaced the phrase "I know."

GE Moore

This philosopher asks if a limited vocabulary for particular occupation, such as a builder, can be considered a form of primitive language for a tribe of builders.

Wittgenstein

He proposes that people connect ideas through (*) family resemblances in one work, while his most famous work enumerates seven propositions including, “The world is everything that is the case” and “What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence”.

Wittgenstein

This thinker dedicated a work to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia that analyzes the Passions of the Soul.

Descartes

An ontological argument proposed by this thinker argues that the concept of a mountain cannot be separated from the concept of a valley.

Descartes

For 10 points, name these thought experiments “proving” the impossibility of motion, including “Achilles and the Tortoise.”

Zeno’s Paradoxes

This is the first word in the title of a book that claims all propositions are analytic, strongly verifiable, or weakly verifiable.

language (Language, Truth, and Logic by AJ Ayer)

A namesake hypothesis by Jerry Fodor posits that mental representations have the structure of these systems.

language

This concept is the subject of a book that cites Freud’s (#) analysis of the concept of cathexis when people mourn to build a theory of this concept.

gender

This school included disposition and relative disposition (#) among its categories of being, and it classified primary emotions into distress, pleasure, appetite, and fear.

stoicism

In The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell described Hitler as “an outcome of” this man.

Rousseau

One theory of his posits that monarchies should develop in warmer nations, and a discourse of his describes the first (#) man to enclose a plot of land and declare “This is mine

Rousseau

This man claimed that society progresses via the "cunning of reason" and he organized his works around categorial triads.

Hegel

This thinker also posited that free will (#) can only exist in a society with property rights and contracts.

Hegel

One of this man’s works outlines thirty-eight strategies for winning arguments; he included the introduction to that essay, The Art of Being Right

Schopenhauer

His major work, written after his misogynistic essay “On Women,” claimed that the undifferentiated noumenon drives nature,

Schopenhauer

he analogy ‘palace’ of this thing was developed out of a story about Simonides of Ceos and a collapsing banquet hall.

memory

This philosophy uses felicific calculus to determine the moral worth of an action.

Utilitarianism

That algorithm considers factors such as the purity and intensity of pleasure, and was formulated by the English author of The Principles of Morals and Legislation

Utilitarianism

A political philosopher from this country developed the idea of a (*) “veil of ignorance”

USA

They are often notated by a lightning bolt, a pair of swords, or an upside-down (*) T

contradiction

Boethius claims that this state can be reached regardless of fortune, while Aristotle says (*) virtue is required to achieve it.

happiness

A dialogue from a school most often titled for these things concerns the proposition “white horses are not horses”

names

This philosopher noted that the exclusion of lepers eventually transitioned to other exclusion rituals in an analogy of a ship of fools.

Foucault

His genealogy of knowledge is a direct allusion to Nietzsche's genealogy of morality.

Foucault

In an allegory about Chinese philosophies, this many people taste vinegar and all have different reactions.

3

For 10 points, name this Russian-American philosopher who wrote about her philosophy of Objectivism in the novel Atlas Shrugged.

Ayn Rand

He attacked freethinkers such as Bernard Mandeville in a set of dialogues named for the title "minute philosopher."

Berkeley

This philosopher's "master argument" claims that mind-independent objects do not (#) exist since one cannot conceive them

berkeley

The founder of this school of thought broke his toe and died outside of the “Painted Porch,” which was where Chrysippus taught that wisdom descends from natural law.

Stoicism

Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus [thee-uh-TEE-tuss] is often regarded as the origin of a popular definition of this concept

knowledge

John Locke criticized the rationalist theory of this concept in a work that also includes the idea that the mind at birth is a (*) blank slate.

knowledge

One of this thinker's late works included the chapters "Why I am so Wise" and "Why I write such Excellent Books"

Nietzsche

The arguments from contingency and degree are among the “Five Ways” concerning this statement by (*) Thomas Aquinas

the existence of god

In political thought, this man contributed a comparison of socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism, three of the titular Roads to Freedom.

Russell

he critiqued organized religion and as a whole, writing that “No one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and claim to believe in God” in an attempt to explain Why I Am Not a (*) Christian

Russell

This thinker used the analogy of removing the rotten apples from a basket of good ones to advocate removing all preconceived notions and only adopting the good ones.

Descartes

In this school of thought, the universe is equivalent to nature which in turn is split into two classes: the active and the passive.

Stoicism

The (*) pineal gland was claimed to be the principal seat of the soul by the formulator of the Cartesian variety of this stance that is contrasted with monism.

dualism

In his article “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel used qualia’s separation from observable phenomena as an argument for this belief. That philosophical zombies have no qualia, but seem plausible is another argument for this position.

dualism

The founder of Newnham College was a member of this philosophical school and wrote The Methods of Ethics, which argued that intuition cannot resolve conflicts between values

utilitarianism