HZT4U Exam Review

Meaning of the term Philosophy

The love of wisdom

• Philo = love

• Sophie = wisdom

What is Autonomy

• Being able to form your own opinions and perspectives on the world

• Essentially the end goal of philosophy

What is Myth of the Cave & where is it from?

• Plato

• Prisoners are chained to face the wall of a cave, only seeing shadows of the real world, and assume the cave is the whole world

• A prisoner breaks free and sees the real world, and it’s his job to try and urge other prisoners to break free

• The prisoner who breaks free are philosophers who are enlightened and explore true reality

• The world we live in is our cave

• A philosopher can now only share his findings to get others to become enlightened

Who were the pre-Socratics?

Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno

What dialogue did Plato write about Socrates, what was happening?

• The Crito

  • Crito wants Socrates to escape, but Socrates chooses to obey the law

  • He is born under the law, raised by the law and chose to stay and agree with the law, so why should he not follow the law now?

  • Despite the law seeming unfair, if you agree to it then you should follow it

What are Aristotle’s causes & knowledge of forms?

• Material Cause – What it’s made of (e.g., wood for a table).

• Formal Cause – Its structure or design (e.g., the shape of the table).

• Efficient Cause – The agent or process that brings it into being (e.g., the carpenter).

• Final Cause – Its purpose or function (e.g., to be used for dining).

• Rejected the idea of separate, perfect Forms existing beyond the physical world

• Forms are intrinsic to objects and can only be understood by studying things in the physical world

What are Philosopher kings?

• Leaders in The Republic

• Only the smart philosophers could rule as kings

• If you rule, you cannot own

What are Plato’s parts of the soul? Which should rule over?

• Reason - Rational part for truth and logical thinking

• Spirit - Emotions

• Appetite - Desires for physical pleasures

• Reason should rule over appetite

What is John Locke’s idea on memory?

• Memory is central to personal identity—what makes you the same person over time is your ability to remember past experiences

What is the Existential view of human nature?

• Sartre believes that it is our choice how we respond to determining tendencies.

• I am my choices. I cannot not choose. If I do not choose, that is still a choice. 

• Each of us is responsible for everything we do and our acts define us.

What is the Feminist objection to the rationalist view of human nature?

• Emphasis on reason devalues traditionally feminine traits like emotion, care, and relationships, reinforcing gendered hierarchies

What is St. Thomas Aquinas’ view of human nature?

• Humans are a union of body and soul, with the rational soul enabling intellect, free will, and the pursuit of truth and goodness.

• Human nature is naturally inclined toward good and seeks ultimate fulfillment in union with God.

• Free will allows moral responsibility, guided by reason and divine law

What is St. Augustine’s view of reality?

• Reality is a continuum with humans in the middle

• Evil is the absence of good

• Evil occurs when something good loses part of its goodness (e.g., sickness as a lack of health)

• Only God is perfectly and completely good; creation, being finite and limited, necessarily lacks complete goodness

• This limited goodness allows for the possibility of evil, but God had good reasons for creating such a finite universe

What does Plato say about true knowledge?

• Comes from understanding perfect, unchanging ideas called Forms, not the physical world

• Gained through reason, not through our senses

What is the Turing test?

• Alan Turing

• Setup: A human evaluator interacts with a machine and a human through text-based communication

• Goal: The evaluator tries to determine which participant is the machine and which is the human

• Passing the Test: If the evaluator cannot reliably distinguish the machine from the human, the machine passes the test

What is Empiricism?

• Knowledge comes from experience

• A POSTERIORI

  • ‘Depends on/after experience’

• The mind contains nothing except what experience has put there

What is Rationalism?

• You can gain some knowledge by reason without needing perception (experience)

• Your senses can deceive you, so it’s not the best indicator of knowledge

• A PRIORI

  • ‘Prior to experience’ - gaining knowledge logically prior to experiencing it

  • Ex. Mathematicians don’t need to observe the world to know their theorems are true

What is Materialism?

• The fundamental substance of reality is matter, and that all phenomena, including consciousness, thought, and social structures, can be explained in terms of material processes.

• Posits that everything that exists is either composed of matter or arises from the interactions of matter.

What is Idealism?

• In metaphysics, reality is ultimately nonmatter. In epistemology, the position that all we know are our ideas

• If we push our investigation of reality far enough, we end up with only a mental world, a world of ideas – not matter

Who were Materialists?

• Thomas Hobbes

• Baruch Spinoza

• Pierre Laplace

• Paul-Henri d'Holbach

• Karl Marx

Who were Rationalists?

• Plato

• St. Augustine

• Anne Conway

• Gottfried Leibniz

• Georg Hegel

• Rene Descartes

What is Intentionality?

• The fact that you can conceptualize things that don’t exist

  • Ex. You can imagine a unicorn

What is George Berkeley’s big idea?

• “Esse est percipi” - “To be is to be perceived”

• All qualities could be subjective

• Only the mind and their ideas exist

• Something can only exist if it is being perceived, otherwise how would anyone know if it actually exists?

What is Anthropomorphism?

• attributing human qualities to nonhuman things, especially to God

What is Subjective Time? Who endorsed it?

• Focuses on how time is experienced and perceived by individuals, emphasizing its psychological and phenomenological aspects

• Henri Bergson

What is Epistemology?

• The study of knowledge

What is A Priori?

• ‘Prior to experience’ - gaining knowledge logically prior to experiencing it

• Ex. Mathematicians don’t need to observe the world to know their theorems are true

• Links with rationalism

What is A Posteriori?

• ‘Depends on/after experience’

• The mind contains nothing except what experience has put there

• Links with empiricism

What is Blank slate, and who argued this?

• John Locke

• “Tabula Rasa” - Everybody is born 100% with nothing in their mind

What was Hume & Locke’s relation?

• Hume pushed his empiricism to a thorough skepticism

• Skepticism is a denial of the possibility that we can have a certain knowledge about much of what we all take for granted

What is Wax Meditation?

• Even though a candle melts and is just wax, you still understand that it was a candle

• The mind alone understands the essence of the wax, not through senses but through intellectual intuition

• Knowledge comes from reason and intellect, not sensory experience (rationalism)

What are Innate Ideas?

• There are ideas that have always been present in our mind

  • Ex. the basic principles of motion (something moving can't stop suddenly but has to stop gradually), or that if wax melts it's still the same entity and not something entirely different

• At birth, these ideas are hidden away from the infant though they are present in the mind before birth

• As the person grows, these ideas slowly emerge in the person’s awareness

What are primary qualities?

• Qualities that exist independent of a perceiver. ex. size, position, shape (exists even if no one is observing)

What are secondary qualities?

• Qualities that are perceiver dependent. ex. color, sounds, texture, movement (it is in our minds that experience it)

What is the Noumenal world?

• The world as it might really be apart from our mind

• We’ll never know what this world is really like

  • Never know if the world has objects—maybe they are just fields or force. We may never know if things happen by chance (there is no cause and effect).

What is the Phenomenal world?

• The world constructed by the our minds, the only world we will ever know.

• Here our sensations are organized by our minds. In this world, there are objects and these objects are in causal relationships (this is done by the mind)

What is Transcendental Idealism?

• Kant

• The form of our knowledge of reality derives from reason but its content comes from the senses

What is Cogito Ergo Sum?

• ‘I think therefore I am’

• Rene Descartes

What is Categorical Imperative?

• You should act with reason and apply maxims as universal law to decide if it is moral

  • Can everyone do it? Do I want to live in a world where everyone to do it?

• Everybody is a means in and of themselves, not a means to an end, they can make their own free choices and decisions

  • Ex. you pretend to become friends with someone smart to improve your grade. Hiding true motives is also immoral as you as using someone else for their means to an end

• Immanuel Kant

What is Absolutism?

• Universal rules that apply to everyone

  • Ex. It’s never okay to steal, no matter the circumstance

• Problems:

  • The consequences of an action or the circumstances surrounding an action need to be considered

  • Might ignore diversity and tradition

What is Relativism?

• Moral rules are the product of different cultures and different periods of history

• Moral decisions depend on the situation

  • Ex. It’s not okay to steal, but if you need to steal medicine to save someone’s life it’s more okay

• Problems:

  • How can something be wrong and right at the same time?

  • Morality is more than just the agreement of majority

What is the Divine Command Theory?

• The belief that things are right because God commands them to be

Who is Jeremy Bentham and what is he known for?

• Follows act utilitarianism

• Hedonic Calculus

  • You can objectively calculate the concept of happiness

What are the Consequentialist theories?

• Utilitarianism

• Egoism

• Hedonism

What are the Non-Consequentialist theories?

• Deontology (Kant, Ross)

• Agent’s Virtue (Aristotle)

What is Egoism?

• Always acting in such a way that your actions promote your best long-term interest

• It’s not just whatever we want (immediate interest), but what we SHOULD do for our long term interest

• Seeking “the good,” not with pleasure, but with criteria such as, knowledge, power or rational self-interest

• Ex. someone invites you to a fun party, but you have to study for a test the next day. Even though you might enjoy the party, studying for the test and doing good on it is better in the long term

What are the problems with Egoism?

• Inconsistent - what’s good for me is not always what’s good for you

• Cannot be one big rule for everyone

• Egoists only benefit when the people around them don’t realize they’re only acting for themselves

What is Hedonism?

• Only pleasure has intrinsic value and in worth having for its own sake

• Actions are morally right if they increase pleasure and reduce pain, focusing on personal or collective well-being

What are the two types of Utilitarianism?

• Act Utilitarianism

• Rule Utilitarianism

What is Act Utilitarianism?

• You act in a way that produces the most happiness for the most people

• You can break the rules in order to do this

• Ex. We can cut up one person to save 5 more people (better because it saves more lives)

What is Rule Utilitarianism?

• Follow the rules that produces the most happiness for the most people

• Breaking the rules is not good

• Ex. We can’t cut up and kill someone just because it saves others (having a society that allows killing innocents to help others makes a more fearful society and does not create happiness)

What are the problems with Utilitarianism?

• Can’t always take into account all the possible situations

• Minorities who get sacrificed for the majority

• People might not make decisions because it’s right for them, but could be against their morals because they feel obligated to have other people agree with them

• Some people lose rights in order for others to have a better outcome

• Where is the justice / what is justice

What is Deontology?

• Emphasizes following rules, duties, or principles to determine moral actions, regardless of the consequences.

• Actions are morally right if they align with universal moral rules or duties, such as honesty or justice

• Immanuel Kant.

What are Virtue Ethics?

• Aristotle

• Make moral decisions that develop good character traits

• Golden Mean

  • Too much of a trait is bad, so you need to find the median

  • Median between foolhardiness and cowardice is courage

  • Median between vanity and self-abasement is self-respect

What is Heteronomy?

• Opposite of Autonomy

• Handing over your own decision-making or morality to something else

• Kant says DO NOT do it. He does not believe you should do things just because a divine command says so

What is Natural Law?

• The belief that human beings possess intrinsic values that govern their reasoning and behavior

What is Libertarianism?

• People are free to choose to act other than they do

• Our own experience suggests we make free choices, WE ARE NOT DETERMINED

• Freedom makes responsibility and deciding reason over emotions much more meaningful

What is Hard Determinism?

• Every event has a cause or many causes and free will is nonsense

• The world is governed by laws of cause and effect

• We only claim to have free will because we do not know all the causes of our actions, and are ignorant of the laws that govern us

What is Soft Determinism?

• Attempts to reconcile freedom and responsibility with determinism

• Everything is caused, but we still have free will

• We may be wholly determined by genes, background, environment, feelings etc., but we can still operate as if we were free agents

What is Popper’s theory of falsification?

• Scientific theories are only probable

• You have to actively try and disprove a theory, not look for evidence in favor of the theory

What is Kuhn’s problem with Popper?

• Popper ignores the fact that scientists work in communities

• Even though Popper states that scientists are continually trying to disprove their theories, it doesn’t seem to happen often

What is Mill’s scientific method?

1. Accumulation of particular observations-Collection of as many facts as possible concerning topic being investigated

2. Generalization from the particular observation - Proceeds by inferring general laws from the accumulated particular facts

3. Repeated confirmation - Continue to accumulate more particular facts to see if generalizations hold true.  More instances = more confirmation

What is Inductionism and who founded it?

• Bacon

• The relationship between scientific theories and sensory observations

How does MLK Jr. define just and unjust laws?

• Certain laws may be followed, but some do not, because the laws themselves are unjust

• Laws that do not satisfy moral law are not just at all, so it should not be followed

• Ex. Segregation hurts humans and dehumanizes them, which goes against moral law and is sinful, therefore is an unjust law and should not be followed

What is Biocentrism?

• Encompasses all environmental ethics that extend the status of moral object from human beings to all living things in nature

• All species have inherent value, and that humans are not "superior" to other species in a moral or ethical sense

What is Extensionism?

• Moral standing ought to be extended to things (animals, plants, species, the earth) that traditionally are not thought of as having moral standing.

What is Ecocentrism?

• Including environmental systems as wholes, and their abiotic aspects

• Goes beyond zoocentrism (seeing value in animals) on account of explicitly including flora and the ecological contexts for organisms

What is Virtue Environmental Ethics?

• Tries to figure out how people might act in a way that is virtuous toward the earth

• Hopes to stop things like environmental degradation and have a deep respect for the natural world

Who has the Theory of Forms?

Plato

Who talks about The Unexamined Life and what is the full quote?

• Socrates

• “The unexamined life if not worth living”

What are The Four Idols and who made them?

• Francis Bacon

1. Tribe: Errors inherent to human nature, such as bias, wishful thinking, and the tendency to see patterns where none exist.

2. Cave: Personal biases shaped by an individual's upbringing, experiences, or preferences, distorting their view of reality.

3. Marketplace: Miscommunication or confusion caused by the misuse or ambiguity of language.

4. Theatre: Blind acceptance of established beliefs, ideologies, or traditions without questioning their validity.

What is Eudaimonia and who talks about it?

• Aristotle

• "flourishing" or "living well," achieved through living a virtuous life in accordance with reason

What does Existence precedes essence mean and who said it?

• Jean-Paul Sartre

• Humans first exist without any predetermined purpose or essence, and they create their essence (identity, purpose, and values) through their choices and actions

What are the Divisions of Philosophy?

Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics

What are Scientific Paradigms and who talks about it?

• Thomas Kuhn

• A set of shared ideas, methods, and beliefs that guide how scientists understand and study the world

• Paradigm shifts happen when new discoveries challenge the old ideas, leading to big changes in science

  • Ex. the shift from believing the Earth is flat to it being round

What is Anarchic Thinking?

• Gail Stenstad

• Rejects rigid rules, structures, and traditional authority, and encourages thinking outside conventional frameworks

• Focuses on flexibility, diversity of thought, and rejecting "one right way" of doing things

What are Impressions & Ideas and who talks about it?

• David Hume

• Impressions: direct experiences (like seeing, hearing, or feeling something)

• Ideas: weaker copies of those impressions, like thoughts or memories about what we experienced

• Hume believed all knowledge comes from impressions, and ideas are based on them

How many worlds did Plato believe in?

• 2 worlds:

  • World of Forms

  • Physical world

What is Data Colonisation?

• Corporations or governments collect and control large amounts of personal and cultural data from individuals, often without their informed consent

• End-user license agreements or the Terms of Service is us being asked to agree to something we don’t understand

Who says “You can’t step in the same river twice”?

• Heraclitus

What is the Socratic Method?

• Asking Questions: Socrates asked open-ended questions to challenge beliefs and stimulate thinking.

• Critical Thinking: His aim was to help people think more deeply and recognize contradictions in their ideas.

• Self-Discovery: Instead of giving answers, he guided people to discover truths themselves.

What is the trolley problem?

• Ethical dilemma / thought experiment

• A runaway trolly is going down a track towards 5 people tied down

• You can divert the track to save them, but it kills one person tied on the other track

• What do you do?

What does Aristotle say is the end goal of all humans?

• Eudaimonia / flourishing

• Maximized well-being, happiness, and fulfillment

  • Not simply feeling happy in the moment

What is Thales’s view of reality?

• Everything is made out of water

What is the Chinese Room Experiment and who thought of it?

• John Searle

• A thought experiment by challenge the idea that computers can truly "understand" or have minds

• Scenario: A person who doesn’t understand Chinese follows rules to manipulate Chinese symbols, producing correct responses without any comprehension

• Argument: Computers process symbols (syntax) but lack understanding or meaning (semantics), so they can’t truly "think."

• Critique of Strong AI: Simulating human behavior or passing the Turing Test doesn’t mean genuine understanding

What was Libet’s experiment?

• Studied the timing of brain activity, conscious decisions, and physical actions by measuring brain waves when a person clicked a button.

• Brain activity begins before a person becomes consciously aware of their decision to act

• “Free won’t” - While we may not initiate actions consciously, we have the power to stop them

What is Hume’s view of the self?

• There is no enduring self

• We are constantly changing

What is Kant’s view of human nature?

• We are capable of knowledge, and have the ability to act on it

  • No need for depending on anyone else, even religion or some divine intervention

• We are human because of our reason – we act like all animals, but unlike animals, we give reasons for our actions

What is Marx’s view of human nature?

• The way we view things – morality, social construct, need fulfillment — is shaped by our history

What is Nietzsche’s view of human nature?

• Our awareness gives meaning to humanity

• Psychological observations: the ability to see things from an analytical perspective

• We control the narrative of our existence

How do you have a good argument?

1. Be wary of how we have built in tendencies, due to our nature, to interpret things in a biased manner

2. Strive for open-mindedness in overcoming personal habits of thought:

   • Be prepared to let go of cherished and/or long –held ideas/ideals

3. Examine carefully and critically the meaning of words/terms (semantics)

4. Look critically at received, traditional, or well-established systems of thought by examining the underlying rationale of these systems.