Crap Phil 388

Front 1

What is 'aperion' and who advocated it and for what?

Back 1

aperion=boundless, spatiotemporally infinite, neutral
Anaximader identified it as the arche

Front 2

What is the argument that arche is aperion and who advocated it?

Back 2

Anaximader argued that arche was aperion or 'boundless.' He thouht: (1) arche had to be inexaustible and so spatiotemporally infinite and (2) it had to be neutral otherwise one of the opposites will come to predominate over the other

Front 3

who thought that arche was air?

Back 3

Anaximenes

Front 4

What is Anaximander's argument for the stability of the earth? Explain his argument briefly and the assumptions upon which it rests.

Back 4

Assuming that the earth is at the center of the universe and as such is surrounded by equal opposing forces then it will be no more inclined to move one direction or another. It is either the case that the earth moves equally in both directions or that it does not move. But nothing can move in two directions at once therefore it does not move.

Front 5

What is Protagoras' "Great Myth" and what is it meant to show? Recount the plot briefly and explain how it makes its point.

Back 5

Way back when there were only Gods and it was time to create human beings, Epimetheus was put in charge of distributing natural gifts among the animals but accidently neglected humans. Prometheus thus stole fire for them and they were thusly preserved. Eventually humans gathered together into communities, but then they began to inflict evil on each other. So Zeus had Hermes distribute justice and virtue to EVERY human being equally.

The point of the first part of the myth is that our natural gifts are not sufficient to sustain us within communities. The second part shows that we can and need to obtain instruction in justice from others via a culture or society.

Front 6

What is Epicurus attitude towards sex? Explain how he evaluates it on ethical principles.

Back 6

Epicurus was an explicit hedonist and as such understands pleasures such as sex and food etc. to be the good. He claims, however, that sex, as a bodily(kinetic) pleasure, is lower ranked than those of the mental (katastematic) pleasures. While it is beneficial insofar as it brings pleasure, what Epicurus and his followers are concerned with is how that pleasure fits in with one's overall life. It is fundamentally Eudaimonia which Epicurus is after, and pleasure is what he sees as the only means to that.

Front 7

In NE, Aristotle offers his own view of pleasure. Explain briefly what it is and it's relationship to eudaimonia

Back 7

He thinks that pleasure, to pleasure, is that derived from an activity. He thinks that the form of pleasure is at any moment complete for there is no pleasure who will be complete by its having lasted longer. The feeling of pleasure accross time seems to be the same feeling from one moment to the next. So there is no moment at which pleasure comes into being. Rather pleasure supervenes upon an activity--the pleasure ceases when the activity ceases.
Each animal has an activity which is proper to it that is grounded in its function. So food is pleasenter to asses than is gold. To live in accordance with the activity proper to human beings is to live eudaimonically.

Front 8

We have distinguished three senses of the verb 'to be.' Explain the distinction and briefly describe one case where it leads to significantly different interpretations.

Back 8

1. Existential use - either a exists or there are no as e.g. God exists, or There is a Santa clause

Predicative use - a is F or a is not F, e.g. Babar is an elephant

3.Veridical use - It is the case that p, e.g. it's not true that I ate a pickle last night

In Parmenides' poem the "Way of Belief," the Goddess makes all sorts of claims about being without specifying which sense of the word she means it in. While one might claim that this indicates that she means it to hold for all three kinds, this seems to make much of the poem to be incoherent. Paramenides claims that being in the predicable sense is not meaningful and hence that there is no change, but the poem is full of 'is nots'in the predicable sense so there is a huge problem of how to interpret this.

Front 9

What is the "divided line" and what are the relations between its parts?

Back 9

Place four cognitive states: imagination, belief, thought and understanding from the bottom up on a divided line. The length of each line indicates the amount of truth involved in each cognitive state. Each lower one contains images of the next which we use to extrapolate and posit the existence of something higher. The transition from one state to the other requires a dialectic by which the concepts in each cognitive state is analyzed and evaluated through logical inferences.

Front 10

What is ataraxia and who advocated it? Explain how it was to be achieved

Back 10

Antarxia is a term used by Epicurus to denote freedom from worry or disturbance, which he conceived of as the telos or final aim. The idea is that many worries and fears have been inculcated in us by society that are unijustifiable, chief among these being the fear of death. Philosophy is then supposed to be a kind of therapy by which we undermine the supposed rationality of our fears and hence obtained freedom from all disturbances.