Papers

Danny has finished grading your papers. He’ll be in his office between 2:30 and 3:30 today, Monday, if you’d like to stop by to pick yours up. Otherwise, they’ll be available at the final.

Study Guide, revised

I have added three questions: Part I Q 6 and Part II Q 27, 28. I will not add any more questions. This is a draft. I am not likely to remove questions. I will add more questions. In particular, I will add questions concerning Anselm. If you spot any obvious errors, please let me know.

Instructions

• The Final Exam will be on Wednesday, Dec 10, from 11:30 – 1:18 PM, in our usual room, Baker Systems Engineering 0285. It will be closed book, closed notes. Bring a couple of pens. I will supply “blue books”.
• The exam will consist of three sections: (1) multiple-choice; (2) short-answer; (3) essays.
• A short answer question is a question you can answer in one or two sentences. Essay questions should take no more than two or three blue book pages to answer (adjust this if you have abnormally small or large handwriting).
• All essay questions will be taken word-for-word from Part II of this study guide [any comments in square brackets will be omitted]. All short-answer and multiple-choice questions will either be related to essay questions from Part II, or will be as indicated in Part I.

Questions after the jump!

Sartre

A copy of Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism is available online. The example I discussed in class comes in the following paragraph:

As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him.

Final Exam on Wednesday

Judging by this http://www.ureg.ohio-state.edu/ourweb/scheduling/SchedulingContent/FINALAU08.html webpage, the final exam will be on Wednesday, Dec 10, from 11:30 – 1:18 PM, in our lecture hall.

Paper due date

As announced in class on Tuesday, Nov 18th, the due date for the second paper has been moved from Thursday, Nov 20th to Tuesday, Nov 25th.

Paper Topics

Instructions

Answer one of the following prompts in 5–6 pages (no more than 6 pages), with standard formatting: 1 inch margins, doublespaced, 12 point font, etc.

A 5–6 page paper gives you more space to work with than a 2–3 page paper. This is an opportunity to pack in more content, not an opportunity to abandon the virtue of careful concise prose that was demanded by the 2–3 page paper.

It is not my intent that this be a research paper. Extra reading is not required. The goal here is careful reading and analysis of primary texts. If you do make use of other sources (even if you don’t end up discussing them directly), please cite those sources.

Prompts

1. According to Aquinas, it is possible for God to create something such that it has no beginning to its existence. According to Henry of Ghent, this is not possible. Present and evaluate this disagreement. (Some leading questions: What are the fundamental points of disagreement between Aquinas and Ghent? What is Ghent’s argument against Aquinas’s view? Is it a good argument?)
2. Scotus presents a series of objections to Boethius’s view that God knows future contingents by seeing them from eternity. What are those objections? Which is the most powerful? How might Boethius reply?
3. Ghazali claims that the will is a power to differentiate among similars; Averroes denies this. Explain each view and the arguments given by each philosopher for his view. Who is correct? Why?
4. Suppose time comes to be with the world. Does that help solve the puzzle of why the world came to be when it did? Ghazali argues that it does not. Explain and evaluate his response.
5. According to Ockham, the truth, today, of ‘Antichrist will come’, does not entail that Antichrist must come. Likewise, according to Ockham, the truth, today, of ‘God knows that Antichrist will come’ does not entail that Antichrist must come. Explain why, on Ockham’s account, each of these entailments does not hold. Suppose God tells you, today, that Antichrist will come. Does that entail that Antichrist must come?

Class Nov. 4th

I want to encourage all of you to vote tomorrow. To that end, I’ve decided to cancel tomorrow’s lecture. I’ll be there, and I’ll be happy to answer questions and discuss material that we’ve already covered, but I won’t cover any new material and you should not feel obligated to come.

On an unrelated note, I plan to post paper topics to the course webpage sometime between now and Thursday’s lecture. The paper is (as always) due November 20th.

Anti-Dühring

I mentioned early in the quarter that many of the issues raised by Philoponus and Simplicius are rehashed, with the same nasty tone, by Frederick Engels, in his book, Anti-Dühring, from 1877. The book is a broadside attack on the views of Eugen Dühring. The relevant bit is chapter 5, “Philosophy of Nature: Time and Space.” Here is a bit from the end of the chapter, to give you a taste:

This is the point we have reached with all his deepening and sharpening — that we have perpetually gone deeper into ever sharper nonsense, and finally land up where of necessity we had to land up — “in the dark”. But this does not abash Herr Dühring much. Right on the next page he has the effrontery to declare that he has

“been able to provide a real content for the idea of self-equal stability directly from the behaviour of matter and the mechanical forces” {D. Ph. 82}.

And this man describes other people as ”charlatans”!

Fortunately, in spite of all this helpless wandering and confusion “in the dark”, we are left with one consolation, and this is certainly edifying to the soul:

“The mathematics of the inhabitants of other celestial bodies can rest on no other axioms than our own!” {69}.

Picking and Choosing

I mentioned two papers when we were discussing Ghazali and Averroes on the nature of the will.

One was “Picking and Choosing“, by Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Sidney Morgenbesser. They defend the distinction between picking and choosing, and the claim, in line with Al-Ghazali, that rational agents have the power to pick.

The other was “Taking Plans Seriously“, by Michael Bratman. I suggested that Averroes’s account, according to which my will is general (I will a date) but my action is particular (I reach for that particular date) might have trouble accounting for our ability to make long term plans, and issue Bratman discusses in that paper.

Readings List Updated

I’ve updated the reading list. The readings for next Tuesday are the first two readings on Future Contingents: Aristotle and Boethius’ commentary on Aristotle. The reading for Thursday will be the selection from Boethius’ Consolatio.