A Momentary Lapse Of Reason Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Socratic Method solves problems through asking questions, not through debate.

The Socratic Method is named for Socrates, the ancient Greek (circa 469 - 399 BC) who popularized it. In this system, an inquiry into an issue is quite literal: you inquire by asking questions. By systematically breaking the problem into small parts, and considering the answer to each, a student of this method hopes to achieve both a satisfactory answer and a deep understanding of the issues. The teacher, meanwhile, doesn't answer questions, but poses them. In providing a systematic way of comparing ideas to each other, the Socratic method is often seen as one of the foundations of modern philosophy.

A proper debate should cover all sides of a disagreement. This is why modern debate clubs often stage their events around a single resolution (for example, "Resolved: That all FunTrivia quizzes should be played solely in Flash format"), setting one side the task of arguing for it and the other the task of arguing against. It's common to let each side have extended opening and closing remarks, bracketing back-and-forth arguments. Sound bites, food for TV news, are a very recent development.

Answer: In the Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners mistake shadows for the real objects.

Plato asked his readers to imagine a cave where several prisoners have spent their lives chained so that they face a blank wall. Behind them is a fire. When things move between the prisoners and the fire, the prisoners see the shadows on the wall, and they discuss this shadow puppetry among themselves. To them, though, the shadow of a person is really a person, and the shadow of a book really is a book - they have no idea that what they are seeing isn't representative of the true nature of those things.

In the same way, Plato argues, our senses give us only a poor outline of the true Forms that are the essence of all things. If things appear to change, that's an accident of our perception; the Form itself is perfect and unchanging.

Answer: The St. Thomas who founded Thomism was the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, not Doubting Thomas.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Dominican priest and academic whose philosophical masterpiece, "Summa Theologica," was sadly unfinished at the time of his death. Aquinas held great respect for Aristotle in particular, as well as for philosophers and thinkers from a wide variety of traditions; as a realist, he believed that mankind could know a great deal about the world without divine guidance, and Catholics therefore had no monopoly on truths. Taking faith and reason as two complementary sources of knowledge, he taught that the essence of a thing or person was different from its accidents, its peripheral, non-fundamental aspects. The only exception to this rule is God: in Aquinas's view, God has no accidents, only existence and essence.

While it initially met with some resistance, Thomism has been hugely influential in Christian thought for more than 700 years. The Catholic Church named Aquinas a Doctor of the Church for his contributions, and he is also honored by Anglicans and by Lutherans.

Answer: Kant's masterpiece was actually titled "Critique of Pure Reason."

Kant (1724 - 1804) was active at the end of the Enlightenment period, and his views are still highly influential today. He formulated questions of morality in terms of duty: every action, in this view, is undertaken because of some underlying principle that imposes a duty. For example, in writing this quiz, I'd be obeying a maxim like "In order to spread knowledge about philosophy while contributing to your favorite trivia site, you must write philosophical quizzes!" If I believe that maxim, and I believe that spreading knowledge about philosophy and contributing to my favorite trivia site are worthwhile goals, then I have a moral duty to write this quiz. Ultimate morality is encoded in the Categorical Imperative, which says, roughly, that you should act in accordance with a maxim only when you also genuinely believe that everybody should.

"Critique of Pure Reason," first published in 1781, treats a different topic. For centuries, western philosophers had argued that reason alone, without any help from experience, was enough to gain knowledge about the workings of the world, the nature of justice, and other important questions. Kant argued that reality is unavoidably filtered through the minds of observers - that is, what we perceive as reality is partly just the form that our minds give to our observations. Reason and experience must be combined in order to develop and understand knowledge, and the knower must be at the center of philosophical inquiry. This was a revolution in philosophy.

Answer: Bentham's most moral act is supposed to maximize happiness, not necessarily material wealth.

Utilitarianism is a consequentialist philosophy because it judges actions strictly by their consequences, not on, say, the virtues of the person who is performing the act. In Jeremy Bentham's famous 1822 formulation, the best action increases the collective happiness of the largest number of people, where happiness is generally understood to be increased by pleasure and decreased by pain. Other flavors of utilitarianism maximize slightly different things, like the stability of society (state consequentialism) or the fulfillment of choices (preference utilitarianism).

However, this seemingly simple system can lead to dilemmas, since it implies that the ends justify the means. To provide "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" may require some ugly acts, such as the execution of an innocent person; the classic example is the question of whether to throw someone into the path of a train in order to save the lives of five people stranded further down the tracks. After Bentham, many utilitarians hoped to fix this problem by various means. For example, negative utilitarians seek not to maximize happiness, but to minimize suffering; others emphasize that happiness is increased by the very existence of recognized and respected human rights.

Kant was not a utilitarian at all. He evaluated actions based on their alignment with the categorical imperative, arguing that their morality didn't depend on context but on their intrinsic nature.

Answer: Transcendentalism developed in New England, not in England.

Thoreau and the other transcendentalists (like Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson) came almost exclusively from New England. Boston, Massachusetts, and the nearby Harvard University were centers of the movement, which got its name from its focus on the human spirit rather than on experiences or on tangible things. Working primarily in the 1830s and 1840s, transcendentalists advocated separation from the institutions of society - like politics and churches - in order to restore one's purity and achieve a true community of independent souls. Thoreau's 1854 book "Walden" is still a classic exploration of self-imposed exile and communion with nature.

Answer: Nietzsche's famous assertion was not that God lives, but that "God is dead."

"God is dead," Nietzsche (1844-1900) argued in several of his writings, presenting it as a consequence of technological progress. Here's how he put it in "The Gay Science" (1882): "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?..." However, this is almost certainly not meant literally, and, despite the criticism of some of Nietzsche's contemporaries, may not even be a statement of atheism. Alternate interpretations include the decline of Christian faith in the West, or a systematic shift away from Christian morality. Nietzsche argued that Christian morality could and should be replaced by a new system constructed explicitly by and for humanity. Respecting what he believed was humans' driving force - their "will to power" - he wrote that this new morality consisted of living one's life to the truest and fullest, so that one would not be dismayed to live that life over again.

Answer: Existential literature usually involves a confused individual caught up in an absurd world.

The movement takes its name from its focus on centering and describing human existence. In the famous phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), "existence precedes essence": that is, each human being develops his or her own identity in the process of existing. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) expressed this idea in another way: "One is not born a woman, but becomes one."

Sartre and Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote a number of plays and novels that presented aspects of existentialist thought to a popular audience. Works like Camus's "The Stranger" gave the world disoriented protagonists in a meaningless society, eventually realizing that they alone were responsible for defining their lives.

Answer: Ayn Rand founded Objectivism.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) founded the objectivist movement nearly singlehandedly, promoting her ideas through her writing. Two novels - 1943's "The Fountainhead" and 1957's "Atlas Shrugged" - laid out her case for "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." (The phrasing comes from her afterword to "Atlas Shrugged.") Objectivists promote laissez-faire capitalism as the only system that gives full rein to individual rights, and oppose any attempt to assign people responsibility for others (e.g. volunteer requirements for high school graduation). Objectivism is not widely taught in schools of philosophy, but has had a profound impact on politics in the U.S.

Answer: Post-modern ideas can be found all over the wider culture, from literature to film.

From the novels of Kurt Vonnegut to the films of Quentin Tarantino, popular western culture is full of post-modern ideas and approaches, often emphasizing the artificiality of the world or of society and the absence of universal truths. Instead, post-modernists feel that truth is defined by individual communities, which also develop their own narratives to explain reality as they perceive it. No one group's truth is more accurate than that of another group. Nothing is well-defined in post-modernism, not even the self.

Instead, each person is understood to incorporate many selves, each constructed by a different aspect of society, in an echo of Walt Whitman's statement that "I am large, I contain multitudes."