Midterm Essay Questions Philosophy
1: Introduction to Philosophy Winter 2021 From the following 3 essay topics, choose 2 and write essays in response. Please do not write more than 2 nor less than 2. (This format is exactly the same as the midterm.) You should be able to write a good essay using nothing more than class notes, lectures, readings and PowerPoints. You need not do outside reading, such as internet sites — these are essays, not a research paper. (50 points each, total 100 points.)
1.Certainty, or Error-Reduction? Some philosophers think the goal of our knowledge should be nothing less than certainty. Others say, it is something more modest, such as error-reduction (and usually they also mean that certainty is either an impossible, or an unworthy, goal). Discuss Plato and Descartes on certainty; discuss Socrates and Popper on error-reduction. How is this issue related to the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions?
2.Rationalism, or Empiricism? One of the perennial conflicts in philosophy involves the question: do we get knowledge through reason, or through experience? Or do we use both reason and experience? Discuss how the views of Zeno, Plato, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant bear on this issue. Re: rationalism, pay particular attention to Plato’s Myth of the Cave. Re: empiricism, pay particular attention to the what Locke says, how Kant criticizes him, and what the effects of visual illusions (e.g., Penrose’s impossible prongs; Escher’s impossible buildings) imply for thinking about the place of sensory experience in the formation of knowledge.
3.The Trolley Problem & Modern Ethical Theories. The ethicists Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson pose the following problem. A runaway trolley hurtles down the track. At the end of the track are 5 strangers, who it will certainly kill if nothing intervenes. But you have your hand on a switch; and if you pull the switch, you will divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, at the end of which is only 1 stranger, who it would then certainly kill. What should you do? Why? Discuss possible philosophicalconsiderations (not just psychological ones; although you may also consider these, as well as non-philosophical, informal considerations such as altruism, or lines of least resistance); and do so with particular respect to Kant and Mill as exemplars (respectively) of deontological and consequentialist options in modern ethical thought
