View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Locke say pleasure and pain are the foundation for?

2. How does Locke resolve the contradiction between people who believe in free will and people who do not?

3. What would happen if words referred to particular things, in Locke's opinion?

4. What does Locke say the increase of our intellectual powers follows?

5. How does Locke define desire?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is abstraction, according to Locke?

2. How does Locke define power, in "Essay Concerning Human Understanding"?

3. What are three ways in which people abuse words, in Locke's account?

4. Why are most words general, according to Locke?

5. Where does Locke say our conception of 'number' comes from?

6. What does Locke say is the danger in man's freedom to use words however he likes?

7. What is the difference between love and desire, according to Locke?

8. What does Locke say is the only way to understand the properties of things?

9. What does Locke achieve by claiming that good and evil come from pleasure and pain?

10. What do we do when we define a word, in Locke's account?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How would Locke account for the philosophy of deconstruction--or the notion that language is ultimately self-referential, and that meaning is eternally deferred, never arriving at an object per se? Is Locke's theory of language predicated on an ultimate arrival, or can it handle the notion that truth is, in Nietzsche's phrase, a mobile army of metaphors?

Essay Topic 2

How does Locke protect his philosophy against the skepticism of Hume and Descartes? What arguments specifically does he refute, and what arguments does he leave himself open to? (Do you think the question of whether innate knowledge exists can be answered?)

Essay Topic 3

How would a society predicated on the idea of innate knowledge differ from a society predicated on a Lockean epistemology in which knowledge is shaped by experience? Compare and contrast these societies.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 989 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample