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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Sections 1-3, The Aesthetic Attitude, Freedom and Liberation, The Antinomies of Action.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What example does Beauvoir use to illustrate "The Antinomies of Action"?
(a) That unwise action against oppressors taken without considering the future will lead to more vicious oppression by opportunists.
(b) Men who commit violence against an oppressor for the cause of freedom become oppressors themselves and must reduce the oppressor as a thing to be removed.
(c) If those who lead actions against oppression are not under continual scrutiny, they will plan insurrections for their own benefit.
(d) That the thinkers who can define the evils of oppression actually become oppressors by making people realize their plight but offering no action to correct it.

2. How does Beauvoir define materialist philosophers?
(a) Those who see "no value in thought".
(b) Those who have "striven to reduce mind to matter".
(c) Those who "conceive all matter as eternal".
(d) Those who "see no life after this one".

3. What does Beauvoir claim is revealed through art?
(a) Art reveals the transitory as an absolute.
(b) Art reveals the aesthetic qualities of the will of freedom.
(c) Art reveals that aesthetic contemplation at some point must make contact with time and space.
(d) Art reveals that ambiguous principles of truth and beauty can occupy time and space.

4. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?
(a) It is incapable of furnishing any principle for making choices.
(b) It is so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(c) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.
(d) Existentialism is essentially taken by individuals seeking to pursue what is normally antisocial and contributes to the violence of mastery of nature.

5. How does Beauvoir characterize the fate of the "sub-man"?
(a) His ethics and facticity have no consequences, therefore they are nonexistent.
(b) He makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirm his long negation of himself.
(c) He finds nothing to appreciate and in turn no one appreciates him.
(d) He does not recognize his facticity, therefore he does not experience the triumph of freedom through the development of his ethics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir claim can come to people who are filled with the horror of defeat?

2. What is the point at which existentialism is opposed to dialectic materialism according to Beauvoir?

3. What are the two clans that Beauvoir claims to come from oppression?

4. What does Beauvoir identify as the worst thing to be said for violence?

5. What does Beauvoir claim to be the relationship between the serious and nihilism?

(see the answer key)

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