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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 claim of existentialists does Beauvoir offer in defense of detractors to existentialism?
(a) Bouvoir claims that existentialists help to accentuate the strengths of other theories.
(b) Bouvoir claims that existentialists offer their detractors important challenges to prove their theories.
(c) Bouvoir claims that existentialists believe that the world is willed by man, insofar as his will expresses his genuine reality.
(d) Bouvoir claims that existentialists give focus to the importance of matter in reality.

2. What does Beauvoir claim a child can do due to his state of security?
(a) He can do with impunity whatever he likes.
(b) He can create the world he wants to exist.
(c) He can choose a direction in which he desires to remove his ignorance.
(d) He can have all his needs provided without labor.

3. How does Beauvoir explain that the serious man becomes a dangerous tyrant?
(a) His choice to reject the ambiguity of his freedom combined with the desire to achieve his goal drives him to subject those in his environment to nothing more than instruments of achievement.
(b) His ultimate goal is always to exert power over other people and usurp their freedom to his purposes.
(c) The consequences of his choices to devote himself to his goal requires that he direct the choices of those around him.
(d) He ignores the subjectivity of his choice and sacrifices the freedom of others to achieve his goals.

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

5. At what point does Beauvoir declare the death of an individual is not a failure?
(a) If his death leads to the victory of his cause.
(b) When the cause for which he died preserves freedom for all.
(c) If the cause for which he died is carried on by his survivors.
(d) When it is integrated into a project which surpasses the limits of life.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Beauvoir recognize as the paradox that faces a man who is willing to fight for a valid cause?

2. What does Beauvoir suggest to be the motivation of those who adopt the Aesthetic Attitude?

3. What does Beauvoir identify as the irony of the serious man?

4. What does Beauvoir identify as the certain truth contained in the nihilist attitude?

5. How does Beauvoir bring into question the Marxist claim that pure proletariat revolution is generated by the proletariat class?

(see the answer key)

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