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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 1, Ambiguity and Freedom.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What explanation does Beauvoir give to assert that existentialist thought helps to build community.
(a) Beauvoir asserts, "Existentialists are more often inviting of debate since they do not consider any idea as wrong because they accept no idea as right."
(b) Beauvoir asserts, "Existentialists, with their dogmatic adherence to solipsism, help to rally a wide range of theorists to disprove their irrationality."
(c) Beauvoir asserts, "Despite their disparate views, existentialists easily welcome any detractor because they only see them as creations of their own minds."
(d) Beauvoir asserts, "...existentialism,...(is) the plurality of concrete particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and irreducible as subjectivity.

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

3. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?
(a) By spontaneous acts require conscious evaluation to determine their usefulness.
(b) By spontaneous acts have affects in a physical world.
(c) By spontaneity always projecting itself toward something.
(d) By the fact the spontaneous act of an individual draws a response from others.

4. What does Beauvoir report to the the qualities of God that establishes moral standards?
(a) A moral code from God contributes to establishing a moral consensus that directs thought.
(b) A moral code from God constricts believers to live within boundaries.
(c) A God can pardon, efface and compensate.
(d) A moral code given from God removes the demands from human minds to create one.

5. How does Beauvoir suggest a past accomplishment can be made relevant in the present?
(a) By tracing the affects of the act from the past through to the present.
(b) By comparing present acts to the acts of the past.
(c) By keeping a record of all accomplishments to reflect upon those experiences with every decision.
(d) By ceaselessly returning to it and justify it as part of the project with which the individual is currently involved.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does Beauvoir use as an example of moving through such obstacles?

2. Beauvoir claims that critics of existentialism claim that it is solipsistic. What is solipsism?

3. To what conclusion to Beauvoir arrive regarding Sartre's internal choices that are affected by personal passions?

4. What is a principle that Beauvoir states that an ethics of ambiguity will refuse to deny a priori?

5. Although Beauvoir reports that existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity, what does she claim to be existentialism's fundamental flaw?

(see the answer key)

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