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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, Personal Freedom and Others.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What claim of existentialists does Beauvoir offer in defense of detractors to existentialism?
(a) Bouvoir claims that existentialists offer their detractors important challenges to prove their theories.
(b) Bouvoir claims that existentialists help to accentuate the strengths of other 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. During their stage of freedom, how does Beauvoir claim that a child sees adults?
(a) As physically threatening.
(b) As benevolent dictators that provide their needs.
(c) As fanciful projections of their uninhibited minds.
(d) As divinities.

3. How does the "sub-man" submerge his freedom, according to Beauvoir?
(a) He refuses subjectivity in favor of predictability.
(b) He ignores the ambiguity of his existence.
(c) He accepts the ethics and expectations of society.
(d) He avoids actions that have consequences.

4. How does Beauvoir explain how the passionate man different from the adventurer man?
(a) The passionate man fails to fulfill his subjectivity rather than the content of the subjectivity.
(b) The passionate man attaches his adventure to unmovable ethics.
(c) The passionate man acts from internal desires.
(d) The passionate man has a focus guiding his adventures.

5. To what does Beauvoir compare the "sub-man" in his relationship to ethics and facticity?
(a) To the faceless laborer who's production has more purpose than does he.
(b) To the purposeless book that never gets taken from the shelf.
(c) To the cowardly writer who will not publish and therefore does not exist.
(d) To trees and pebbles which are not aware that they exist.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?

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

3. What role does time play what Beauvoir identifies as the ability to will oneself free?

4. Beauvoir claims that dualists use their basic belief to establish what idea?

5. How does human spontaneity give purpose to a human life, according to Beauvoir?

(see the answer key)

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