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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. How does Beauvoir consider stubbornness in the face of an obstacle that is impossible to overcome?
(a) As the seed of innocent hope.
(b) As that trial that brings experience.
(c) As the beginning of innovation.
(d) As stupidity.

2. During their stage of freedom, how does Beauvoir claim that a child sees adults?
(a) As fanciful projections of their uninhibited minds.
(b) As divinities.
(c) As physically threatening.
(d) As benevolent dictators that provide their needs.

3. How does Beauvoir explain what Descartes meant when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but this power is limited?
(a) That man's mind has no limits in thought, but his physical body does not have the ability to follow the thoughts.
(b) The individual man has the power to follow his desires until his pursuit is obstructed by a more power man.
(c) That the will is defined only by raising obstacles and by the contingency of certain obstacles that let themselves be conquered and others that do not.
(d) That man is free to believe all things, but achieving them is subject to the physical universe.

4. How does Beauvoir compare Marxism to existentialism?
(a) Marxism rejects the moral foundations of law that are rooted in the protection of public property.
(b) Marxism rejects the idea of authority in the development of organized masses.
(c) Marxism establishes moral thought through mass rejection of the moral order.
(d) Marxism rejects the idea of inhuman objectivity and locates itself in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.

5. 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 so deeply ambiguous that its true understanding cannot be achieved.
(b) Its true ambiguity is superficial since it has no moral code.
(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.

Short Answer Questions

1. What explanation does Beauvoir give to assert that existentialist thought helps to build community.

2. What does Beauvoir claim to be the choice that comes to a young man after a long crisis?

3. How does Beauvoir accuse Marxists of accepting moral superiority?

4. What does Beauvoir claim comes of an accomplished act that is left behind by an individual?

5. How does Beauvoir explain the differences between the conditions of Western women from that of children?

(see the answer key)

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