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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Descartes credit man's unhappiness to, according to Beauvoir?
(a) His inability to accept his ambiguity.
(b) The inner conflict between doing right and doing what he wants.
(c) His lack of freedom.
(d) Having first been a child.

2. How does Beauvoir explain how goals supplant freedom in the life of the serious man?
(a) Goals become the means of defining the existence of the serious man at the cost of freedom and individually defining his ethics.
(b) The serious man rejects all independent thought for the sake of achieving his goal.
(c) Rather than finding freedom in choosing goals, the serious man chooses goals to avoid his freedom.
(d) The serious man is defined by his goal not by his choices or acts.

3. How does Beauvoir explain that a child, himself, is not serious?
(a) A child's thoughts are often fanciful and unrealistic.
(b) A child is allowed to play and expend his existence freely to passionately pursue and joyfully attain goals which he has set up for himself.
(c) A child is not affected by the knowledge of things that have been established before him.
(d) A child is not aware that his fate is the grave.

4. What does Beauvoir claim to be the basis upon which a man decides upon what he wants to be?
(a) Upon the basis of his ethical code providing the greatest benefit.
(b) Upon the basis of moral choice.
(c) Upon the basis of the most beneficial consequences of his acts.
(d) Upon the basis of what he has been.

5. 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".

Short Answer Questions

1. At what point does Beauvoir claim an individual has the ability to decide and choose?

2. What does Beauvoir claim comes, "...between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet,..."?

3. How does Beauvoir explain what Descartes meant when he said that the freedom of man is infinite, but this power is limited?

4. What idea regarding ethics does Beauvoir attribute to Hegel?

5. In what sense does Beauvoir claim that every man is free?

Short Essay Questions

1. What are two descriptions that Beauvoir gives to man at the beginning of Part I, Ambiguity and Freedom?

2. How does Beauvoir define the serious man?

3. What does Beauvoir note has been claimed of the nature of existentialism as a philosophy?

4. How does Beauvoir explain that willing bad is possible?

5. How does Beauvoir explain that adult lives can slip by in an infantile world?

6. How does Beauvoir explain that nihilism becomes the desire for power?

7. How does Beauvoir claim that spontaneity affects man's freedom?

8. How does Beauvoir characterize Materialists?

9. To what does Beauvoir credit the development of many different philosophical world views?

10. What faces the adolescent who is being liberated from the infantile world, according to Beauvoir?

(see the answer keys)

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