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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. How does Beauvoir compare southern slaves to children?
(a) By comparing their obedience to the slave owner to that of children to adults in their lives.
(b) By comparing the ignorance of their condition to the ignorance of children to the realities of the world.
(c) By comparing hopes for freedom to the a child's hope for the future.
(d) By comparing their faith in a heavenly afterlife to the fantasy world that children create in their minds.

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

3. How does Beauvoir explain that Marxists perceive that acts can be regarded as good or bad?
(a) Only through the destruction of private property.
(b) Through the revolt of a class which define aims and goals from a which a new state appears as desirable.
(c) Only when systems are formed in which each gives according to his ability.
(d) Only when systems are designed that each takes according to his need.

4. What does Beauvoir define as the drama of original choice?
(a) That it has both cause and effect.
(b) That its affects are ambiguous.
(c) That it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime.
(d) That it justifies the positions of existentialists.

5. What does Beauvoir claim matters to the serious man?
(a) Being able to lose himself in the nature of the object which he prefers to himself.
(b) Setting a track to achieve a predetermined goal.
(c) Subjecting himself to the project that defines his ambiguity to himself.
(d) Using his ambiguity to shape his ethics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Beauvoir define the relationship of the "sub-man" to ethics and facticity?

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

3. What does Beauvoir seek to prove regarding man's mastery of the world?

4. How does Beauvoir introduce the role of God in the discussion of ethics?

5. How does Beauvoir characterize the response of Western women when the structures that shelter them seem to be in danger?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Beauvoir characterize Dualists?

2. How does Beauvoir show that the "sub-man" passes into being a serious man?

3. What does Beauvoir point out as the difference between the passionate man and the adventurer?

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

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

6. Upon what basis does Beauvoir suggest that a man decides upon what he wants to be?

7. What type of adults does Beauvoir claim stays in an infantile world?

8. How does Beauvoir claim that the truly free will is produced?

9. According to Beauvoir, how have existentialists defined their philosophy?

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

(see the answer keys)

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