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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Schopenhauer say people rationalize the things they acquire?
(a) a need to keep current in a changing world
(b) reasons are found after getting what is wanted or willed
(c) only wanting things that have a built in reason
(d) reasons are manufactured to suit the climate

2. Who suggests that whenever philosophy grows in a country its moral health decays?
(a) Berkeley
(b) Kant
(c) Rousseau
(d) Voltaire

3. To what does Schopenhauer agree a priori?
(a) the individual believes his will is free
(b) the will is developed through experience
(c) the individual believes he is controlled
(d) the will is easily controlled

4. What is needed by a strong man who seeks intensity and experience at the cost of tragic woe?
(a) optimism
(b) altruism
(c) assistance
(d) pessimism

5. What does Spencer call a rationalizing myth for belief that defies conception?
(a) cosmology
(b) toxicology
(c) geneology
(d) theology

6. What does Spencer affirm that needs centralization, government power, apathy and individual subordination?
(a) socialism
(b) democracy
(c) regulation
(d) legalism

7. Where does Croce get the idea that history is a process of choosing a lie that is closest to the truth?
(a) from Nietzsche
(b) from Schopenhauer
(c) from rousseau
(d) from Plato and Aristotle

8. What had Kant determined to be a Thing-in-Itself that can be conceived in thought but not experienced?
(a) conceptuality
(b) eventuality
(c) ultimate reality
(d) history

9. What does the publisher of Schopenhauer's book eventually tell him?
(a) the law refused the distribution of the book
(b) they printed only the few copies they gave him
(c) the book is too dry to sell
(d) most of the edition is sold as waste paper

10. Who is the dominant philosophical thinker of the 19th Century?
(a) Voltaire
(b) Schopenhauer
(c) Immanuel Kant
(d) Nietzsche

11. What does Durant say the beginning of Schopenhauer's book contains?
(a) unreadable prose taken from Kant
(b) two-hundred pages of second-hand idealism
(c) lackluster descriptions of Europe
(d) sound and fury signifying nothing

12. Who is the author of Time and Free-will?
(a) Schopenhauer
(b) Spencer
(c) Descartes
(d) Henri Bergson

13. What is a critical analysis of knowledge that is independent of all sense experience?
(a) Kant's Letters to Philosophers
(b) Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason
(c) Kant's Whole History of Thought
(d) Kant's The Return to Common Sense

14. On what does Spencer say the soul of men living humble and precarious lives relies?
(a) more on mythology than on science
(b) more on reality than on possibility
(c) more on future hope than reality
(d) more on guidence than education

15. Whose mission is it to save religion from reason and science from skepticism?
(a) Berkeley's
(b) Voltaire's
(c) Rousseau's
(d) Kant's

Short Answer Questions

1. By Spencer's time, what is the third stage of philosophical thought?

2. Where does Spencer say that Religion is central?

3. What work of Spencer's theorizes that all ultimate religious ideas eventually become logically inconceivable?

4. How does Schopenhauer develop his blunt manner, realistic mind, and knowledge of the world and of men?

5. What early 19th century philosopher is included in a group of pessimists, poets and composers considered the voices of the age?

(see the answer keys)

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