CVSP 201 Final, Fall 2008

CS 201-10 Final Examination Name______________________ 27 January 2009 3pm to 5pm Student No.___________________ Take your time to organise your answers and write clearly. Read each question carefully and make sure you answer the question fully. You may answer the questions in any order, but clearly indicate the number of the question in your exam booklet. Return this exam sheet with your booklet. Time limit: 2 hours. Section A (30%) Answer one of the following: 1. Write a short essay explaining this theme as discussed in The Republic. What are the main conclusions, and how do these fit in within the main philosophical proposal? ‘The first thing we have to agree on, then, is whether these proposals are feasible or not. For, whether it’s asked in joke or in earnest, we must allow people to ask the question: Is the female of the human species naturally capable of taking part in all the occupations of the male, or in none, or in some only? And if in some, is military service one of them? That’s the best way to begin, and the way in which we are most likely to reach a fair conclusion.’ 2. Write a short essay discussing the significance of the following passage in the context of the Aeneid ‘Come now, and I shall tell you of the glory that lies in store for the sons of Dardanus, for the men of Italian stock who will be our descendants, bright spirits that will inherit our name, and I shall reveal to you your own destiny. That young warrior you see there leaning on the sword of valour, to him is allotted the place nearest to the light in this grove, and he will be the first of us to rise into the ethereal air with an admixture of Italic blood.’ Section B (50%) Answer one question 3. Compare and contrast the following passages as a basis for discussion, how do they differ in purpose? How do these works see the divine and do they reflect each author’s philosophy? Life-stirring Venus, Mother of Aeneas and of Rome, Pleasure of men and gods, you make all things beneath the dome Of sliding constellations teem, you throng the fruited earth And the ship-freighted sea – for every species comes to birth Conceived through you, and rises forth and gazes on the light. The winds flee from you, Goddess, your arrival puts to flight The clouds of heaven. For you, the crafty earth contrives sweet flowers, For you, the oceans laugh, the skies grow peaceful after showers, Nature of Things I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of Troy and came to Italy to the shores of Lavinium; and a great pounding he took by land and sea at the hands of the heavenly gods because of the fierce and unforgetting anger of Juno. Great too were his sufferings in war before he could found his city and carry his gods into Latium. This was the beginning of the Latin race, the Alban fathers and the high walls of Rome. Tell me, Muse, the causes of her anger. How did he violate the will of the Queen of the Gods? What was his offence? The Aeneid 1 4. Using the following passages as a basis for discussion, compare and contrast how these works define the good and how this might be achieved? “But,” we shall say, “we have bred you both for your own sake and that of the whole community to act as leaders and king-bees in a hive; you are better and more fully educated than the rest and better qualified to combine the practice of philosophy and politics. You must therefore each descend in turn and live with your fellows in the cave and get used to seeing in the dark; once you have got used to it you will see a thousand times better than they do and will distinguish the various shadows, and know what they are shadows of, because you have seen the truth about things admirable and just and good.” The Republic Since moral goodness is concerned with feelings and actions, and those that are voluntary receive praise and blame, whereas those that are involuntary receive pardon and sometimes pity too, students of moral goodness must presumably determine the limits of the voluntary and the involuntary. The Nicomachean Ethics Section C (20%) For each quotation identify the author (if known) and title of the work from which it is taken. 5. Have you entirely forgotten your own kingdom and your own destiny? The ruler of the gods himself, by whose divine will the heavens and the earth revolve, sends me down from bright Olympus and bids me bring these commands to you through the swift winds. What do you have in mind? What do you hope to achieve by idling your time away in the land of Libya? 6. …I called out aloud to the Cyclops, taunting him: “Cyclops, in the end it was no weak man’s companions you were to eat by violence and force in your hollow cave, and your evil deeds were to catch up with you, and be too strong for you, hard one, who dared to eat your own guests in your own house, so Zeus and the rest of the gods have punished you.” 7. Land of Thebes, city of all my fathers – O you gods, the first gods of the race! They drag me away, now, no more delay. Look on me, you noble sons of Thebes – the last of a great line of kings, I alone, see what I suffer now at the hands of what breed of men – all for reverence, my reverence for the gods! 8. Because, unlike courage and wisdom, which made our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, self-discipline stretches across the whole scale. It produces a harmony between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you measure by the standard of intelligence, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding self-discipline as this unanimity in which there is a natural concordance between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual. 9. For certainly all men are in the clutches of a dread – beholding many things take place in heaven overhead or here on earth whose causes they can’t fathom, they assign the explanation for these happenings to powers divine. Nothing can be made from nothing – once we see that’s so, already we are on the way to what we want to know: what can things be fashioned from? And how is it, without the machinations of the gods, all things can come about? 10. In the first light of dawn all my household gathered round me, the children brought pitch and the men whatever was necessary. On the fifth day I laid the keel and the ribs, then made fast the planking. The ground-space was one acre, each side of the deck measured one hundred and twenty cubits, making a square. I built six decks below, seven in all, I divided them into nine sections with bulkheads between. 2 11. Naturally, therefore we do not speak of an ox or a horse or any other animal as happy, because none of them can take part in this sort of activity. For the same reason no child is happy either, because its age debars it as yet from such activities; if children are so described, it is by way of congratulation on their future promise. For, as we said above, happiness demands not only complete goodness but a complete life. 12. So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency; and also for this reason, that whereas these vices fall short of or exceed the right measure in both feelings and actions, virtue discovers the mean and chooses it. Thus from the point of view of its essence and the definition of its real nature, virtue is a mean; but in respect of what is right and best, it is an extreme. 13. Then Death is nothing to us; it concerns us not a jot, seeing we hold the mind is mortal. And just as we did not, in time gone by, feel anxious when the Cartharginian host swarmed into the fray from every quarter, every coast; and the whole world – everything beneath the sweeping shore of heaven – trembled, shaken by the sickening shock of war, and when on land and sea the rule of all Mankind lay in the balance, which of two empires was destined to hold sway, so when the bond is put asunder between body and soul, the two from which we are composed into a single whole, nothing can befall us, we who shall no longer be. 14. But of course you want to live for your children’s sake, so that you may be able to bring them up and educate them. Indeed! By first taking them off to Thessaly and making foreigners of them, so that they’ll have that to enjoy too? Or if that is not your intention, supposing that they are brought up here, will they be better cared for and educated because of your being alive, even without you there? 3