CVSP 201 Final, Fall 2008

CS 201, Section 3, Final Examination Name 26 January—2009 Stdt. No. Time limit: two hours. Take time to organize your answers and write clearly. Read over the entire exam before starting; you may find some of the quotations helpful in answering the essay questions. 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. Part A (50 percent): Answer one of the following essay topics: 1. Write an essay in which you compare and contrast the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius about how to achieve true happiness. What do the authors’ respective views tell us about the ideal life of the individual and the ideal society? 2. Write an essay in which you compare and contrast the idea of responsibility in any three of the books we have read by Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Virgil. You may want to address the following issues: the individual’s responsibility to others in society, to the gods, to herself or himself. Who determines that responsibility? What kind of society do these philosophers advocate? Part B (30 percent): Answer six of the following questions in no more than about four sentences; some might be answered in one sentence. 3. The slogan—“there’s probably no god; now stop worrying; and enjoy your life”—best reflects what philosophy we have discussed this semester? Define concisely “enjoy” in the context of this philosophy. 4. Write a similar advertisement, of no more than about 12 words, for any of the other philosophical approaches we’ve read this semester. Make it catchy. State the author of the philosophy and explain briefly any aspects of the wording that you need to. 5. Define epistemology. 6. Who was Crito, what did he do, and why did he fail? 7. Explain the significance of the olive tree in the Odyssey. 8. You have been asked to write a movie screenplay of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In discussing the project with the movie producers, they ask you what the epic’s fundamental message is. Answer concisely. 9. Who killed Antigone, and how? 10. What philosopher we’ve read distinguishes between the visible world and the intelligible world? Which does he argue is superior? Part C (20 percent): The following quotations are selected from all of our readings from this semester. Identify the author (if known) and title of all of the following: 11. Conscious of their own ignorance, most people are impressed by anyone who pontificates and says something that is over their heads. Some, however, have held the view that over and above these particular goods there is another which is good in itself and the cause of whatever goodness there is in all these others. 12. . . . 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.” 1 13. If I had been the mother of children or if my husband died, exposed and rotting—I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied our people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say? A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again. 14. 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. 15. You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man. 2