“Is there anything you would be willing to die for?” is a…

“Is there anything you would be willing to die for?” is a…

“Is there anything you would be willing to die for?” is a philosophical question insofar as:

(a) it does not have any right or wrong answer because it is a meaningless question.

(b) it is a meaningless question because everyone could have a different answer to it.

(c) it forces us to articulate and justify our beliefs about what we know and ought to do.

(d) it is more concerned with one’s religious beliefs than with factual claims about the world.

 

One of the aims of philosophy is to think critically about whether there are good reasons for adopting our beliefs. Reasons are considered “good reasons” if they are consistent with everyday experience and:

(a) are part of a set of religious, moral, or political beliefs that an individual feels deeply about.

(b) are considered good by at least one culture, sub-culture, or individual.

(c) cannot be interpreted in different ways by different people or cultures.

(d) take into account objections, are acceptable to impartial third parties, and avoid undesirable consequences.

If the world that we individually perceive is limited to an internal perspective, then there is no way that we could determine whether our own perspective is useful, true, or valuable because:

(a) we know whether our internal perspective is correct only by comparing it with an objective, external perspective (the “real” world).

(b) whatever we appeal to in order to prove that our perspective is right itself would be part of the standard we use in evaluating that perspective.

(c) scientific research that reveals facts about the world would cause us to challenge our perceptions in a dreamworld of our own making.

(d) without limiting our perspective to an internal dreamworld, we cannot achieve any objective, external knowledge of the real world.

Philosophy is concerned primarily with identifying beliefs about human existence and evaluating arguments that support those beliefs. These activities can be summarized in two questions that drive philosophical investigations:

(a) why should we bother? and what are the consequences of our believing one thing over another?

(b) what do you mean? and how do you know?

(c) who really believes X? and how can we explain differences in people’s beliefs?

(d) how do philosophers argue? and are their differences important?

 

One of the tasks of philosophy is to test conceptual frameworks for depth and consistency. It does this through (1) expressing our ideas in clear, concise language and (2) supporting those ideas with reasons and with overcoming objections to them. Philosophy thus emphasizes the need to:

(a) pose questions that can be resolved not by reasoning but only by faith or personal belief.

(b) show why the beliefs adopted by most people in a culture are preferable since more people understand those beliefs and see no reason to raise objections to them.

(c) articulate what we mean by our beliefs and to justify our beliefs by arguments.

(d) develop a set of ideas about the nature of society (i.e., an ideology) that can be used to support a religious conceptual framework.

The philosophic insistence on providing a logos for the world and our experience of it might itself rely ultimately on adopting a certain mythos, insofar as:

(a) philosophy assumes that it is possible and meaningful to reason about the world and experience.

(b) the myths of philosophy are really lies that are told to make so-called philosophic enquiries sound more respectable.

(c) philosophy is based on logic, whereas myths are not based on logic.

(d) mythos refers to the philosophic understanding of the world, whereas logos refers to the philosophic understanding of our experience of the world.

“There is no rationale for myth because it is through myth that reason itself is defined.” This means that:

(a) mythos is ultimately based on logos, just as myth is ultimately based on reasoning or thinking.

(b) myth does not “explain” how things are related as much as it simply reveals them as related.

(c) metaphysicians are justified in reasoning as they do because there is only one true answer about being.

(d) myth and reason are the same: “myth” defines “reason,” and “reason” defines “myth.”

Whereas the social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics) ask questions about how people think and act, philosophy is the study of:

(a) how people with different beliefs or backgrounds disagree with one another.

(b) what beliefs mean and whether people with different beliefs are justified in having them.

(c) the reasons why philosophic questions never have better or worse answers.

(d) questions that can be answered better by appealing to scientific experiments.

To say that “philosophy” (like “love” or “art”) is not a closed concept means that we cannot state the necessary and sufficient conditions by which it is defined. Rather, philosophic issues are identifiable as having “family resemblances” with one another. In other words:

(a) there is no one distinguishing feature that identifies an issue as philosophic, only an overlapping of issues roughly associated with one another.

(b) the way we come to think about philosophy, love, or art really depends on how we were raised by our families to identify things as resembling one another.

(c) the necessary and sufficient condition for something to be considered philosophic is that it answers either of these questions: What does it mean? and How do you know?

(d) philosophy is not a closed discipline insofar as it is willing to accept any answer suggested by the “human family” as being true.