Ans 4 a): These causes and principles are clearly the subject matter of what he calls

first philosophy. But this does not mean the branch of philosophy that should be
studied first. Rather, it concerns issues that are in some sense the most
fundamental or at the highest level of generality. Aristotle distinguished between
things that are better known to us and things that are better known in
themselves, and maintained that we should begin our study of a given topic with
things better known to us and arrive ultimately at an understanding of things better
known in themselves. The principles studied by first philosophy may seem very
general and abstract, but they are, according to Aristotle, better known in
themselves, however remote they may seem from the world of ordinary experience.
Still, since they are to be studied only by one who has already studied nature (which
is the subject matter of the Physics), they are quite appropriately described as
coming after the Physics.

Aristotle's description the study of being qua being is frequently and easily misunderstood, for
it seems to suggest that there is a single (albeit special) subject matterbeing qua beingthat is
under investigation. But Aristotle's description does not involve two things(1) a study and (2) a
subject matter (being qua being)for he did not think that there is any such subject matter as
being qua being. Rather, his description involves three things: (1) a study, (2) a subject matter
(being), and (3) a manner in which the subject matter is studied (qua being).
Ans 4 b) Gottfried Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony (French: harmonie prtablie)
is a philosophical theory about causation under which every "substance" only affects itself, but
all the substances (both bodies and minds) in the world nevertheless seem to causally interact
with each other because they have been programmed by God in advance to "harmonize" with
each other. Leibniz's term for these substances was "monads" which he described in a popular
work (Monadology 7) as "windowless".
An example:
An apple falls on Alice's head, apparently causing the experience of pain in her mind. In
fact, the apple does not cause the pain the pain is caused by some previous state of
Alice's mind. If Alice then seems to shake her hand in anger, it is not actually her mind
that causes this, but some previous state of her hand.
Leibniz's theory is best known as a solution to the mind-body problem of how mind can interact
with the body. However, Leibniz also rejected the idea of physical bodies affecting each other,
and explained all physical causation in this way.
Under pre-established harmony, the preprogramming of each mind must be extremely complex,
since only it itself causes its own thoughts or movements, for as long as it exists. In order to
appear to interact, each substance's "program" must contain a description of either the entire
universe, or of how the object is to behave at all times, during all "interactions" which will
appear to occur.
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It can also be noted that if a mind behaves as a windowless monad, there is no need for any other
object to exist in order to create that mind's sense perceptions, leading to a solipsistic universe
consisting only of that mind. Leibniz seems to admit this in his Discourse on Metaphysics.
However, he claims that his Principle of Harmony, according to which God creates the best and
most harmonious world possible, dictates that the perceptions (internal states) of each monad
"expresses" the world in its entirety, and the world expressed by the monad actually exists.
Although Leibniz says that each monad is "windowless," he also claims that it functions as a
"mirror" of the entire created universe.
On occasion, Leibniz styled himself as "the author of the system of preestablished harmony"
Ans 4 e): One of the primary representatives of skepticism about the external world was Ren
Descartes, who is often regarded as the first modern philosopher for his break with the
scholastic, medieval tradition that preceded him. Descartes was a mathematician, and wanted to
find a basis for truth that was as reliable as the mathematical truths of geometry. In his famous
book, Meditations on First Philosophy he searches for a founding principle upon which a theory
of truth can be based in the way that mathematical truths are all based on a smaller set of
foundations like calculus. He hoped to establish a sound basis for scientific method and prove
that the real source of truth and scientific knowledge was in the mind, and not in the external
senses. In order to show that science rested on firm foundations and that these foundations lay in
the mind and not the senses, Descartes began by bringing into doubt all the beliefs that come to
us from the senses. His aim in these arguments is not really to prove that nothing exists or that it
is impossible for us to know if anything exists (he will prove that we can know external objects
later), but to show that all our knowledge of these things through the senses is open to doubt. If
our scientific knowledge came to us through the senses, we could not even be sure that anything
outside of us existed. The obvious implication is that, since we do know that external objects
exist, this knowledge cannot come to us through the senses, but through the mind. Commenting
on his own method, Descartes remarked:
Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of the architect.
When an architect wants to build a house which is stable on ground where there is a sandy
topsoil over underlying rock, or clay, or some other firm base, he begins by digging out a set of
trenches from which he removes the sand, and anything resting on or mixed in with the sand, so
that he can lay his foundations on firm soil. In the same way, I began by taking everything that
was doubtful and throwing it out, like sand
Ans 4 f): Characteristics of Existentialism
The life of a human being is plagued by angst and despair. The world as filled with alienation
and absurdity. Since no philosophy can explain life, existence is actually a void. Pretty cheerful
view of the universe, right?
These ideas represent the perspective of many existentialists. They aimed to see the world
through the eyes of an individual human being, struggling to understand what he is doing on
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Earth. They were not interested in painting a rosy or optimistic picture of the world. Instead they
were willing to point out challenges that were often without solutions.
Have you ever felt like you don't know where you're going or if you're progressing forward?
From the point of view of existentialism, this absurd situation is a big part of all of our existence.
Absurdity in this case refers to the persistence of human beings in living out our lives, despite
little evidence that what we do matters to the greater universe. We create meaning in our lives
even when there is little or no evidence of a natural force protecting or guiding us. We simply
continue to exist aimlessly.
'Freedom' and 'authenticity' are also terms you'll hear from this philosophy. Authenticity
describes the attribute of taking responsibility for one's own experience, and not viewing your
experience as defined by outside forces such as the greater society, the universe, or God. An
authentic life is one in which you choose what matters, and create your own meaning. If you are
aware of this reality, you are free.
Ans 5 a): The Allegory of the Cave (also titled Plato's Cave or Parable of the Cave) is
presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic (514a520a) to compare
"...the effect of education () and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue
between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. Plato has
Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their
lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in
front of a fire behind them, and begin to designate names to these shadows. The shadows are as
close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a
prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not
make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows
seen by the prisoners.
Ans 5 b): Faith and reason are both sources of authority upon which beliefs can rest.
Reason generally is understood as the principles for a methodological inquiry,
whether intellectual, moral, aesthetic, or religious. Thus is it not simply the rules of
logical inference or the embodied wisdom of a tradition or authority. Some kind of
algorithmic demonstrability is ordinarily presupposed. Once demonstrated, a
proposition or claim is ordinarily understood to be justified as true or authoritative.
Faith, on the other hand, involves a stance toward some claim that is not, at least
presently, demonstrable by reason. Thus faith is a kind of attitude of trust or assent.
As such, it is ordinarily understood to involve an act of will or a commitment on the
part of the believer. Religious faith involves a belief that makes some kind of either
an implicit or explicit reference to a transcendent source. The basis for a person's
faith usually is understood to come from the authority of revelation. Revelation is
either direct, through some kind of direct infusion, or indirect, usually from the
testimony of another. The religious beliefs that are the objects of faith can thus be
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divided into those what are in fact strictly demonstrable (scienta) and those that
inform a believer's virtuous practices (sapientia).

Ans 5 c): The will to power (German: der Wille zur Macht) is a prominent concept in the
philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have
believed to be the main driving force in humans namely, achievement, ambition, and the
striving to reach the highest possible position in life. These are all manifestations of the will to
power; however, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's work, leaving its
interpretation open to debate.
Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology. This can be
contrasted to the other Viennese schools of psychotherapy: Sigmund Freud's pleasure principle
(will to pleasure) and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (will to meaning). Each of these schools
advocates and teaches a very different essential driving force in man.
Ans 5 d): Epistemology (from Greek , epistm, meaning "knowledge, understanding",
and , logos, meaning "study of") is a term first used by the Scottish philosopher James
Frederick Ferrier to describe the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of
knowledge and is also referred to as "theory of knowledge". Put concisely, it is the study of
knowledge and justified belief. It questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired, and
the extent to which knowledge pertinent to any given subject or entity can be acquired. Much of
the debate in this field has focused on the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and
how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification. The term was probably
first introduced in Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic: The Theory of Knowing and Being
Ans 5 h): Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of text interpretation, especially the
interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts.
Hermeneutics was initially applied to the interpretation, or exegesis, of scripture. It emerged as a
theory of human understanding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the
work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Modern hermeneutics includes both
verbal and nonverbal communication as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and
preunderstandings.
The terms "hermeneutics" and "exegesis" are sometimes used interchangeably. Hermeneutics is a
wider discipline which includes written, verbal, and nonverbal communication. Exegesis focuses
primarily upon texts.
Hermeneutic, as a singular noun, refers to some particular method of interpretation (see, in
contrast, double hermeneutic).

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"Hermeneutic consistency" refers to the analysis of texts to achieve a coherent explanation of

them. "Philosophical hermeneutics" refers primarily to the theory of knowledge initiated by
Martin Heidegger and developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Truth and Method (1960). It
sometimes refers to the theories of Paul Ricur.
Ans 1: Immanuel Kant (17241804) argued that moral requirements are based on a standard of
rationality he dubbed the Categorical Imperative (CI). Immorality thus involves a violation of
the CI and is thereby irrational. Other philosophers, such as Locke and Hobbes, had also argued
that moral requirements are based on standards of rationality. However, these standards were
either desire-based instrumental principles of rationality or based on sui generis rational
intuitions. Kant agreed with many of his predecessors that an analysis of practical reason will
reveal only the requirement that rational agents must conform to instrumental principles. Yet he
argued that conformity to the CI (a non-instrumental principle) and hence to moral requirements
themselves, can nevertheless be shown to be essential to rational agency. This argument was
based on his striking doctrine that a rational will must be regarded as autonomous, or free in the
sense of being the author of the law that binds it. The fundamental principle of morality the CI
is none other than the law of an autonomous will. Thus, at the heart of Kant's moral
philosophy is a conception of reason whose reach in practical affairs goes well beyond that of a
Humean slave to the passions. Moreover, it is the presence of this self-governing reason in each
person that Kant thought offered decisive grounds for viewing each as possessed of equal worth
and deserving of equal respect.
Kant's analysis of commonsense ideas begins with the thought that the only thing good without
qualification is a good will. While the phrases he's good hearted, she's good natured and she
means well are common, the good will as Kant thinks of it is not the same as any of these
ordinary notions. The idea of a good will is closer to the idea of a good person, or, more
archaically, a person of good will. This use of the term will early on in analyzing ordinary
moral thought in fact prefigures later and more technical discussions concerning the nature of
rational agency. Nevertheless, this idea of a good will is an important commonsense touchstone
to which he returns throughout his works. The basic idea is that what makes a good person good
is his possession of a will that is in a certain way determined by, or makes its decisions on the
basis of, the moral law. The idea of a good will is supposed to be the idea of one who only makes
decisions that she holds to be morally worthy, taking moral considerations in themselves to be
conclusive reasons for guiding her behavior. This sort of disposition or character is something we
all highly value. Kant believes we value it without limitation or qualification.
According to Kant, what is singular about motivation by duty is that it consists of bare respect
for lawfulness. What naturally comes to mind is this: Duties are created by rules or laws of some
sort. For instance, the bylaws of a club lay down duties for its officers. City and state laws
establish the duties of citizens. Thus, if we do something because it is our civic duty, or our

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duty as a boy scout or a good American, our motivation is respect for the code that makes it
our duty. Thinking we are duty bound is simply respecting certain laws pertaining to us.
Ans 2: Marxism as proposed by Karl Marx advances the following ideas. All the emphasized

phrases are Marxist jargon.

1. The most important features of a society are its economic classes and their relations to
each other in the modes of production of each historical epoch.
2. A class is defined by the relations of its members to the means of production.
3. Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production, the proletariat own only
their capacity to work. Landlords rule the land, and the peasants are less significant than
workers and are trapped in the idiocy of rural life. The proletariat definitely includes
those who produce objects in factories with their hands, but Marxists dither about
whether it includes people who work with their minds but are employees and live by their
salaries.
4. History is the history of class struggles among the classes in society. New progressive
classes arise that are related to new forms of production and struggle with the old. New
forms of society arise appropriate to the new forms of production when the new classes
win power. This doctrine is called historical materialism.
5. The state is the means whereby the ruling class forcibly maintains its rule over the other
classes.
6. The successive stages of history include primitive communism characterized by
equalitarian hunting and gathering, barbarism characterized by rule by chiefs, slave
society with a slave class and agriculture, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and
communism.
7. Most struggles in history are class struggles, even though the participants profess other
goals. For example, protestantism reflects the rising capitalist class.
8. New classes usually win power by revolution. Revolutions are violent, because the dying
ruling class doesn't give up power without a desperate struggle.
9. The capitalist class wins power over the feudal class by a bourgeois democratic
revolution. A bourgeois democratic revolution is a good thing in its day, because it gets
rid of feudal personal relations and replaces them by a cash nexus.
10. Capitalism creates the proletariat who have nothing to sell but their labor by bankrupting
the artisan classes and the petty bourgeoisie and driving them into the proletariat.

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11. The proletariat wins power by a proletarian revolution. According to Marx and Lenin,
this revolution must be violent, because the bourgeoisie won't give up power by electoral
means.
12. Neither Russia nor China had undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution when the
communists seized power. The communists undertook to build socialism anyway, and
some of their rival socialists used the missing bourgeois-democratic revolution to predict
that communist power would end badly.
13. Around the end of the 19th century Edouard Bernstein argued that it was possible to win
power peacefully by winning elections. This was revisionism and the orthodox Marxist
have used revisionism as an epithet ever since. "Revisionism" came to have more general
meanings than Bernstein's actual doctrine, because it could be applied to people who
denied Bernstein's doctrine but who could be accused of not being revolutionary enough.
14. Under capitalism the progressive class is the proletariat which is destined to overthrow
capitalism and establish socialism, which will eventually evolve into communism.
Ans 3 d): Phnomenologie des Geistes (1807) is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's most
important and widely discussed philosophical work. Hegel's first book, it describes the threestage dialectical life of Spirit. The title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit
or The Phenomenology of Mind, because the German word Geist has both meanings. The book's
working title, which also appeared in the first edition, was Science of the Experience of
Consciousness. On its initial publication (see cover image on right), it was identified as Part One
of a projected "System of Science", of which the Science of Logic was the second part. A smaller
work, titled Philosophy of Spirit (also translated as "Philosophy of Mind"), appears in Hegel's
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and recounts in briefer and somewhat altered form
the major themes of the original Phenomenology.
Phenomenology was the basis of Hegel's later philosophy and marked a significant development
in German idealism after Kant. Focusing on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, physics, ethics,
history, religion, perception, consciousness, and political philosophy, The Phenomenology is
where Hegel develops his concepts of dialectic (including the Master-slave dialectic), absolute
idealism, ethical life, and Aufhebung. The book had a profound effect in Western philosophy, and
"has been praised and blamed for the development of existentialism, communism, fascism, death
of God theology, and historicist nihilism.
Ans 3 b): Islamic philosophy is the systematic investigation of problems connected with life, the
universe, ethics, society, and so on as conducted in the Muslim world.
Early Islamic philosophy began in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar (early 9th century
CE) and lasted until the 6th century AH (late 12th century CE). The period is known as the
Islamic Golden Age, and the achievements of this period had a crucial influence on the
development of modern philosophy and science; for Renaissance Europe, the influence
represented one of the largest technology transfers in world history.. This period began with alMPY-02

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Kindi in the 9th century and ended with Averroes (Ibn Rushd) at the end of 12th century. The
death of Averroes effectively marked the end of a particular discipline of Islamic philosophy
usually called the Peripatetic Arabic School, and philosophical activity declined significantly in
Western Islamic countries such as Islamic Spain and North Africa.
Philosophy persisted for much longer in the Eastern countries, in particular Persia and India
where several schools of philosophy continued to flourish: Avicennism, Illuminationist
philosophy, Mystical philosophy, and Transcendent theosophy. Ibn Khaldun, in his
Muqaddimah, made important contributions to the philosophy of history. Interest in Islamic
philosophy revived during the Nahda (awakening) movement in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and continues to the present day.

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