1. For the overwhelming majority of Enlightenment philosophers and all of the American founders, the important questions were about what?
2.What was the presiding deity of the American Revolution?
3. What consensus view of America's philosophical history did Carl Becker articulate?
4. Who "raised Giordano Bruno from the ashes..." and what was his "game"?
5. Why did Spinoza and Locke insist that we may know of God?
6. What Spinozistic (and possibly Lockean) view of God and nature did Bruno anticipate?
7. Why, according to Spinoza, do "the mass of men believe they are free"?
8. What was Epicurus's "most problematic doctrine"?
9. How did Alexander Pope "track" Spinoza on our perception of evil?
10. What does Locke's conclusion that "God is a thinking thing" mean, in comparison with Spinoza's view?
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11. What was Ethan Allen's vision of the hereafter?
12. What was a common saying about doctors and atheists, in the Middle Ages?
13. What definitive teaching of the radical (Enlightenment) philosophy revolutionized the early modern world?
14. How have human beings made themselves special?
15. Where does the common conception of religion really begin?
16. Belief is a matter of _____, not ____.
17. What purely-Spinozistic implications follow from Locke's most famous slogan in his Essay?
18. When did Hume give up on supernatural religion?
19. Where, according to Spinoza, is mind?
20. What fundamental Spinozistic idea does Locke "float" in the fourth book of his Essay?
DQ
- If it is the nature of "God" to just be nature and its laws, are we still talking about God?
- What's your view of "miracles"?
- In what sense do you consider yourself free?
- Would you rather live in a universe in which atoms and events "swerve" unaccountably, or in which they conform to law-like necessity?
- If our knowledge were complete, would we perceive no evil in the universe? Is suffering an illusion?
- Are we the universe's organ of thought?
- Are medical scientists more or less likely than others to be atheists? Should they be?
- In what respects do you see yourself as part of nature, and as something other than nature? Is culture a part of nature? Is our concept of nature simply cultural?
- In what respects do you see yourself and our species as special, and as nothing very special?
- Is it possible to really believe what you cannot explain? 217
- Is all knowledge from sensation and reflection? Where else could it come from?
- What do you think of Andy Clark's "extended mind" theory? (See the recent New Yorker profile...)
DQ: In what respects do you see yourself as part of nature, and as something other than nature? Is culture a part of nature? Is our concept of nature simply cultural?
ReplyDeleteAns: I consider everything, including humans and human minds, natural. I do not think that anything truly unnatural can come out of a natural universe. Even the things that we produce, and so often consider unnatural, are made from materials that are natural at their source. For example, plastic is something we may consider as unnatural because it is man-made and non-biodegradable in nature. However, its source is petroleum which comes from the biodegradation of prehistoric natural creatures and plants. Additionally, there is more to nature than we could ever fully know, as Spinoza and others point out. For instance, there is a bacteria that can consume plastics that has probably existed for eons. However, until we produced plastic we did not know there was a bacteria that could do that. Or, maybe it evolved to after we produced the plastics. At any rate, this does make you wonder if we could ever even produce something truly unnatural, something that nature had no part in helping create and could not correct for eventually. As a matter of fact, we could not really be involved in producing something unnatural, or it would have been produced by something natural. But, I have to admit I am a Spinozist at heart.
As for our culture, I do believe that human partnership and cooperation is something that evolved naturally as a means of survival. And, unfortunately I do think our concept of nature is very warped, especially in non-indigenous cultures around the world. I think we wish that we were somehow above nature, and that we could go on using it up for our own selfish desires. But, we are a part of nature and we depend on it in ways we cannot fathom because we have not taken the time to get to know ourselves within it. And, that may be our downfall.