Quiz Reviews

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Reviews of the weekly quizzes…

Below are the basic elements in a good answer. Full credit requires that your answers are explained in your own clear, down-to-earth language. If the language in the lectures or readings is helpful, you can use some of it, but you will lose points if you borrow from sources outside the class. I want to see how you understand and interact with these ideas, not software or the internet.

Use these reviews to make corrections/clarifications to your reading questions answers. This will help with your exams.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by jsalbato@cnm.edu.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review – Quiz #1

Here are the basic elements in a good answer. (Please make corrections/clarifications to your Reading Questions answers. This will help with your Final Exam.):

1. The tasks for each week are listed at the top of our webpage: (1) Do the readings while (2) answering the Reading Questions, then (3) watch the videos to get further clarity in your answers, then (4) take the Friday Quiz.

2. Our readings, reading questions, and videos (schedule, discussion board, roster, and grades) are all on jeffsreadings.com (We will only use Brightspace for taking quizzes and turning in exams.)

3. Password: I can’t paste it here, because of Russian bots (I wish I was kidding), but it starts with “f” and ends with “3”

4. The best prep for the Friday quizzes is the Reading Questions, because most of the quiz comes straight from those questions. (But please be sure to read the questions carefully, because there are some subtle differences from the reading questions that I want you to think about. You can paste some of your reading questions answers straight over, but this won’t work for all of the quiz questions.)

5. The Friday quizzes cannot be made up, but there are many extra points built into the quizzes and final exam to make up for missing a quiz or two. So, if you miss a quiz or have a bad week, getting high scores on the next two quizzes will get you caught up quickly. There are no “extra credit” assignments.

6. Grades are based on earning points (not percentage; that’s way harder). For example, a “B” is earned when you get 80 points (out of the 126 possible, that is only 64%…you see, Jeff is a softy).

7. Philosophy is the study of the presuppositions in all fields of thought. (Philosophy is the home of genuine critical thinking, carefully checking the support for all of our ideas, even the ones that we assume and seem obvious.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review – Quiz #2
1. My belief is only true if it agrees with reality. My believing it has no effect on its truth.
2. We test the basic rationality of a value claim by seeing if it is consistent with the facts and with the author’s other beliefs and values. This requires us to get to know the author of the claim to see what their values are.
3. You grow a beard (I am so ashamed of my immaturity.)
4. The Cave story mocks the “seeing is believing” mindset, because it shows the cave-dwellers (most people) staring at illusions and mistaking them for reality. If all you see is deception, then your beliefs will be delusions. And, in Plato’s view, the whole physical world of sight is deceptive.
5. Our everyday, physical world is untrustworthy for three reasons (pick two): 1. The world is always changing, 2. Our perspectives are always changing, and 3. The theories we use to interpret the world are always changing. (But, note, that doesn’t mean that objective truth doesn’t exist, it just isn’t found using everyday perception. It is found in the realm of ideals, like math and philosophy.)
6. The sailors rejected the new captain because he didn’t have “practical experience” and didn’t use his everyday perceptions like most people. Instead, his trick was to use unchanging truths (astronomy and math, in this case), instead of ordinary sight. The larger point is that theorists and philosophers are often ridiculed, but their ideas are often more sound than the changing view of the masses. (Which is why you should stop making fun of Jeff and instead give him baked goods.)
7. Philosophy is the study of presuppositions in all fields of knowledge. The Cave prisoners are us, and their stupidity and stubbornness about their assumptions should inspire us to want to study philosophy to check our assumptions so that we can escape our stupid and oppressive caves.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #3
1. (If you were lazy and asked Professor Google, it said “human existence”, but that is not helpful at all, so make sure you never just put what Google says.) Dasein is the only entity that is concerned with its own being. It is a being that doesn’t know what it is and realizes it won’t always “be” (i.e. death). You and I, as self-conscious humans, are such entities.
2. Since I am thinking abut this crazy question, this question and thinking about and typing my answer to it are phenomenologically closest to me right now. Everything else fades into the background so that I can concentrate on this task.
3. A steering wheel normally appears as an everyday tool I can just take for granted (i.e. ready-to-hand). It barely appears at all…it is “just” a steering wheel. The other items are not normally taken for granted but are more mysterious.
4. Ready-to-hand is an experience where things barely appear at all because it is so familiar that we pay almost no attention to it so that we can focus on the task. The ready-to-hand fades from awareness, so it looks like its almost not there at all, but we know it is there, because we are using it.
5. If math or my job is directly related to my life goals (you will need this math in your career or your job is in your career field), then to concentrate on my current task I have to forget about those longer goals and let them fade into the background to concentrate on each task. This can be bad, because I might lose sight of those goals. For most people, however, math class and their job are not connected to their goals and those goals do not appear at all except when daydreaming. This is really bad because you will likely continue at these irrelevant tasks and never reach anything you seek.
6. If your death became truly present-at-hand this would mean we are studying death objectively to assess the value of our pro-jects. This is because you realize that all of our projects are ending (breaking), and this, if Jeff’s hopes are realized, would allow us to study all of the projects behind our everyday tasks and evaluate them to assess their worth. “Since I am dying (we all are, by the way), do I really want to do this task to achieve that goal? Wait, I am not even working toward any of the goals that matter. Damn it! Please help me Jeff, and here are some baked goods for bringing this life-changing fact to my attention.” (Or, you know, something like that.)
7. (This is a tough question, sorry) “a. I am” the They. Remember, the They is everyone and oneself, but always no one in particular. The They cannot be located as a definite thing, whereas the other choices are definite things. This is the worst thing about the They, that is, that it cannot be ignored or defied, because it is not definable, but we know what it thinks, because it is what we think. (spooky)
8. The They says, “Sure, death will happen to you, but not soon, so don’t think about it. You have plenty of time to take control of your life someday. For now, just keep working at the Krusty Krab to buy another companion cube.” (Note: Krusty Krab = your job/school; companion cube = your phone)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #4
1. Hell is other people! Because we hate being so dependent on them to accept our (chosen and often delusional) social identities.
2. Garcin cannot leave because he must first convince Estelle and Inez that he is the tough guy that he thinks he is.
3. Estelle needs her mirror, because a mirror is how superficial people try to control how other people see them, and so without it her identity is up for grabs. And even if you aren’t purely superficial, we all still try to control the “self” we portray to others, whether it is Jeff’s “I’m a kind nerd” or your “I want people to see me as someone who doesn’t care what they think.” (Wicked irony, eh?)
4. We are all desperate to get other people to accept us as the person we think we are and are devastated when we fail. We want to BE that identity, but we can’t if the They won’t acknowledge it.
5. Bad Faith is a lie to oneself, where you are fully conscious of the lie and deceive yourself intentionally. These lies are used to avoid current choices or deny our responsibility for past choices. This can be done by either pretending you don’t have the transcendent ability to alter your facticity or by denying your concrete circumstances that call for a choice. (2)
6. We use these Bad Faith lies to avoid current choices and deny past choices. If I say “I’m a procrastinator”, then I can pretend I had no choice but to do poorly. This way we can pretend that it’s not our fault that our life turns out the way it does.
7. He doesn’t “have to” do any of this. He makes the choice to act like a robot for tips instead of choosing to be himself, get another job, etc. In choosing to be a fake, he is freely valuing tips and fakeness over all of the other things he could value more, like his happiness, his freedom, being authentic, being genuinely kind to others, etc.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #5
1. Our list is: love/companionship, freedom/expression, acceptance/recognition, and purpose/meaning. (And, of course, there are also our baseline physiological and security/safety needs.)
2. A neurosis is a failure in the Reality Principle. In other words, it is a behavior that shows an inability to accept reality in seeking to meet your needs. I am out of touch with reality if I think the shoes I bought express my genuine thoughts and feelings and not just my copying others to gain acceptance for a fake version of myself. The designer of the shoes is expressing her actual self; I’m not.
3. If our needs are only partially met we begin to psychologically deteriorate and will usually develop neurotic traits to try to artificially cope with these needs being unmet (like having a fake self, bad faith, etc.).
4. Selfishness is a defect in that it will lead to difficulties in meeting our real needs, and it is socially patterned in that this is a common, and even encouraged, behavior in our society. (And so the selfish person has a hard time seeing their defect, because they see many others being selfish and being applauded for it…like being given the highest political office on earth…zing!)
5. Product alienation is caused by the product never being yours but only the owners, and it reflects only their choices and skills.
6. Activity alienation robs the worker of expression, and this forced behavior during work results in mental exhaustion and the need for artificial self-expression.
7. Georg avoided product alienation because his product was his and reflected his choices and skills, and he avoided activity alienation because he freely and creatively decides how to do his job. (And this is why he is satisfied in his needs for acceptance and expression.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #6
1. The secretary is nowhere near equal to her boss in salary, social respect, or opportunity, but the trick our society pulls is to make her “feel” equal by having the same expensive tastes and values as her boss, driving a nice car, having the same clothing brands, cell phone, attitudes towards poor people, etc.
2. The key to oppression today is giving people expensive artificial needs that can never be satisfied, so they will oppress themselves in jobs to make as much money as possible to afford these inexhaustible fake needs.
3. The key steps in the cycle are:
You want to fulfill some expensive artificial need. These needs are not actually fulfilling of your real needs so they must be constantly replaced and cause you to go into debt. You overwork at an alienating job just to make as much money as you can to afford them. The alienated nature of such jobs makes your dissatisfaction even worse. So you buy even more false needs to compensate for your alienated and dissatisfying life…. Repeat…
4. Being lazy and hating your job are unnatural, but they are the standard, psychological results of alienated work. If you associate effort with working an alienated job, you’ll think it is normal to hate all work and find all activity exhausting.
5. They asked for their manuscript and accused the other person of stealing it. The interesting part is they made up total lies to justify their false belief.
6. You believe Apple, because the ads and social effects of the brand is like hypnosis, with no real evidence given to support why you should agree with them. Then, you act and feel on the belief by buying the phone and feeling joy that you are now rad, too. Finally, this last step is key, you repeat or make up total lies to try to make sense of your totally irrational belief and actions. (Your real reasons are something like, “People will see that I have the same overpriced phone as millions of people and think I fit in and am rich,” but you will tell yourself “It has a great camera, my old phone is uncool, and I’m an Apple person.”)
7. “Marketing Orientation” explains how we value ourselves as if we are products to be bought, so we go to the gym because we think if we improve our looks we will be worth more in other’s eyes and so we’ll feel better about ourselves as products.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #7
1. The basic rule of Stoicism is to concern yourself only with things you can control.
2. For beginners, the first step is to get rid of all desires, because a beginner has no desires that are in their control and so must first repress all desires until desires in their control can be found.
3. Our career depends on many things we can’t control, from the economy and the politicians and pandemics that affect it, the people that hire and fire us, the whims of people’s tastes that choose to buy our products and services, etc.
4. d. a cup
5. Selfishness is a special brand of self-interest wherein the person would harm others to benefit themselves, whereas self-interest is a neutral term. Self-interest is perfectly consistent with being kind to others, caring for your society, etc.
6. He immediately seduces the queen, killed the king, and took over the kingdom.
7. The fact that so many of us lock our doors, lock up our wealth, and own guns for protection seems to show that we agree with Hobbes when he says humanity is selfish and cruel.
8. Hobbes is exaggerating, because we are not locking our doors because we fear all of humanity… we lock our doors out of fear of a small minority of people who are either mentally unhinged or socially desperate.

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #8
1. Unless there was a situation of scarcity, the Savage would not care and simply find fruit at another tree, because she has no conception of property.
2. The Savage mind sees someone suffering and naturally identifies with the sufferer and feels their pain. Thus, they are moved to help the sufferer to relieve their own empathetic feelings of pain.
3. The civilized man covered his ears and talked himself out of identifying with the person’s suffering, so that they could rationalize not getting involved. In other words, Rousseau is saying that anyone’s first response is to help a person in distress, but our social self makes great efforts to find a way to rationalize not helping.
4. First they would feel bad for the suffering of the Chinese, (second, they would theorize about what effects it might have on the global economy and their investments), and, lastly, they would go on with their lives as if it never happened.
5. The young man with (the curse of) ambition is embarrassed by his simple life, and so decided to compete with others his whole career and kisses the butts (this is what “obsequious” means) of his superiors. In the end he realizes that he wasted his life in these pursuits and would have been happier to stay with his former, simple life. (And, yes, this is the godfather of capitalism saying that capitalism sucks for the workers but is good for the economy.)
6. The Invisible Hand is saying that God curses people with ambition so that they will feel compelled to complete with others to get rich and grow our economy. The idea is that the rich person must share their abundant wealth and employ others to maintain their wealth, and this will lead to the money tickling down to the working class and poor to the point where everyone wins. (Note: Smith goes to great lengths to say this is not because of charity or justice but all happens against the wishes of the rich, who are completely selfish. In other words, God tricks them. And, yes, this has been the central theory our economy has been built around since the 1980s.)

[jsalbato@cnm.edu]

Review Quiz #9
1. The World Bank said that toxic waste should be dumped in Less Developed Countries because the way you determine the cost of causing someone to be ill or die is based on how much money they would have earned if they weren’t sick or dead. So, kill people with the lowest wages. (Barf!)
2. If Ford spent $11 on each Pinto, it wouldn’t have burst into flames, but Ford calculated that that would be more expensive than paying for the deaths, so Ford decided to NOT fix the Pinto to save money for their Stockholders (a.k.a. “society”).
3. Anderson said he was not responsible for the deaths because (pick two): a. He didn’t directly kill anyone or order killing, b. He was just following orders, c. He was just trying to do his job to the best of his abilities, d. The laws agreed with him, e. “Good society” approved his efforts, f. He was following in the footsteps of a great, successful man.
4. In the other variations the authority tells them to shock the subjects, and, in each situation, some people disobey. In variations 12 and 14 the authority tells them to stop shocking the subjects. The simple answer is that human nature does not want to hurt people, and so when someone tells them not to hurt people, they obey perfectly.
5. In variation #18 obedience climbed all the way to 93% because of the introduction of peers who obeyed the authority, so, in a group setting, the vast majority of us would obey orders to kill because the orders are combined with the powerful forces of group conformity. So, if you are a member of a social group that is obeying authority, such as in a religious or military group, the pressure to obey is practically overwhelming. (And then you can add on the shared ideology that gives you some belief in your own goodness and the other’s badness…and damn!)
6. The key factors were: a. Absorb the subject in a technical task so that in this ready-to-hand mode they will ignore the big picture. b. Demonstrate that an authority figure is responsible, and so you can pretend you have no choice (bad faith), c. Provide an institution or project that justifies the situation to make it easier for you to rationalize your obedience. “It’s bad to hurt people, but this is for science, freedom, my country, God,” etc. d. Foster an atmosphere that encourages norms of hierarchy and obedience so you can feel like your are being a good person by playing your role, e. Leave room for the subjects to devalue their victims to help them insanely rationalize that the victim, somehow, deserves this or doesn’t matter. f. Have the subjects enter the situation voluntarily, because they will feel obligated to “keep their promise”, and g. Escalate the harms the subjects cause gradually so that they can build up their rationalizations.

[Author]

Posts