Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, d'Holbach, James

1.  What is the Allegory of the Cave in Plato's *Republic*?  What is the significance of it?  What does it indicate about the distinction between appearance and reality?
2.  What is the distinction between the world of becoming and the world of being?
3.  What is it that the philosopher, the true lover of wisdom, seeks to discover?
4.  What is Descartes' purpose in writing the "Meditations on First Philosophy"?
5.  Descartes enumerates major grounds for doubt.  What are they, and what are they designed to accomplish?
6.  Define the "resolutive-compositive method"
7.  According to Descartes, what is the very first thing of which one may be absolutely certain?
8.  What is Descartes' criterion of truth?  What is the character of things known according to this criterion?
9.  What is a "thinking thing"?
10.  According to Descartes, what is the classification of our thoughts?
12.  For Descartes, the source of error is in our judgments.  What does this have to do with ideas?
13.  Make a clear distinction between Descartes' concepts of formal and objective reality.
14.  How does Descartes go about showing that the idea of God must be innate?
15.  What is the Principle of Universal Causation?  What is the Causal Adequacy Principle?  How does Descartes use them in his Cosmological Argument for the existence of God in Meditatioins, III?
16.  What is the materialist's distinction between primary and secondary qualities?
17.  What is the wax experiment, and what is its significance?
18.  Berkeley rejects the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.  How does he do this?
19.  How does Philonous (Berkeley) defend himself against the charge of skepticism brought against him by Hylas (the materialist)?
20.  What is the representative (causal) theory of perception?  Why does Berkeley claim that it is an untenable position to hold?
21.  What, according to Berkeley, does the materialist claim are the major characteristics of material things?
22.  If Berkeley is right that matter cannot be a substratum of qualities that are perceived, then what must be the source of ideas/qualities?
23.  What does Berkeley's metaphysical and epistemological position have to do with god?
24.  Explain what it means when Berkeley claims that "to be is to be perceived or to perceive."
25.  What is the distinction between hard determinism, soft determinism, and indeterminism?
26.  What are the tow major types of hard determinism?
27.  In what ways are soft determinists in agreement with hard determinists?
28.  How does d'Holbach define 'will'?
29.  How does he define and describe 'free will'?
30.  How does William James define and describe 'soft determinsm'?
31.  What does it mean to say that there is a "loose play among the parts of the universe" and that "possibilities exceed actualities" for William James?
32.  What is the dilemma of determinism?  What does it have to do with judgments of regret?