Core Humanities
Take-Home Exam (Monday Evening Class Only)
NAME______________________
Instructions: For the multiple choice questions, you may either underline or somehow
highlight your answer or else just delete the others, whatever is easier, so long as you
make clear what your answer is. For the short answers, simply type them into the body
of this document in the blank spaces provided. Feel free to write as much as you want
but I only need three or four sentences per answer.
(1) Aristotle, Plato’s famous student, believed that all things on earth are composed
of some combination of the four primary elements: earth, fire, water, and air.
Things that are primarily composed of the heavier elements (water and earth)
naturally move down whereas things primarily composed of the lighter elements
(air and fire) naturally move up. Newton, of course, called this “gravity.” What
branch of philosophy is Aristotle dealing with here?
a. Aesthetics
b. Ontology
c. Physics
d. Metaphysics
e. Epistemology
(2) Short Answer: Hermes Trismegistus, the reputedly ancient Egyptian philosopher
and magus, famously said “as above, so below,” to indicate humanity’s drive to
raise itself closer to God and to divinity in general. Thinking about King’s
definition of an “unjust law” in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in what way
might King agree with Hermes about how we ought to structure our
human/manmade laws?
(3) In another of Aristotle’s texts, he discussed how the universe was set in motion by
an unmoved mover, an absolute power that created and set in motion all the
mechanisms of nature though it, itself, was neither created nor set in motion by
anything else (God, in a sense). In discussing this unmoved mover, what branch
of philosophy is Aristotle dealing with here?
a. Epistemology
b. Logic
c. Metaphysics
d. Physics
e. Aesthetics
(4) W.E.B. Dubois told a story in Souls of Black Folk about an encounter he had
when he was a young boy with a young white girl who saw him not as an equal
human being but as something less than human. He saw himself in one way and
saw himself through the eyes of the girl in another way (he called this a kind of
“double-consciousness”). Who else talked about this kind of experience of seeing
others as an “it” rather than a “thou”?
a. Plato
b. Socrates
c. Martin Buber
d. St. Augustine
(5) In the television show, Ancient Aliens, Giorgio Tsoukalos is famous for his
peculiar sort of logic: whenever anything happened in human history that is
difficult to explain from a modern perspective, his answer is always “therefore
aliens must have done it.” He won’t budge on that position, despite evidence to
the contrary. And though I love him dearly, he’s clearly participating in what
Peirce would call the:
a. Method of Inquiry
b. Method of Tenacity
c. Method of Authority
d. A priori Method
(6) Short Answer: thinking about someone who is operating in what Peirce might call
the method of tenacity or the method of authority, in order to break them free
from this, what must the “gadfly” do? In other words, thinking about that cycle of
belief formation in Peirce, what is the role of the gadfly in getting people to start
learning again?
(7) Thousands of years before Christ, he had a doctrine of “turn the other cheek” and
thousands of years before Socrates, he explained why the “unexamined life is not
worth living.” Who was he?
a. Leke Adeofe
b. Ptah-Hotep
c. Zar’a Ya’aquob
d. Lucius T. Outlaw
(8) Short Answer: of the three parts to the human essence, according to Adeofe, is it
mind, body, or destiny that creates an individual human being’s personal identity?
Explain why it’s the one and not the other two.
(9) Short Answer: what was Appiah’s general critique of Afrocentrism? What does
he suggest instead?
(10)
Short Answer (easy one): we’re about to start a long section on
comparative major world religions. We’ll be covering Buddhism, Hinduism,
Sikhism, Sufism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam along with some ancient
religions like Zoroastrianism and Shamanism, generally understood. Which of
these are you most looking forward to learning more about and why?