|
|
|
Instructions to candidates:
1. Answer TWO questions. Each question carries equal marks.
2. You may not answer a question previously chosen as an essay.
3. You may take NO MORE THAN 200 words of notes into the examination, which must be handed in with the script at the end.
________________________________________________________________
1. "Everything remains in the state in which it is if there is nothing to change it..." (Leibniz)
Is this true of your mind?
2. "Ah. you pedants. hangmen. turnkeys. lawmakers, you shavepate rabble… What is to become of your laws, your ethics, your religion, your gallows, your Gods and your Heaven and your Hell when it shall be proven that such a flow of liquids, this variety of fibres, that degree of pungency in the blood or in the animal spirits are sufficient to make a man the object of your givings and your takings away?" (The Marquis de Sade)
How do you answer?
3. Is the idea of altering what has already happened coherent?
4. Are there any things that no human-made device will ever be able to do?
5. "The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened: they begin to cry: 'Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!' Indeed, the last eight months have seen a strange spectacle in the town — a standing army of 14,000 men and women subsidized by the trades unions and workshops of all parts of the United Kingdom, to fight out a grand social battle for mastery with the capitalists, and the capitalists of Preston, on their side, held up by the capitalists of Lancashire." (Karl Marx)
Could this 'strange spectacle' have been predicted?
6. "... [T]he use of the very word 'determinism' is in some degree misleading. For it tends to suggest that one event is somehow in the power of another, whereas the truth is merely that they are factually correlated." (A.J. Ayer)
Is this the truth?
________________________________________________________________
|
|
Prepared by VP Created 21:04:07 A module of the BA Philosophy programme Centre for Professional Ethics | University of Central Lancashire | e-mail hhoughton@uclan.ac.uk |
