View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What consequence does Locke describe if there were individual words for each thing?

2. In what way was Locke's perspective unique in the debate between free will and fate?

3. What modern movement did Locke prefigure in his arguments about philosophical language?

4. What happens to love over time, according to Locke?

5. What does Locke say about the form of signs and words?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Locke suggest philosophers curb the abuse of words?

2. What is the debate between determinists and libertarians?

3. What does Locke achieve by claiming that good and evil come from pleasure and pain?

4. What does Locke say words ultimately refer to?

5. What is abstraction, according to Locke?

6. How does Locke resolve the debate between determinists and libertarians?

7. Why are most words general, according to Locke?

8. What is the correspondence theory of truth?

9. What problem is Locke trying to address with his discussion of identity in consciousness and identity in body?

10. What does Locke say is the only way to understand the properties of things?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What was the historical effect of Locke's philosophy? What preceded it, and what proceeded from it? What historical development can Locke's work be seen as a part of? Describe his place in that development.

Essay Topic 2

In what way is Locke defining a science of knowledge, and in what way is "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" a book of philosophy? Does Locke's taxonomy of knowledge make his philosophy scientific? What would it mean if we define "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" as science, as a taxonomy of ideas, rather than as philosophy?

Essay Topic 3

How would Locke account for the philosophy of deconstruction--or the notion that language is ultimately self-referential, and that meaning is eternally deferred, never arriving at an object per se? Is Locke's theory of language predicated on an ultimate arrival, or can it handle the notion that truth is, in Nietzsche's phrase, a mobile army of metaphors?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 913 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample