Notes for Looking at Philosophy



Chapter Seven: Pragmatism, the Analytic Tradition, and the Phenomenological Tradition and Its Aftermath (the 20th century)

. After reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the following concepts/terms (several of which appear in earlier chapters and may be review for you):

1) pragmatism

2) semiology

3) Cartesian

4) Empiricism

5) Metaphysical

6) Correspondence theory

7) Coherence theory

8) Rationalism

9) Idealism

10) Epistemology

11) Ockham’s razor

12) Law of the excluded middle

13) Synthesis

14) Logical positivism

15) Analytic

16) Synthetic

17) Incorrigibility

18) Atomic facts

19) Linguistic

20) Reductionism

21) Holism

22) Quantum mechanics

23) Phenomenology

24) Etymologies

25) Neologism

26) Absurd (in the philosophical sense of the word)

27) Signifier and signified

28) Structuralism

29) Functionalism

30) Psychoanalysis

31) Metonymy

32) Deconstruction (in the philosophical sense of the word)

33) Phallocentrism

34) Patriarchy

35) misogyny

36) pre-oedipal

37) Existentialism

You should pay attention to the beliefs and contributions of the following figures/schools of thought:

1) William James

2) John Dewey

3) George Edward Moore

4) Bertrand Russell

5) Ludwig Wittgenstein

6) William Quine

7) Edmund Husserl

8) Martin Heidegger

9) Jean-Paul Sartre (you will also be reading Sartre’s plays in Senior Seminar)

10) Ferdinand de Saussure

11) Claude Levi-Strauss

12) Jacques Lacan

13) Jacques Derrida

14) Luce Irigaray

You should be able to answer the following questions/respond to the following prompts:

1) Analyze the three following assertions, first using William James’ pragmatic theory of meaning and then his theory of truth:

a. The world is flat.

b. Reality is only a dream.

c. After your death, your soul will be directed to either heaven or hell, depending on God’s judgment of your life.

2) What in general is the pragmatists’ idea of useless thought? What kind of thinking is useful?

3) According to the logical positivists, all assertions are either analytic, synthetic, or nonsense. What function does this thesis have for the logical positivists? What is the main weakness of the logical positivists’ thesis?

4) What would the logical positivists like about Quine’s philosophy? What would they dislike?

5) Attack or defend Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation” thesis.

6) What does Heidegger mean when he “calls us back to a remembrance of Being”? What stands in the way of our responding to this call, according to Heidegger?

7) Sartre on the topic of our relations to other people.

8) Explain how Saussure’s linguistic theory influenced Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstruction.

Plus anything from our handouts.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download