Review Questions
4.1 Historiography and the History of Philosophy
1
.
What are the advantage and disadvantages of a presentist approach to the history of philosophy?
2
.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of a contextualist approach to the history of philosophy?
3
.
What approach to the history of philosophy represents a middle ground between the presentists and the contextualists?
4.2 Classical Philosophy
4
.
What evidence suggests that many of the ideas that we attribute to Greek philosophers may have had their origin in ancient Egypt or Babylonia?
5
.
How can one justify Parmenides’s claim that the world is unchanging?
6
.
What are Aristotle’s four causes, and how did he apply them?
7
.
Why did the Epicureans embrace empiricism?
8
.
How did Neoplatonism adapt Plato’s theory of forms to explain the imperfections in the world a perfect God created?
4.3 Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Philosophy
9
.
How is Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophy different from classical philosophy?
10
.
How did Philo of Alexandria develop Plato and Aristotle’s ideas to explain the creation?
11
.
How did Ibn Sina’s scientific approach differ from that of the Aristotle and the Epicureans?