Nonfiction and Philosophy - CLEP Humanities

In the Bible, the books of Exodus through Deuteronomy tell of the departure of the Hebrew people from Egypt. The classic moment in this sojourn is their time at Mount Sinai. This is where the so-called Ten Commandments were said to be presented by God to Moses. Whatever might be the historical accuracy of this overall tale, this is an important fact to know, as the experience of the Hebrew people in the desert was pivotal for their self-identity. This would remain a continuing motif throughout their scriptures as well as in the Christian scriptures as well, which would present Jesus as a kind of second Moses.

To most people, Thales is known for two things. On the one hand, he is known for his position that all things are made up of water. This thesis was an honest attempt to explain experience by experience alone. Water is involved in many things and processes, so it seemed to him to be a good candidate for what makes up everything in the world—letting one thing change into another.

He is also known for the story of how he was laughed at when he fell into a well. He is presented like this in the Theaetetus of Plato. This makes him seem like an airy philosopher, who was staring at the stars without any awareness of his surroundings—"with his head in the clouds." In his Politics, Aristotle does tell at tale about how Thales put his knowledge to use to make a profit, so as to prove to the unbelieving that philosophy can be useful if need be. Be that as it may, the story from the Theaetetus is perhaps the best known story about Thales.

In the course of the discussions of the Republic, Plato uses the Allegory of the Cave to explain the nature of education (at least as he believes it is). The general idea is that education is a matter of conversion, turning the soul from false images to the actual reality of the truth. The Allegory tells the tale of prisoners, locked up in an underground cave, unable to move their heads, looking at shadows projected on the wall by others. They learn how to guess about the shadows but never even realize that they are just the projections of objects on sticks.

Then, someone (i.e. a philosopher) comes along and turns a prisoner around, taking of his shackles. Forcefully, the philosopher shows that person that he has not been experiencing reality but instead has only been looking at shadows. He drags that person out of the cave so as show him what things really are. (Hence, the Allegory proposes that the philosopher teaches him about the way to see the ultimate truths of reality.)

Thomas Aquinas, the preeminent medieval Catholic philosopher and theologian, is best known for the massive Summa Theologiœ, which in Latin means "a summation of theology." Aquinas sought to summarize Christian scriptures, classical philosophy like that of Aristotle, and Christian theology like that of Augustine. Thomas Aquinas was attempting to unify all previous thought in the Western tradition to make logical and rational arguments for Christian doctrine.

Immanuel Kant was a profoundly influential philosopher who helped reshape philosophical trends in Europe around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Key to his thought was that moral imperatives needed to be absolute and grounded in reason. Kant referred to this imperative as the "categorical imperative," which was an argument that there is always an absolute moral right that should be followed.

The French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to the United States in 1831 ostensibly to study prison reform in the new nation. During his time in the United States, he took copious notes and undertook some travels to help him understand the newly formed democratic republic. After his return to Europe, he penned the text Democracy in America, which gave a kind of "outsider's look" at the new nation and its institutions.

Although written by a foreigner, it was quite perspicuous on many trends in American governance and culture. To this day, it remains a text that various political factions (of differing allegiances) quote seemingly to their own personal advantage. Though certainly "high level" and dated, it remains an important text for understanding the founding of the United States of America.

After the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, many people in Britain sought a way to combat religious divisions and conflicts. John Locke, an early enlightenment figure, set out a theory of religious toleration in his Letters Concerning Toleration, which were published without his knowledge by the letters' recipient. Locke actually only advocated toleration for any Protestant believers, as he argued both atheists and Catholics were enemies of the English state.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was published in the aftermath of the chaos of the English Civil War. Hobbes began with an extremely negative view of human life and the human condition. His full phrasing of the human condition was in the following quotation: "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (XIII.9)

The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is well known for being a leading figure in "rationalism," the philosophy that holds that reason is the chief source of knowledge. Descartes' most famous phrase is almost a perfect summation of this viewpoint. "Cogito, ergo sum," a Latin phrase meaning "I think, therefore I am," asserts in one phrase that existence is proved by a person thinking.

In his Discourse on Method and his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes undertakes a radical reevaluation of everything that he currently believes. He questions everything in order to find out what he actually knows is true. Particularly in the Meditations, he develops a detailed thought experiment in which a potential "evil genius" or evil spirit deceives him—even to the point of making him doubt his senses as well as his very ideas about mathematical facts. Thus, he notices, in the midst of this confusion, that one thing remains—even when he doubts and is potentially deceived, he must at least exist. In order to be fooled, you must actually be. This realization becomes a moment of liberation for him, and he then proceeds to prove that the world does in fact exist, though not before first proving the existence of God.

Lucretius's great poem was a kind of popularization and systematization of the Epicurean cosmology. He presents a kind of worldview that believes that everything physical is merely made up of atoms of different shapes. Indeed, there is nothing more than this matter. He uses this overall cosmology (as had various Epicureans) to present arguments regarding morality.

It should be noted that while this outlook is also called "materialism" (in that it reduces everything to matter), it should not be associated with self-indulgence. Lucretius and other Epicureans were actually quite strict people, whose goal was the reduction of pain, not the maximization of pleasure. Indeed, one of his ways of reducing pain was by critiquing the so-called gods of the Greeks and Romans using the overall atomistic outlook.

David Hume is most famously associated with skepticism. Often, people recall the stormy picture that he paints at the end of the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature in which he reflects on the skeptical conclusions at which he seems to arise in the first book's discussions. It is arguable that this is a simplistic reading of Hume. Still, this is what most people know about him from his philosophical writings (especially the Treatise as well as his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). Thus, he is known for doubting the reality of things like personal identity and even the relation of our mind to the external world.

The tradition of natural law ethics spans from at least the Stoics through the Middle Ages and beyond. It has earlier resonances in Aristotle as well. Its greatest development occurred in the Middle Ages into early modernity. While the Treatise on Law in the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas is an important text in the natural law tradition, he is actually not the correct answer for this question. He did not write much (if anything) on international law. That really was not a problem in the Latin Middle Ages.

Instead, it is to the Dutch jurist and political philosopher Hugo Grotius that we must turn for such matters. Writing in the midst of many international conflicts in Europe, Grotius penned works like De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) as well as an important tract on the rights of nations on international waters. He undertook to discuss what rights pertain to people naturally as well as how these are related to the rights of nations. His work was not utterly unique, but it was an important touchpoint for later writers on these matters.

It was George Berkeley who stated esse est percipi. In his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous and A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, he lays out a scathing critique of John Locke. Berkeley truly believed that Locke's theory of knowledge and metaphysics would lead to skepticism. He tried to overcome this by saying that all of reality is made up of ideas. That is things themselves are ideas and we know those very ideas. This required him to undertake a number of interesting discussions which, although quite strange, present a very interesting set of philosophical musings.

The first Glass family story was "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," originally published in The New Yorker in 1948, which detailed the eldest sibling Seymour's suicide. J.D. Salinger subsequently wrote many more stories about the entire group of siblings in the Glass family. The stories appear in his collections Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, and Franny and Zooey.

Augustine's Confessions follows the life of the author from his birth through thirteen separate books. Primarily the story of Augustine's early spiritual and educational life and his eventual conversion to Christianity, the book nonetheless covers the important details of Augustine's life. This makes the Confessions one of the earliest examples of an autobiography.

Although there are several letters attributed to Plato, the bulk of his works are written in the form of dialogues. In his philosophical works, he often writes of how Socrates disputes and discusses some matter with various figures of Athenian civic life. The dialogue style itself is masterful, often using literary devices to make subtle philosophical points. In this, he differs greatly from his student, Aristotle, whose works are quite dry (though also much more direct and clear than are Plato's works). Many later philosophers would write in the form of dialogues, though it is arguable that few ever matched the excellence of Plato's style.

In the Confessions, Augustine of Hippo pens a story of his conversion to Christianity. In this, he does "confess" his guilt and arrival at conversion from this guilty state of life. The whole work is written like a monologue to God—a long prayer. This is not offered as an option among those provided for this question. Instead, the closest genre here noted is that of autobiography. In a general way of speaking, Augustine does pen an autobiography by writing the Confessions. It does tell his life story up to a certain point in history, thus giving us a form of monologue-to-God-biography.

During the second half of the 13th century, there were several standard philosophical styles. One was the style of literal commentary, which was used for interpreting the texts of Aristotle and other accepted authorities. In addition, within theological circles, there was the development of the so-called "summae"—lengthier summaries of doctrine, sometimes quite systematic in nature.

These large texts, however, were made up of questions that were written in a style quite peculiar to the Middle Ages, namely that of "disputed questions." These texts would set forth a question, take options "pro" and "con" and then make a conclusion based upon both sides of the question. Sometimes, in shorter works like this, the author would only consider the options that were contrary to his own, helping the reader to understand some possible objections to the text.

This style of disputation was used in many of the treatises that began to be written late in the 13th century and into the 14th. It remained a style that was used especially in Catholic thought for some time. It was, however, most vigorously used as a writing style during this period of the Middle Ages.

(It should be added that there were also short treatises written during this time. They are not, however, the most unique style of writing during the time period.)