The following are actual questions from recent mid-term and final exams in Freshman Studies. They are meant to give a small sampling of the kinds of questions you may be asked. Except as noted, one hour was allotted for each response.
Identification and Brief Paragraph Questions
(35 minutes) Write two or three sentences identifying the speaker and discussing the significance of each of the following quotations:
1. "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
2. "I bequeath the argument to the two of you, for I must go and see about the sacrifice. "
3. "We'll have no woman's law here while I live."
4. "This day brings you your birth; and brings you death."
5. "Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her."
6. "Isn't anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding like a blind man on the right road?"
Choose any five of the following items I and for each write a brief paragraph in which you identify the work in which it appears and discuss its significance to the overall argument.
a) "...a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born."
b) "Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions ... have been either very young or very new to the field ... they change."
c) "To make a science of socialism, it had first to be placed on a real basis."
d) "Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."
e) "Unless we are told the (coordinate system] to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in the statement of the time of an event."
f) "Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse. not from rules."
(35 minutes) Answer the following questions in 2 brief paragraph.
a) In what sense is Picasso's "Portrait Of Kahnweiler" a portrait? In what sense is it not a portrait?
b) What does Engels see as the primary philosophical differences between "uto- pian" and "scientific" socialism?
c) What are the differences between the special and general theories of relativity?
d) What does Blake mean when he says: "Opposition is true Friendship."
(20 minutes) Answer two of the following three.
1. What are the differences among the three theories (classical, special, and general) of relativity?
2. Why does the special theory of relativity reject the addition of velocities employed in classical mechanics?
3. What is the significance of the Lorentz transformation?
Essay Questions
Compare and contrast Plato's Philosopher-Ruler with Machiavelli's Prince. How are these two alike, how are they different, and why?
(30 minutes) Discuss the theme of promise and fulfillment in Genesis.
Plato supposed that by using one's reason, one can find a mode of life that is both just and happy. Write an essay discussing how Freud and Engels would respond to Plato's supposition.
"The ideal artist is ideally free." Write an essay discussing the relationship between art and freedom in the works of William Blake and Virginia Woolf.
"Epistemology is in part, but only in part, a matter of perception. It is also a matter of what is out there to be perceived." Write an essay discussing the relationship between perception and "what is out there" in the work of Kuhn and any other writer from the course.
(35 minutes) In most important books, what a writer has to say and the format he or she chooses for saying it are inseparable, since the format will reinforce and confirm the convictions it expresses. Write a brief essay discussing the relationship between content and format in the work of Blake and Engels.
In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf experienced several interruptions which stimulated her thoughtful digressions-for example, the couple getting into the cab. For any three such interruptions, write on 1) the circumstances of the interruption (where, when), and 2) the significance of the digression (i.e., how VW uses the thoughts stimulated by the incident to support her thesis).
In the discussion of revolutions, both The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific refer to Darwin's theory of evolution. To what extent does evolution serve or not serve as an appropriate analogy for their respective revolutions?
