The Second Midterm will cover Descartes, Turing, Hume, Hobbes, Sartre, Darwin, and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.
In addition to knowing how each author answers the four questions, you should also be familiar with the following ideas and concepts:
- Descartes' three forms of doubt and what beliefs each form of doubt calls into question and what sorts of beliefs each form of doubt leaves untouched.
- Descartes' Cogito argument.
- Cartesian Dualism.
- Descartes' Two Arguments against Artificial Intelligence.
- Turing Machine.
- Turing Test.
- Searle's Chinese Room Argument.
- Hume's conception of Empiricism.
- The differences between Impressions and Ideas.
- Hume's conception of personal identity.
- Hobbes' conception of Mechanism and Materialism.
- Hobbes' account of the state of nature and the social contract.
- Hobbes' account of the sources of human conflict.
- Sartre's conception of existentialism.
- Sartre's accounts of Anguish, Abandonment, and Despair.
- The five features of Darwin's account of Evolution.
- The unit of evolutionary change for humans according to Darwin.
For the Essay you should think about elements of existentialism in the film Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Pay particular attention to the way the film presents the three moods of Anguish, Abandonment, and Despair. | 