Philosophy 101 Jeopardy

Plato to Kant, ethics to logic - a free Philosophy 101 review board for college classes. Put it on the screen and let students buzz in from phones.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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Ancient Greek Thinkers

$200
This philosopher's allegory of the cave appears in The Republic.
Who is Plato?
$400
A tutor to Alexander the Great, this philosopher wrote the Nicomachean Ethics.
Who is Aristotle?
$600
Convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth, this philosopher was executed by drinking hemlock in 399 BC.
Who is Socrates?
$800
This philosopher of Ephesus taught that everything is in flux and you cannot step into the same river twice.
Who is Heraclitus?
$1,000
This philosopher's school in an Athenian garden taught that pleasure, understood as the absence of pain, is the highest good.
Who is Epicurus?

Rationalists and Empiricists

$200
This English empiricist compared the mind at birth to a blank sheet of white paper.
Who is John Locke?
$400
This Irish bishop argued that for ordinary objects, to be is to be perceived.
Who is George Berkeley?
$600
This Dutch rationalist, expelled from his Amsterdam synagogue in 1656, identified God with nature.
Who is Baruch Spinoza?
$800
This German rationalist held that reality is made of simple substances he called monads.
Who is Gottfried Leibniz?
$1,000
Hume divided all objects of human reason into matters of fact and these.
What are relations of ideas?

Ethical Theories

$200
This theory judges actions by their consequences, aiming at the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
What is utilitarianism?
$400
This is Kant's supreme moral principle, to act only on a maxim you could will to become a universal law.
What is the categorical imperative?
$600
This approach, rooted in Aristotle, focuses on developing good character rather than following rules.
What is virtue ethics?
$800
This nineteenth-century utilitarian argued that some pleasures are higher in quality than others.
Who is John Stuart Mill?
$1,000
This method, from Bentham, measures pleasure and pain by intensity, duration, certainty and other factors.
What is the felicific (or hedonic) calculus?

Knowledge and Skepticism

$200
This branch of philosophy studies the nature and limits of knowledge.
What is epistemology?
$400
The traditional analysis of knowledge, traced to Plato's Theaetetus, uses this three-part formula.
What is justified true belief?
$600
Knowledge that can be justified independently of experience, such as that all bachelors are unmarried, is called this.
What is a priori knowledge?
$800
In a three-page 1963 paper, this philosopher offered counterexamples to the traditional analysis of knowledge.
Who is Edmund Gettier?
$1,000
This problem, raised by Hume, asks how past observations can justify conclusions about the future.
What is the problem of induction?

Mind and Metaphysics

$200
This view holds that mind and body are two fundamentally different kinds of substance.
What is dualism?
$400
This view holds that everything that exists is ultimately physical.
What is physicalism (or materialism)?
$600
Thomas Nagel's 1974 paper asked what it is like to be this animal.
What is a bat?
$800
This thought experiment by John Searle argues that manipulating symbols by rule is not the same as understanding them.
What is the Chinese Room?
$1,000
David Chalmers coined this name for the puzzle of why physical processes give rise to subjective experience.
What is the hard problem of consciousness?

Logic and Argument

$200
An argument whose form guarantees that the conclusion is true whenever all the premises are true is called this.
What is valid?
$400
A valid argument whose premises are all actually true is called this.
What is sound?
$600
Attacking the person making an argument rather than the argument itself is this fallacy.
What is ad hominem?
$800
The valid argument form If P then Q, P, therefore Q goes by this Latin name.
What is modus ponens?
$1,000
The invalid form If P then Q, Q, therefore P is the fallacy of doing this.
What is affirming the consequent?

Final Jeopardy — I Think, Therefore I Am

Rene Descartes first published the phrase often rendered as I think, therefore I am in this 1637 work, written in French.

What is the Discourse on Method?

How to run this board

The board surveys an intro course: the ancient Greeks, the early modern rationalists and empiricists, ethical theories from virtue ethics to utilitarianism, epistemology, metaphysics and the mind-body problem, and the basic vocabulary of logic and argument.

Philosophy clues reward precision, so accept an answer only if it names the right thinker or theory, not just the general idea. When a team gets one right, ask a rival team for the strongest objection - it turns a trivia round into a seminar.

Groups of three work well for a discussion section. Give the lowest-scoring team first pick after each round so the conversation stays open.

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