Philosophy Quiz

Answer: Socrates. Accused of 'corrupting the youth' and disrespecting the city's gods, Socrates refused to flee and drank the hemlock. He wrote nothing himself: we know him mainly through his pupil Plato.

Answer: Occam's razor. Attributed to the English friar William of Ockham (14th century), this 'razor' cuts away unnecessary hypotheses. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses before zebras.

Answer: A tortoise. Each time Achilles reaches the tortoise's position, it has moved on a little: there would be infinitely many steps to cover. The mathematics of infinite series settled the matter… 2,000 years later.

Answer: Aristotle. For Aristotle, only a god or a beast could live outside the city. Language was given to us to debate what is just and unjust.

Answer: river. For Heraclitus, everything flows ("panta rhei"): the river's water has changed, and so have we. The world is in constant change.

Answer: Our ability to tell reality from a perfect illusion. If a brain wired to a computer received simulated sensations, could it know it is not living in the real world? An idea echoed by "The Matrix".

Answer: Not multiplying assumptions beyond necessity. Attributed to the friar William of Ockham (14th century), this principle 'shaves off' unnecessary assumptions: between two explanations that work equally well, pick the simpler one. No barber was consulted.

Answer: 'Stand out of my sunlight'. Diogenes the Cynic, who lived in a large jar, despised wealth and honours. Alexander supposedly replied: 'If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.'

Answer: Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes borrows a phrase from the Latin playwright Plautus. For him, without a strong state, human life would be a 'war of all against all': solitary, poor, nasty, brutish… and short.

Answer: Hannah Arendt. Arendt was struck to see not a monster but a zealous official who obeyed without thinking. Her thesis: the worst can arise from the absence of thought.

Answer: His clothed skeleton, displayed in a case. Bentham wanted to serve science to the very end. His 'auto-icon' sits in a display case, in his clothes and with a wax head: the real one, poorly mummified, was put away.

Answer: Pangloss. The tutor Pangloss caricatures the optimism of the philosopher Leibniz. Voltaire mocks him by making him suffer every possible disaster.

Answer: Democritus. Democritus, with his teacher Leucippus, imagined the atom ("that which cannot be cut") more than 2,000 years before modern physics.