Philosophy questions are attribution questions. Almost nobody is asked to
explain an argument; they are asked who said it, who taught whom, and what a
named idea is called. That reduces a forbidding subject to a manageable list.
Who said it, and who taught whom
The teaching chain — Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, Aristotle
taught Alexander — is the single most-asked fact in the category and is worth
knowing cold. After that, the famous lines and their owners: "I think therefore I
am" (Descartes), the categorical imperative (Kant), the veil of ignorance
(Rawls), the social contract, the greatest happiness principle, Occam's razor.
Named thought experiments are the growth area, because they make good
questions and travel well beyond philosophy:
Zeno's paradoxes,
the prisoner's dilemma,
the Turing test,
Monty Hall, the trolley problem,
and Schrödinger's cat — which is asked as a physics question about as often as a
philosophical one.
The ancient world alongside it
Classical questions travel with the philosophy: the seven wonders, the
Olympian gods, the Roman emperors in order at the start and the notorious ones
after that, the founding myth of Rome, and what happened at
Pompeii. The
Library of Alexandria and
Eratosthenes measuring the earth
are both asked frequently and both usually asked slightly wrong, which is worth
knowing about before you are the one contradicting the quizmaster.
Where is Alexandria?
Answer Egypt (founded in 332 BC by Alexander the Great)
Which member of the Ptolemaic dynasty was the first to learn Egyptian?
Answer Cleopatra VII
Who founded the Lyceum?
Answer Aristotle
Which philosopher declared "God is dead" and wrote "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"?
Answer Friedrich Nietzsche
Which German philosopher formulated the "categorical imperative"?
Answer Immanuel Kant
Which Scottish philosopher argued we can never truly justify expecting the future to resemble the past?
Answer David Hume
Who wrote "Das Kapital" and, with Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto"?
Answer Karl Marx
Who divided the mind into the id, the ego and the superego?
Answer Sigmund Freud
Which philosopher wrote "I think, therefore I am"?
Answer René Descartes
Which psychologist proposed the collective unconscious and its archetypes?
Answer Carl Jung
Which philosopher wrote "Principia Mathematica" with A. N. Whitehead and won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Answer Bertrand Russell
Which Athenian philosopher never wrote anything down?
Answer Socrates (470-399 BC)
Which English philosopher argued the mind begins as a blank slate?
Answer John Locke
Who wrote "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"?
Answer Max Weber
Which economist argued governments should spend their way out of a slump?
Answer John Maynard Keynes
Who wrote "Confessions" and prayed "Lord, make me chaste — but not yet"?
Answer Saint Augustine of Hippo
Who wrote "The Wealth of Nations" and described the "invisible hand" of the market?
Answer Adam Smith
Which bishop argued that to be is to be perceived?
Answer George Berkeley
Which Danish writer is usually called the father of existentialism?
Answer Søren Kierkegaard
What is Plato's famous work?
Answer The Republic
Which philosopher's method is usually summarised as thesis, antithesis, synthesis?
Answer Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Which book describes life without government as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"?
Answer Leviathan
Who founded the Academy in Athens - the first university in the Western world?
Answer Plato
Which Frenchman founded academic sociology and studied suicide rates as a social fact?
Answer Émile Durkheim
Who wrote "Discipline and Punish", tracing the prison and the modern idea of surveillance?
Answer Michel Foucault
Whose sayings were collected by his followers as the "Analects"?
Answer Confucius
Whose "hierarchy of needs" is usually drawn as a pyramid?
Answer Abraham Maslow
Which linguist proposed that humans are born with a universal grammar?
Answer Noam Chomsky
Which medieval theologian wrote the "Summa Theologica" and gave five proofs of God?
Answer Thomas Aquinas
Which economist led the Chicago school and argued inflation is always a monetary phenomenon?
Answer Milton Friedman