欧洲文化入门
欧洲文化入门（Div. 1 － 5 ）复习题
I
III. 名词解释
1.Aeschylus
He was regarded as one of the three greatest tragic dramatists of an-cient Greece. He has written more then 80 plays such as Prometheus Bound, Persians and Agamemnon.
2.Plato
He was the philosopher of ancient Greece, pupil of Socrates. He built up a comprehensive system of idealism philosophy. Of the Dialogues he wrote, 27 have survived, including The Apology, Symposium and The Republic .
3.The Edict of Milan
When Constantine I won the throne from his rivals, he believed that God helped him in winning the battle and issued the Edict of Milan in 313. This edict granted religious freedom to all, and made Christianity legal.
4.Middle Ages
In European history, the thousand-year period following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is called the Middle Ages. It is so called because it came between ancient times and modem times. In the Middle Ages, Christianity took the lead in politics, law, art, and learning for hundreds of years. It shaped people's lives. So this period is also called the “Age of Faith”.
5.The code of chivalry
A knight should pledge to protect the weak, to fight for the church, to be loyal to his lord and to respect women of noble birth. These rules were known as code of chivalry, from which the western idea of good manners developed.
6.Scholasticism
It was the study of general questions starting from ancient writings and Christian teaching. The Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas was the supreme figure in scholasticism in the Middle Ages.
7.The Reformation
It was a 16th century religious movement as well as a socio-political movement. It was led by Martin Luther and swept over the whole of Europe. This movement was aimed at opposing the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church and replacing it with the absolute authority of the Bible. The Reformers believed in direct communication between the individual and God, engaged themselves in translating the Bible into their mother tongues, urged the Church to have institutional reforms and were interested in liberating national economy and politics from the interference of the Roman Catholic Church and carrying out wars in the interests of the peasants and revolution in the interests of the bourgeoisie. The Reformation dealt the feudal theocracy a fatal blow and shattered Medieval Church's stifling control over man, thus paving the way for capitalism.
8.Calvinism
The French theologian put his thoughts in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was known as Calvinism. Calvinism rejected the papal authorities and stressed the absolute authority of God' s will, holding that only those specially elected by God are saved. It also held that any form of sinfulness was a likely sign of damnation whereas ceaseless work could be a sign of salvation. Many historians have suggested that Calvinism helped to pave the way
for Capitalism.
9.Kepler’s Laws
Kepler is best known for his discovery of the three laws of planetary motion, the three laws being called Kepler’s Laws published in 1609 and 1619. They may be stated as follows: (a) Each planet moves in an ellipse, not a perfect circle, with the sun at one focus; (b) Each planet moves more rapidly when near the sun than farther from it;
(c) The distance of each planet from the sun bears a definite relation to the time period the planet take to complete a revolution around the sun. This law was reduced to a mathematical formula: the square of the period of revolution of a planet about the sun is proportional to the cube of the mean distance of the planet from the sun.
10.Baroque art
Baroque art flourished first in Italy, and then spread to Spain, Portugal, France in south Europe and to Flander and the Netherlands in the North. It was characterized by dramatic intensity and sentimental appeal with a lot of emphasis on light and color.
IV. 问答
1.What were the main features of ancient Greek society?
In Greek society,only adult male citizen had real power and the citizenship was a set of rights which a man inherited from his father. The economy of Athens rested on an immense amount of slave labor. Slaves worked for their masters. The exploitation was a serious social problem. The Greeks loved sports. They often took part in the con-tests of sports in Olympus Mount, thus Olympic Games came into be-ing.
2.In what important ways was Aristotle different from Plato? What are some of Aristotle's works that are
still influential today?
(a) Aristotle emphasized direct observation of nature and insisted that theory should follow fact. This is different from Plato's reliance on subjective thinking. (b)He thought that "idea"and matter together made concrete individual realities in which he differed from Plat who held that ideas had higher reality than the physical world. His significant works includes: Ethics, Politics , Poetics and Rhetoric
3.What did the Romans have in common with the Greeks? And what was the chief difference between
them?
(a) The Romans had a lot in common with the Greeks. Both people had traditions rooted in the idea of the citizen-assembly, hostile to monarchy and to servility. Their religions were alike enough for most of their deities to be readily identified—Greek Zeus with Roman Jupiter,Greek Aphrodite with Roman Venus, and so on—and their myths to be fused. Their languages worked in similar ways and we re ultimately related, both being members of the Indo-European l anguage family which stretches from Bangladesh to Iceland. (b)The re was one big difference. The Romans built up a vast empire. The Greeks didn't, excepted for the brief moment of Alexander's conquests, which soon disintegrated.
4.What was the Hebrew's major contribution to world civilization?
The history of the Hebrews was handed down orally from one generation to another in the form of folktales and stories, which were recorded later in the Old Testament, which still later became the first part of Christian Bible. Thus the Hebrews made one of the greatest contributions to the world civilization.
5.Why do we say the Bible has shaped Western culture more decisively than anything else ever written? Judeo-Christian tradition constitutes one of the two major components of European culture.
(a) The Bible which is virtually related to every phase of human life greatly influences people's daily life, especially in the Middle Ages when almost everyone was a Christian;
(b) The Bible has great impact upon western literature. For a long period of time, the Latin Bible was accepted as the authority and Latin was the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, so most European literature at that time was in Latin. Besides, it is generally accepted that the English Bible and Shakespeare are two great reservoirs of Modem English. Furthermore, the use of Biblical themes has been a literary tradition. In fact few great English and American writers of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century can be read and appreciated with satisfaction without a sufficient knowledge of the Bible;
(c) The study of the Christian teaching especially the Bible has become an important branch of knowledge-scholasticism which has been prevalent for centuries;
(d) The Bible has also influenced western philosophies and science. Thus the Bible has shaped western culture more decisively than anything else ever written.
6.How did Christian monks help Western civilization survive?
The Christian monks helped western civilization survive in many ways:
(a) The Christian monks spread Christianity to the Mediterranean region and some of them even suffered martyrdom;
(b) Some monks translated the Old Testament into Greek and St. Jerome translated the whole Bible into Latin, Later some such as John Wycliif and William Tyndale translated the Bible into the vernacular;
(c) In the Middle Ages, people in western Europe were mainly divided into three classes: clergy, lords and peasants. Of these three classes, the only literate section were the clergy. The Christian monks did a lot to help preserve and transmit a large part of the traditional heritage of the western culture. They not only translated the Bible into Latin or the vernacular but also copied or translated the ancient works into the vernacular, such as the monks in these monasteries set up by Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.
7.What are the major elements of humanism? How are these elements reflected in art and literature during
the Italian Renaissance?
(a) Humanism is the essence of Renaissance. Humanists in Renaissance believed that human beings had rights to pursue wealth and pleasure and they admired me beauty of human body. This belief ran counter to the medieval ascetical idea of poverty and stoicism, and shifted man's interest from Christianity to humanity, from religion to philosophy, from heaven to earth, from the beauty of God to the beauty of human in all its joys, senses and feelings.
(b) The philosophy of humanism is reflected in the art and literature during the Italian Renaissance in the literary works of Boccaccio and Petrarch and in the art of Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Giorgione, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, etc. In their works they did not stress death and the other world but call on man to live and work for the present and future world.
8.How did Italian Renaissance art and architecture break away from medieval tradition?
The Italian Renaissance art and architecture radically broke away from the medieval methods of representing the visible world. Compared with the latter, the former has the following distinct features:
(a) Art broke away from the domination of church and artist who used to be craftsmen commissioned by the church became a separate strata doing noble and creative works;
(b) Themes of paintings and architecture changed from purely celestial realm focusing on the stories of the Bible, of God and Mary to an appreciation of all aspects of nature and man;
(c) The artist studied the ruins of Roman and Greek temples and put many of the principles of ancient civilization into their works; (d) Artists introduced in their works scientific theories of anatomy and perspective.
9.What were the major differences between Locke’s concept of “social contract” and Hobbes’s?
(a) Hobbes’s concept of “social contract” is as follows. To escape anarchy, men enter into a social contract, by which they submit to the sovereign. In return, men attain peace and security. In his theory, the powers of the sovereign must be absolute, and it is only by the centralization of authority in one person that the evil can be avoided. And the sovereign is not a party himself to the social contract. The subjects of the sovereign cannot either change the form of the government or repudiate the authority of the sovereign. As to the form of government, Hobbes preferred monarchy.
(b) Locke tried to show the rational foundation of political society and government. He emphasized that the social contract must be understood as involving the individual’s consent to submit to the will of the majority and that the will of the majority must prevail. For him, absolute monarchy was contrary to the original social contract and dangerous to liberty. For him, the ruler of government is one partner of the social contract.
(c) Although both Hobbes and Locke used the term “social con-tract”, they differ fundamentally. First, Hoboes argued that men enter into a social contract to escape the state of war, for, in his view, men are enemies and at war with each other, Locke argued that men are equal and that they enter into a social contract by reason. Secondly, Hobbes argued that individuals surrender their rights to one man, the sovereign whose power is absolute. Locke argued that the individuals surrender their rights to the community as a whole. According to him, by majority vote a representative is chosen, but his power is not absolute. If he fails to implement the people’s will, the people have the right to overthrow him.
10.What is Descart es’s method of Cartesian doubt? What is its significance?
Descartes employed methodic doubt with a view to discovering whether there was an indubitable truth. And he expressed this truth in this famous motto; “I doubt, therefore I think: I think, therefore 1 am.” This Cartesian doubt is the most important point in his philoso-phy. According to Descartes, “I think therefore I am” makes mind more certain than matter. He “believed that a thing that is thinking is one that doubts, understands, conceives, affir ms, denies, wills, imagines, and feels. Doubting is thinking, thinking is the essence of mind. So he concluded that all things that we conceive very clearly and distinctly are true, and that knowledge of things must be by the mind. As to the senses, he believed that they are not dependable.