Rules

All questions except D-I-Y dialectics are multiple choice

You have to record your own answers. One point for each correct answer. Answers in red.

1. Who was the woman philosopher who inspired Socrates?

Was it:
α. Sappho
β. Aspasia
γ. Helen of Troy?

2. What was said to be the “most dangerous book ever published”?

a. The Bible in English translation
b. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
c. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

3. Who was called “Tussy”?

a. Hegel’s wife
b. Engels’ cat
c. Eleanor Marx

4. Who said:

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

a. Pierre Simon Laplace
b. Albert Einstein
c. Charles Darwin

5. Hegel and two other literary-philosophical figures were members of a political club formed in the 1790s inspired by the French Revolution.

Who were the other two?

a. Schelling and Hölderlin
b. Diderot and Voltaire
c. Rousseau and Robespierre

6. Who said
“All this demonstrates, in passing, that our methods of thought, both formal logic and the dialectic, are not arbitrary constructions of our reason, but rather expressions of the actual inter-relationships in nature itself”.

a. Hegel
b. Engels
c. Trotsky

7. Who was the first person – or persons – to translate the Communist Manifesto into English?

a. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling
b. Helen McFarlane
c. Fred Engels

8. Helen McFarlane was the first person to translate Hegel into English. Who was one of the first to translate Kant into English?

a. Bertrand Russell
b. Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot)
c. Werner S Pluhar

9. Which 3 Michelin Star London chef once said: “In my heart I’m a socialist; in my mind I’m a capitalist”.

a. Marco Pierre White
b. Heston Blumenthal
c. Gordon Ramsay

(Hint: He owned a restaurant where Marx once lived in Soho)

10. Engels’ statue in Manchester is in Tony Wilson square. What was the name of Tony Wilson’s independent record label that launched Manchester bands Joy Division and The Happy Mondays?

a. Rough Trade
b. ECM Records
c. Factory Records

11. To whom was this 1985 book dedicated?

a. Charles Darwin
b. Fred Engels
c. Stephen Jay Gould

12. What connects these two pictures for followers of Ilyenkov?

a. Wagner’s The Twilight of the Gods
b. the city of Berlin
c. Science of Logic

13. Marx researched Capital in the British Museum reading room. But another revolutionary said this in 1907:
“It is a remarkable institution, especially that exceptional reference section. Ask them any question, and in the very shortest space of time they’ll tell you where to look to find the material that interests you. … Let me tell you, there is no better library than the British Museum.”

a. Sergei Stepniak
b. Ho Chi Minh
c. Vladimir Lenin

14. Who said “Love is a catastrophe, a crazy illness” ?

a. Ludwig Feuerbach
b. Slavoj Zizek
c. Peter Kropotkin

And now for something completely different

How it works

The [answer] of each question gets incorporated into the following question.

So if you are particularly fiendish you work in both directions!

1. Moriarty is always contradicted by Ohms
Say it out loud (a Cockney accent helps)

2. [Ohms] are a scientific unit to measure Resistance

3. [Resistance] alongside their brave comrades while their countrymen let Germans claim a new state called (you just need the name of the area, not the country) Vichy
Say it out loud – Vici

4. Before Caesar could [Vici], he had to “veni” and what else? (answer in Latin) Vide
Say it out loud + ‘O’ Video

5. What star did it kill? Radio

6. [Radio]’s activity creates material conditions where a substance can meet its complete opposite. This contradiction can form destruction or… (you can draw it if you don’t know the word)
Draw it! (if you haven’t already) Superimposition

7. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian engineer who thought [Superimposition] somehow powered the economy. He then started to see a similar shape in all parts of social life. He argued that nature thus proves the necessity of Benito Mussolini.
In what direction did the shape he is famous for point? Up

8. On earth, when [Up] describes the activity of one body away from another, what tends to contradict this movement? Gravity

9. The dominant 20th Century theory of [Gravity] was (to the horror of its famous inventor) contradicted by which other theory? Quantum theory or mechanics

10. This bestselling author believes we can appropriate waves of [Quantum theory or mechanics] to protect ourselves from the contradictions that cause us illness and aging. Deepak Chopra