Quiz: On the Question of Dialectics

All 10 questions. A perfect score earns the gold medal; 80% earns silver.

1. Which pair of opposites does Lenin give for social science? Supply and demand in the market Mental and manual labour The class struggle Town against country
2. Which modern scientist, an enemy of Hegelianism, does Lenin cite as also describing knowledge as a series of circles? Paul Volkmann Henri Poincaré Ernst Mach Wilhelm Ostwald
3. How does Lenin describe the path of human knowledge? A series of unconnected leaps A straight line of steady progress A cycle that returns forever to the same point A curve endlessly approximating a series of circles, a spiral
4. Which simple relation does Marx’s Capital analyse first, according to Lenin? The exchange of commodities The wage contract The division of labour The circulation of money
5. Whom does Lenin name as giving this aspect of dialectics insufficient attention? Bogdanov Hegel Kautsky Plekhanov
6. According to Lenin, which is absolute: the unity of opposites or their struggle? Their struggle Their unity alone Both of them equally Neither: both are relative
7. What image does Lenin use for philosophical idealism? A disease of the brain that infects thinkers cut off from practice A building raised in the air without any foundation in experience A mask worn by the bourgeoisie to hide its exploitation of the workers A sterile flower that grows on the living tree of human knowledge
8. What does Lenin find already present in a sentence like “Ivan is a man”? A proof of the priority of matter over the mind The class character of language and of grammar An example of formal logic only, with no dialectics Dialectics: the individual is the universal
9. What does Lenin call the essence (or one of the essentials) of dialectics? The splitting of a whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts The negation of the negation The transformation of quantity into quality, and of quality into quantity The priority of matter over consciousness
10. Which conception of development does Lenin call “dead, pale and dry”? Development as decrease, increase and repetition Development as a spiral Development as a unity of mutually exclusive opposites Development as leaps

0 of 10 answered