Practical English I final test

Practical English I


Final test

(English Philology – Masters Degree)

(Writing)

Date: 31 January 2022
Duration: 13:20 – 16.20
(Time allowed: 3.00 hours)

Instructions:

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  Answers are to be written on the answer sheets.
  
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  Illegible writing, vagueness and Plagiarism will result in loss of marks.
  

Do not write here – reserved for the examiner

Task 1	30 points
Total final assessment	30 points

Do not turn this page until you are ready to start under examination

Task 2. Read the articles and write a synthesis essay (300- 350 words).
Animal rights
BY Steven M. Wise
Philosophical background
The proper treatment of animals is a very old question in the West. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers debated the place of animals in human morality. The Pythagoreans (6th–4th century BCE) and the Neoplatonists (3rd–6th century CE) urged respect for animals’ interests, primarily because they believed in the transmigration of souls between human and animal bodies. In his biological writings, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) repeatedly suggested that animals lived for their own sake, but his claim in the Politics that nature made all animals for the sake of humans was unfortunately destined to become his most influential statement on the subject.
Aristotle, and later the Stoics, believed the world was populated by an infinity of beings arranged hierarchically according to their complexity and perfection, from the barely living to the merely sentient, the rational, and the wholly spiritual. In this Great Chain of Being, as it came to be known, all forms of life were represented as existing for the sake of those forms higher in the chain. Among corporeal beings, humans, by dint of their rationality, occupied the highest position. The Great Chain of Being became one of the most persistent and powerful, if utterly erroneous, ways of conceiving the universe, dominating scientific, philosophical, and religious thinking until the middle of the 19th century.
The Stoics, insisting on the irrationality of all nonhuman animals, regarded them as slaves and accordingly treated them as contemptible and beneath notice. Aggressively advocated by St. Augustine (354–430), these Stoic ideas became embedded in Christian theology. They were absorbed wholesale into Roman law—as reflected in the treatises and codifications of Gaius (fl. 130–180) and Justinian (483–565)—taken up by the legal glossators of Europe in the 11th century, and eventually pressed into English (and, much later, American) common law. Meanwhile, arguments that urged respect for the interests of animals nearly disappeared, and animal welfare remained a relative backwater of philosophical inquiry and legal regulation until the final decades of the 20th century.