HISTORICAL CONTEXT: EMERGENCE

OF SOCIAL SCIENCE DISCIPLINES

 ANTHROPOLOGY: DEFINITION

• Anthropology, the study of all aspects of human life

and culture. Anthropology examines such topics as
how people live, what they think, what they produce,
and how they interact with their environments.
Anthropologists try to understand the full range of
human diversity as well as what all people share in
common.
 ANTHROPOLOGY: QUESTIONS
ASKED:

Anthropologists ask such basic questions as: When,

where, and how did humans evolve? How do people
adapt to different environments? How have societies
developed and changed from the ancient past to the
present? Answers to these questions can help us
understand what it means to be human. They can also
help us to learn ways to meet the present-day needs of
people all over the world and to plan how we might live
in the future.
 ANTHROPOLOLOGY: HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND

The European Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries marked
the rise of scientific and rational philosophical thought. Enlightenment
thinkers, such as Scottish-born David Hume, John Locke of England, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France, wrote a number of humanistic works on the
nature of humankind. They based their work on philosophical reason rather
than religious authority and asked important anthropological questions.
Rousseau, for instance, wrote on the moral qualities of “primitive” societies
and about human inequality. But most writers of the Enlightenment also
lacked firsthand experience with non-Western cultures.
 DAVID HUME

He believed that, as he put it,

"the science of manis the only solid
foundation for the other sciences", that
human experience is as close are we are
ever going to get to the truth, and
that experience and observationmust
be the foundations of any logical
argument. Anticipating the Logical
Positivistmovement by almost two
centuries, Hume was essentially
attempting to demonstrate how
ordinary propositions about objects,
causal relations, the self, etc,
are semantically equivalent to
propositions about one's experiences.
 DAVID HUME

He argued that all of human knowledge can be divided into two

categories: relations of ideas (e.g. mathematical and logical
propositions) and matters of fact(e.g. propositions involving
some contingent observation of the world, such as "the sun rises
in the East"), and that ideas are derived from
our "impressions" or sensations. In the face of this, he argued,
in sharp contradistinction to the French Rationalists, that even
the most basic beliefs about the natural world, or even in the
existence of the self, cannot be conclusively established
by reason, but we accept them anyway because of their basis
in instinct and custom, a hard-line Empiricist attitude verging
on complete Skepticism.
 DAVID HUME

n his "A Treatise of Human Nature" , Hume definitively

articulated the so-called “is-ought problem”, which has since
become so important in Meta-Ethics, noting that claims are often
made about what ought to be on the basis of statements about
what is. However, Hume pointed out, there are significant
differences between descriptive statements (about what is)
and prescriptive or normative statements (about what ought to
be), and it is not at all obvious how we can get from making
descriptive statements to prescriptive.
JOHN LOCKE

John Locke (1632 - 1704) was an

English philosopher of the Age of
Reason and early Age of
Enlightenment. His ideas had
enormous influence on the
development of Epistemology and
Political Philosophy, and he is widely
regarded as one of the most
influential early Enlightenment
thinkers.
 JOHN LOCKE

He is usually considered the first of the British

Empiricists, the movement which included George
Berkeley and David Hume, and which provided the main
opposition to the 17th Century Continental Rationalists.
He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately derived
from experience, and the knowledge of which we are
capable is therefore severely limited in its scope and
certainty.
 JOHN LOCKE

His Philosophy of Mind is often cited as the

origin for modern conceptions of identity
and "the self". He also postulated, contrary
to Cartesian and Christian philosophy, that
the mind was a "tabula rasa" (or "blank
slate") and that people are born without
innate ideas.
 JOHN LOCKE

Locke saw the properties of things as being of two distinct kinds.

Their real inner natures derive from the primary qualities, which
we can never experience and so never know. Our knowledge of
material substances, therefore, depends heavily on their secondary
qualities (by reference to which we also name them), which are
mind-dependent and of a sensory or qualitative nature. He
therefore believed in a type of Representationalism, that these
primary qualities are "explanatorily basic" in that they can be
referred to as the explanation for other qualities or phenomena
without requiring explanation themselves, and that these qualities
are distinct in that our sensory experience of them resembles
them in reality.