GS220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Steven Pinker, Cultural Relativism, Immortal Souls
Document Summary
Metaphysics: fundamental noions about how people understand the world, existence, objects, space ime, cause, efect. Ontology: concerned with what things exist and what their relaionships are with one another. Cosmology: study of the origin, fundamental structure, characterisics of and dynamics of the universe as an ordered whole & the laws that govern it. Emphasizes observaion, explanaion, and predicion of real world phenomena. Connected with emergence of modernity in europe (scieniic revoluion, secularizaion, technological development, capitalism, progress) Praciioners oten saw selves in opposiion to religion and supersiion. Split between natural and social sciences: both geography & anthropology straddle both. Great chain of being: humans, animals, nature pre-darwin. World is ixed & unchanging and so are forms of life in it. Crows created as crows and had always existed as crows. Organisms could be arranged in a single line from most primiive to most advanced. Humans most advanced because they had immortal souls. Discoveries in archaeology, geology, biology made this possible.
