Task 1 Flashcards
What is the Neolithic revolution?
- the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to farming and settlement around 10,000 BCE;
- a greater complexity of social interactions in settlements was a further impetus for thought and language development
Which Cultures were included in the Fertile Cresent?
- Ancient Mesopotamia
- Ancient Egypt
- Sumerian culture
- Babylonian culture
Name Lindenberg’s three characteristics of preliterate civilizations
- ‘know-how’-knowledge
- Fluidity of knowledge
- Collection of myths and stories in which human traits are projected onto objects and events
When did written language first appear?
6000 BCE in china and 3000 BCE in Europe and 350 BCE in America
When is the earliest evidence of counting and what characterized it?
- 35.000-20.000 BC
- consisted of lines
- Subitizing- distinguishing between one, two and three entities
When is did the names of one to ten start to appear?
because all Indo-European languages share the same roots for these numbers, it has been suggested that their names already existed before the original language began to split into branches around 2000 BCE
Who developed a written system for the numbers 1-24 and when?
- The Greeks did, in 600 BCE
Which two civilizations in the Fertile Crescent seem to be most important for the origin of Western culture and why?
- Ancient Mesopotamia: mathematical knowledge, astronomy
- Ancient Egypt: Geometrical knowledge, Calendar consisting of 12 months
What seem to be the conditions for growth in knowledge?
- Political stability, urbanization, patronage (funding, you can study because they have wealth) and the availability of a writing system (easy enough to be learnt by a critical mass)
Which two worldviews existed in Greek culture?
o Heraclitus – everything is constantly changing and even if you do the same thing twice, it is different due to the conditions that are given
o Others – at the end of the explanatory road of the perceivable changing phenomena, there has to be something fixed and unchangeable
Which four schools were established in Ancient Greece?
- Academy (388BCE) – founded by Plato, true path of knowledge is reasoning; rationalism
- Lyceum (335 BCE) – established by Aristotle; empirically guided scholar, who based his knowledge on careful observation of reality
- Stoa (312 BCE) – represented a lifestyle of self-control, fortitude and detachment from distracting emotions
- Garden of Epicurus (307 BCE) – represented a lifestyle based on a virtuous and temperate life with the enjoyment of simple pleasures obtained by knowledge and friendship
How did the Ancient Greek Culture spread and how is it called?
Hellenistic Culture - spread under the rule of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), over a much wider area expanding from Egypt to India, including the whole Fertile Crescent
What were the remains of the Western Roman Empire?
- Decreased access to Greek knowledge: less knew Greek languages;
- The catholic church
Which steps did Lindenberg characterize as the turning tide in the West?
- Charles the Great (around 800) - improved the education system
- Better agricultural techniques (between 1000 and 1200) - population explosion
- Master graduates created in order to teach universities ( a new market)
- Renaissance (1300-1600) - cultural movements based on imitation of Greek and roman civilizations
When did the protestant revolution start and why was it important for the development of science?
- 1516
- emphasized the need for education, critical thinking (e.g. reading the bible themselves and not taken the word of the church for granted), hard work and worldly success
What were the two historical steps in book printing?
- By 1300 – letters were carved in a woodblock and printed on cloth, allowing mass production of a small number of pages
- Around 1450 – movable printing was invented by Gutenberg, allowing cheap production of all types of texts, leading to a rapid and massive availability of information to everyone who was interested
What are the main biases in History Writing?
- Biases on persons
- Importance of Zeitgeist
- Matthew effect
- Ethnocentrism
- Hindsight Bias
- History reviews are summaries of summaries
What is the biases on persons in history?
– history of science is presented as a succession of discoveries and insights made by geniuses that far exceed the intellectual level around them
- Science is above all a collection activity, individuals are minor importance
What why is the Zeitgeist important to consider?
– word is used in the history of science to indicate that the time was right for a certain discovery did not originate from a single genius, but from a much wider development leading to the discovery
What is the Matthew effect?
– the tendency to give more credit to well-known scientists than they deserve; increases the perceived impact of these scientists
What is Ethnocentrism?
– authors tend to attach excessive weight to the contribution of their own group and the group of their readers; this increases the dominance of one’s own research group over that of other group, resulting in the tendency to give too much credit to the input of economically dominant groups
What is the hindsight bias?
- we assume that the same knowledge we have now was shared by the persons who first described the phenomenon
