Week 1           General Anthropology

Many philosophical questions are both universal and innate, like questions about life/death, questions about what the stars are, and quesitons about where we come from. But some require knowledge to interpret correctly. Heliocentrism is a great example. The Sun looks like it is going around the Earth. You cannot see what is really going on without knowledge of several important pieces of information, and without writing, this knowledge could never have been built. It took thousands of years from the first writing to realize some things we take as obvious. We have seen profound scientific revolution in the past 500 years, and we still have much to discover, but we can trace the origins of many threads of empirical knowlege, philosophy, and cultural understanding to ancient history.