SOCI 302 (102) Midterm Take Home Exam Raisah Ismail (99860116) 1
SOCI 302 (102) Midterm Take Home Exam
4. How did European debates and ideas about human diversity - from the 16th century
onward - relate to philosophical schools in the ancient world?
Prior to the 15th century, societies were ordered based on kinship with most individuals
living as peasants and engaging in simple production or small bands of hunters and gatherers.
Books were a rarity and there was no printing press yet meaning many people were illiterate,
thus very few people knew about places far away from them or about people who looked or
lived differently from them, making the idea of human diversity virtually non-existent.
Furthermore, the work of important scholars (such as Herodotus, Ibn-Khaldun, and Marco
Polo) contain no evidence of utilising “race” as a system of classification despite observing
people who may physically vary from themselves. Herodotus made associations between
ethnicity and social, mental and behavioural characteristics. For example, he described the
Greeks with adjectives such as “clever” and “brave” whilst describing others (i.e., non-Greeks)
as “barbarians” who lacked these qualities. Although his system of classification was very
ethnocentric, it did not have a “racial” basis as he utilised an environmentalist approach in an
attempt to explain these differences. Thus, this suggests that our ancestors in the ancient world
(up until the 16th century or later) did not know of “race” as a concept or as a term of
classification.
In the 15th century, Europeans began adopting new ways of perceiving the world. New
sailing technology in combination with innovations in the printing press and media resulted in
Columbus’s Voyage in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s Voyage in 1493 becoming widespread
knowledge. The development of the printing press allowed for widespread literacy which
enabled Europeans to read accounts about faraway places and learn about people who were
very different from themselves. Philosophical schools in the ancient world also played a pivotal
role in the modern development of the concept of “race”. Platonic Thought laid the foundation
, SOCI 302 (102) Midterm Take Home Exam Raisah Ismail (99860116) 2
for the development of logic as it is “the contemplation of what cannot be directly seen or
witnessed but inferred”. Diverging from Plato, Aristotle goes on to focus on two ideas;
empiricism (which placed an emphasis on observation) and a hierarchy of existence (also
referred to as the “great chain of being”). Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s 15th-century texts
“Oration on the Dignity of Man” and “On Being and Unity” attempts to reconcile the works of
Plato and Aristotle by arguing that “being and oneness are equal” – the foundation for
humanism which argues that the human quest for knowledge is central to their status in the
great chain of being. Following this, in the 17th century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz
invented calculus which attempts to derive unseen facts (i.e., factual) from observed facts. In
the 18th century, Carolus Linnaeus’s reframes Aristotle’s “great chain of being” into a
classification system of the diversity of life which is based on observations of resemblances.
All of these ideas would later on play a vital role in the development of the concept of “race”
as individuals found it easy to follow Aristotle’s hierarchy of existence by placing different
kinds of humans into a hierarchical chain of being through the utilisation of logic and calculus
to explain these differences using factual such as facial angles, phrenology and IQ tests.
An example of European ideas that use such factual to explain human diversity would
be Pieter Camper’s “Facial Angles” which was published in the 18th century. In his work,
Camper characterised individuals by their facial measurements and suggested that Africans
were closer to apes than human beings and that White individuals were the “most evolved”.
Heavily rooted in scientific racism, his work was regarded as very influential with his ideas
being used to support the idea that White individuals were the most evolved and therefore
superior simply based on their facial measurements.
Another example of European ideas that use factual to explain human diversity would
be Franz Joseph Gall’s “Phrenology” which was promoted in several works culminating in the
19th century. Gall believed that the brain was the organ of the mind meaning that it was made
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