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Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE
Aristotle
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Period: 85 to 165
Claudius Ptolemy
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Period: 428 to 348 BCE
Plato
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Period: Jan 1, 1066 to Jan 1, 1485
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages was the time after the fall of the Roman Empire up to the time of the Renaissance. Also known as the Dark Ages, it was originally thought that this period of instability had no contributions to the world. However, without the Middle Ages we would have no Gothic design, no stained glass windows in churches, no illuminated manuscripts, and no sense of chivalry. -
Period: Jan 1, 1450 to
Fear of Witches
Great campaign against witches coincided with Europe's brutal religious wars and with the early development of new scientific culture among members of Europe's educated elite, even educated people believed in the existence of witches -
Period: Jan 1, 1452 to Jan 1, 1519
Leonardo da Vinci
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Period: Jan 1, 1473 to Jan 1, 1543
Nicholas Copernicus
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Period: Jan 1, 1501 to
Mercantilism 16thC - 18thC
Mercantilism is based on the idea that strong nation-states had the opportunity to create a world economy by using a state's military power to ensure local markets and supply sources were protected. Advocates of mercantilism believed the prosperity of a nation was reliant on its supply of capital, and global volume of trade was static. The result was a system of economics that required a positive balance of trade, with surplus exports. -
Period: Jan 1, 1546 to
Tycho Brahe
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Period: Jan 1, 1561 to
Francis Bacon
Lord Chancellor of England- had little influence on actual science. However, like Descartes, he rejected ancient authority and methods of seeking knowledge. He formalised the inductive method and became a leading philosopher of empiricism. Baconian knowledge is far more practical than that of scholastic. Bacon's weakness was in his failure to understand the role of mathematics (as it followed the deductive method) -
Period: Jan 1, 1564 to
Galileo Galilee
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Period: Jan 1, 1571 to
Johannes Kepler
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Period: to
Rene Descartes
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Period: to
European Discovery of Australia
When European sailors began entering ‘Australian' waters in the early 1600s, they called it Terra Australis Incognita (unknown land of the South).
Between 1606 and 1770 more than 50 European ships made landfall on Australian soil, which was then inhabited solely by Indigenous people.
Navigator and astronomer Captain James Cook claimed the whole of the east coast of Australia for Great Britain on 22 August 1770, naming eastern Australia 'New South Wales'. -
Period: to
Intellectual/ Scientific Revolution 17th C
Science provided Europe with a new faith in itself. -
Period: to
17thC Mathematics
Decimals came in the express fractions, the symbols used in algebra were improved and standardised, and in 1614 logarithms were invented by Scot John Napier. Coordinate geometry was mapped out by Descartes, the theory of probabilities was developed by Pascal, and calculous was invented simultaneously in England by Newton and in Germany by Leibniz. -
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Sir Isaac Newton
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Period: to
The Enlightenment 18thC
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment opened a path for independent thought, and the fields of mathematics, astronomy, physics, politics, economics, philosophy, and medicine were drastically updated and expanded. The amount of new knowledge that emerged was staggering. The Enlightenment also prompted the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which provided rural dwellers with jobs and new cities in which to live. -
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Montesquieu
French philosophe -
Period: to
Voltaire
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Period: to
Slavery in the Unites States 18th - 19thC
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Period: to
Rousseau
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Period: to
Britain's Industrial Revolution
Manufacturing, business, and the number of wage laborers skyrocketed. Technology changed: hand tools were replaced by steam- or electricity-driven machines. Population boomed, and demographics shifted. Because industrial resources like coal and iron were in Central and Northern England, a shift in population from Southern England northward took place. These changes in social and demographic realities created vast pressure for political change as well. -
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French Revolution 1789
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Period: to
Constitution of the United States
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Period: to
Romanticism late 18thC - mid 19thC
The basic idea in Romanticism is that reason cannot explain everything. In reaction to the cult of rationality that was the Enlightenment, Romantics searched for deeper, often subconscious appeals. This led the Romantics to view things with a different spin than the Enlightenment thinkers. The Romantics idealized the Middle Ages as a time of spiritual depth and adventure. -
Period: to
Nihilism 19th C
All beliefs, values and knowledge are baseless and cannot be known. Nothing has meaning and nothing exists outside matter. The cosmos operates in a closed, cause and effect system. All human action is considered to be governed by nature and nurture. Humans cannot be held responsible for their actions.
Friedrich Nietzche famously commented on the deterioration of morality in western society. -
Period: to
Stolen Generation
The "Stolen Generations" is the name given to at least 100,000 Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed or taken under duress from their families by police or welfare officers.
Apparent motivations include child protection, the belief that the Aboriginal people would die out given their catastrophic population decline after white contact,[7] and the belief that full-blooded Aboriginal people resented miscegenation and the mixed-race children fathered and abandoned by white men. -
Period: to
Postmodernism Late 20thC
There is no longer one worldview that bonds western culture. Movement from "nothing has meaning" in Nihilism to "whatever is constructed has meaning" in this way, Postmodernism stems from Nihilism with a linguistic twist.
Prime reality is what you make it, God does not exist, all worldviews are equally credible, the physical world is all there is.