Anthropology

Plato's philosophy included the belief that things in the physical world, including social structures, imperfectly reflected ideal forms of those things that exist outside experience. A priori: Philosophical term referring to ideas, propositions, or concepts not derived from direct experience, but from self-evident propositions(主张).


Aristotle's philosophy of nature was inherently teleological (目的论的): that is, his comprehension of living things was fully informed by a belief that all of nature is imbued with a purpose.Form is inseparable from function. 


The major impetus for the development of anthropology was European colonial expansion. Two perspectives for interpreting native societies. (1)Native societies somehow represented a pristine and unadulterated condition, free of the burden of civilized life. The native were innocent and ignorant, yet capable of learning. (2) Natives were uncivilized, they lacked Christianity. So it was the mission of Christian Europe to convert them.

The missionary enterprise thus became an integral and paradoxical feature of European colonial expansion. Natives were exploited for economic reasons and at the same time introduced to Christianity for compassionate reasons.

Hobbes claims in his book Leviathan that human are kept in constant motion by the force of the desire for self-preservation. The human state of nature is one of war between individuals. People compete but reason that people born equal, so they enter a social contract and surrender their rights to a sovereign. All the people combine into one single mind. The government is like Leviathan (a monster written in the Bible). It is made by human, run by human but it simultaneously protect and hurt people.

Puferdolf thought that human nature is expressed through the process of becoming social, an end toward which humans strive as a means of escape from an asocial condition. He claimed that Marriage, the basic unit of social organization, as a crucial step toward society.

According to Rousseau, human progress consisted in the acquisition of property and the creation of artificial societies within which individuals lost their equitable status.