Learning Objectives

  1. Describe some of the large-scale societal changes that have taken place during the lifetimes of you and your parents.
  2. Describe how the annual meetings of contemporary scientific societies reflect the interactions between individual scientists that began in Mersenne’s cell.
  3. Appraise the differences in collecting data with the naked eye to doing so with instruments such as telescopes and microscopes.
  4. Summarize the major changes in approach to understanding the world caused by the new philosophy.
  5. Modify your thinking about sunrises and sunsets and determine which direction the earth is spinning relative to the sun.
  6. Explain how modern psychology uses empiricism and rationalism to explain human behavior.
  7. Explain the differences between representing knowledge on the printed page vs. doing so on a web page.
  8. Compare the current movie rating system (e.g., G, PG, PG-13, R, and X) to the Index of Prohibited Works.
  9. List the progression of astronomical knowledge and equipment from Brahe to Newton.
  10. Identify some modern examples of intolerance, religious or otherwise.
  11. Differentiate the approaches to understanding the world taken by Descartes and Bacon.
  12. Discuss how the English Civil Wars (e.g., big history) affected the intellectual zeitgeist of Great Britain.
  13. Assess the contributions of the British empiricists to foundational issues in psychology.