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He argued that the colder climates of Europe produced brave but unintelligent people who were able to maintain their independence but who did not have the capacity to rule others. Aristotle, for example, explained the differences between Northern Europeans and Asians in terms of climatic causes. Strabo referred to similar phenomena when explaining the mighty and greatness of Rome. Thucydides and Xenophon saw Athens’s natural conditions and geographical position as the factors underlying its greatness. In the Greco-Roman period, regional studies were closely bound up with the study of history. They included the physician Hippocrates, the philosopherĪristotle, and the historians Thucydides, Xenophon, and Herodotus. The first attempt to explain the physical features and character traits of various peoples and their culture with reference to the influence of natural conditions was made by the Greek and Roman scholars. In brief, determinists believe that most human activity can be explained as a response to the natural environment. The determinists generally consider man a passive agent on which the physical factors are constantly acting and thus determining his attitude and process of decision making. The essence of the deterministic school of thought is that the history, culture, living style and stage of development of a social group or nation are exclusively or largely governed by the physical factors of environment. In other words, the belief that variation in human behaviour around the world can be explained by the differences in the natural environment. The point of view is that the physical environment controls the course of human action. Their major initial source for explanations was the physical environment, and that theoretical position was established around the belief that the nature of human activity was controlled by the parameters of the physical world within which it was set.ĭeterminism is one of the most important philosophies which persisted up to the Second World War in one shape or the other. The first approach adopted by the geographers to generalize the patterns of human occupations of the earth surface was deterministic.