Professor
Sir Geoffrey Lloyd
Career
Throughout
my University career I have been based chiefly at
Cambridge, holding various
University and College posts, first at King's and then
at Darwin. From
1983 onwards I held a personal Chair in Ancient
Philosophy and Science and from
1989 to my retirement in 2000 I was Master of Darwin
College. I was
Chairman of the East Asian History of Science
trust, which is the
governing body directing the work of the Needham
Research Institute from 1992
to 2002, and I am currently Senior Scholar in
Residence at that Institute.
I have held visiting professorships and lectured
across the world, in Europe
(France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Holland,
Belgium, Greece) in the Far
East (Fellow of the Japan society for the Promotion of
Science in Tokyo in
1981, visiting professor at Beijing daxue in 1987,
visiting professor at Sendai
in 1991, and the first Zhu Kezhen Visiting Professor
in the History of Science
at the Institute for the History of Natural
Science, Beijing, in 2001) ,
in Australasia (Hood Professor at the Department of
Philosophy at the
University of Auckland, 2006) and in North America
(Bonsall professor, Stanford
in 1981, Sather professor Berkeley in 1984, AD White
professor at large,
Cornell from 1990 to 1996: I have also lectured at
Harvard, Princeton, the
Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, Yale, Brown,
University of
Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Austin, Chicago among
other places).
I
serve on the editorial committee of 10 journals,
including Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science, Journal of the
History of Astronomy, Physis,
History of the Human Sciences, Arabic Sciences and
Philosophy, Endoxa and
Antiquorum Philosophia.
Publications
I have written 20 books (listed
below) and edited a
further 4, and various of these books have been
translated into French,
Italian, Spanish, German, Greek, Romanian, Polish,
Slovenian, Turkish, Japanese,
Korean and Chinese. In addition I have published
some 150 articles and
about the same number of reviews.
Honours
I was elected a Fellow of the
British Academy in 1983, I
received the Sarton medal in 1987, I was elected to a
Honorary Fellowship at
Kings in 1991, to Honorary Foreign Membership of the
American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1995, to the International Academy for
the History of Science
in 1997, and to an Honorary Fellowship at Darwin in
2000. I
was awarded an Honorary Litt. D. by
the University of Athens in 2003, and an Honorary
Litt. D. by the University of
Oxford in 2010. I
received the Kenyon
Medal for Classical Scholarship from the British
Academy in 2007 and the Dan
David Prize for Classics in 2013. I was
knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in
1997.
Current Projects
My
most recent work concerns various aspects of the
problem of the psychic unity
of humankind. There has been extensive debate in
recent years between
universalists and relativists on topics such as the
cognition of space, colour,
causation, the emotions, personhood. My own
contribution aims
(ambitiously) to take into account the most recent
work in the domains (a) of
the neuro-sciences and evolutionary biology, (b) in
social and linguistic
anthropology, and (c) philosophy, as well as adding a
historical dimension from
studies of ancient Greece and China, in order to
clarify the key issues.
I do not side either with the universalists or their
opponents. My aim is
rather to show more clearly than has been done in most
other studies the limits
there must be to claims for the psychic unity of
humans, and how differences
are to be explained where they exist. My
2007 book from Oxford
University Press, Cognitive
Variations;
Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human
Mind was the subject of
a special number of Interdisciplinary Science
Reviews in 2010.
In
2009 Oxford University Press published my Disciplines
in the Making:
Cross-cultural perspectives on Elites, Learning and
Innovation. This takes
8 areas of human experience and considers first the
differences in the
understanding of the core activities involved in
different societies ancient
and modern, and secondly the factors that encouraged
or impeded their
establishment as learned disciplines, in particular
the roles, both positive
and negative, of elites in those processes. The 8 in
question are: philosophy,
mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, religion and
science.
In 2012 I published a further cross-disciplinary study using the evidence from ancient and modern societies to throw light on three major questions, namely Being (what there is, ontology or cosmology), Humanity (what makes a human being a human being and what repercussions this has on behaviour and morality) and Understanding (how are claims to know justified and communicated).
I am currently engaged in turning my Tarner lectures in the Philosophy of Science (2012) into a book to be entitled The Ideals of Inquiry: An ancient history. This tackles three interrelated questions to do with investigation, namely the different views that have been entertained on how inquiry is to be pursued, the assumptions that have been made about what there is ‘out there’ to be investigated, and what investigation was thought to be good for. In each case I contrast what we hold today with what was believed in ancient societies, and I examine the roots and implications of such differences.
Books authored
1966 Polarity and Analogy, Cambridge University Press
(pp v + 503) (trans.
Spanish, Italian, Korean)
1968 Aristotle, The Growth and Structure of his Thought,
Cambridge University
Press (pp xiii + 324) (trans. Japanese, Italian,
Chinese, Spanish, Slovenian,
Turkish)
1970 Early Greek Science, Thales to Aristotle, London,
Chatto and Windus (pp
xvi + 156) (trans. Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese,
Korean, Chinese, Polish
and Greek)
1973 Greek Science after Aristotle, London, Chatto and
Windus (pp xiii + 189)
(trans. Italian, French, Japanese, Polish and Greek)
1979 Magic, Reason and Experience, Cambridge University
Press (pp xii + 335)
(trans. Italian, French, Greek)
1983 Science, Folklore and Ideology, Cambridge
University Press (pp xi + 260)
(trans. Italian)
1987 The Revolutions of Wisdom, University of California
Press (pp xii + 468)
1990 Demystifying mentalities, Cambridge University
Press (pp viii + 174)
(trans. Italian, French, Spanish)
1991 Methods and Problems in Greek Science, Cambridge
University Press (pp xiv
+ 457) (trans. Italian, Rumanian, Greek)
1996 Adversaries and Authorities, Cambridge University
Press (pp xvii + 250)
1996 Aristotelian Explorations, Cambridge University
Press (pp ix +242)
2002 The Ambitions of Curiosity, Cambridge University
Press (pp xxi + 175)
(trans. Italian, Spanish)
2002 (with Nathan Sivin) The Way and the Word (pp xvii +
348), Yale University
Press (trans. Italian, Greek, Chinese)
2003 In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek
Imagination, Oxford University
Press (pp xxi + 258)
2004 Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical
Perspectives on Greek
and Chinese Science and Culture, Oxford University Press
(pp xi + 222) (trans.
Italian and Japanese)
2005 The Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and
Morality in Ancient Greece,
China and Today, London, Duckworth (pp 176)
2006 Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and
Chinese Science, Aldershot,
Variorum (pp 302)
2007 Cognitive variations: reflections on the unity and
diversity of the human
mind, Oxford (pp 200) (trans. Chinese)
2009 Disciplines in the Making: Cross-cultural
Perspectives on Elites, Learning
and Innovation, Oxford (pp 215)
2012 Being, Humanity and Understanding, Oxford (pp. 136).
Books edited
1978 Hippocratic Writings Penguin Classics (pp 380)
1978 (with G.E.L.Owen) Aristotle On Mind and the
Senses, Cambridge University
Press (pp 362)
1966 (with J. Brunschwig) Le Savoir Grec, Paris Flammarion (pp 1095), (2nd edition 2011) (trans English, Spanish, Italian, German).
2001
(with G. Cambiano and M. Vegetti) Storia della
scienza, vol 1 sez 4, La Scienza
greco-romana, Rome, Enciclopedia Italiana (pp
537-1044)
Contact:
Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd , Scholar in Residence
Email:
gel20[put
the "at" sign here]hermes.cam.ac.uk
Tel: 01223-311545
Fax: 01223-362703