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 published 19 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, Japanese,
Korean and
Chinese. In addition I have published some 140 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, to an Honorary Fellowship
at Darwin in 2000 and to an Honorary D.Litt by the University of
Athens in 2003. I was knighted for 'services to the history of
thought' in 1997. I received the Kenyon Medal for Classical scholarship
from the British Academy in 2007.
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.
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.
I am currently engaged in a further ambitious project using the evidence both from ancient societies and from modern ethnography 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 does this have on behaviour and morality) and Understanding (how are claims to know justified and communicated: the problems of epistemology and philosophy of language). These are issues that can and should be investigated both in ancient societies and in modern ones where, in both cases, some exotic and paradoxical beliefs are recorded or have been reported that pose severe problems of interpretation. Why have humans entertained such diverse views on what there is, on the relations between humans and other animals, and on our capacity to understand? Some have claimed not just that world-views differ, but that in a sense different human groups inhabit different worlds. One of my strategic aims is to throw light on the issues by examining both the commonalities and the divergences between belief systems. As in my other recent studies my discussion involves the counterpoint between Greece and China and ranges widely in the ethnographic and philosophical literature.
Books authored
1966 Polarity and Analogy, Cambridge University Press (pp v + 503)
(trans.
Spanish, Italian)
1968 Aristotle, The Growth and Structure of his Thought, Cambridge
University Press (pp xiii + 324) (trans. Japanese, Italian, Chinese,
Spanish, Slovenian)
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 forthcoming)
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 forthcoming)
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)
2009 Disciplines in the Making: Cross-cultural Perspectives
on Elites, Learning and Innovation, Oxford (pp 215)
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)
1996 (with J. Brunschwig) Le Savoir Grec, Paris Flammarion (pp 1095)
(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