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, Toronto and McGill, 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 24 books (listed
below) and edited a further 7, and various of these books
have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish,
German, Greek, Rumanian, 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, to an Honorary
Fellowship at Darwin in 2000, and to a Fellowship of the
Learned Society of Wales in 2015. I was awarded an
Honorary Litt. D. by the University of Athens in 2003,
an Honorary Litt. D. by the University of Oxford in
2010, and an Hororary Litt. D by the University of St.
Andrews in 2016. I
received the Kenyon Medal for Classical Scholarship from
the British Academy in 2007, the Dan David Prize for
Classics in 2013, and the Fyssen Prize for Cognitive
Science in 2014. I
was knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in
1997.
Current Projects
My recent work concerns various aspects of
the problem of the psychic unity of humankind. 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 most
recent monograph, published
by Oxford University Press, is entitled Intelligence
and Intelligibility: Cross-cultural studies of
human cognitive experience. This
explores the multiple understandings and facets of
what we mean by 'intelligence' as applied to
different living beings and even to machines and
investigates the limits of intelligibility not just
of the world around us but of other human beings'
understanding of it. I am
now following this up with a
further study on the methodology of the history of
science, provisionally
entitled Expanding
Horizons in the
History of Science: The Comparative Approach.
My second main
project is a collaborative exercise bringing together
social anthropologists, historians and philosophers of
science, computer scientists, classicists and sinologists,
to see what each of those disciplines can contribute to
cross-cultural understanding. This project has
involved two workshops at the NRI, in 2017 and 2019,
entitled Science
in the Forest, Science in the Past, exploring the
knowledge claims and practices of indigenous and ancient
peoples and challenging the viability of assessing those
by using modern Western science as a yardstick. The proceedings
of the first workshop have been published in HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 19.1 in 2019 and those of the
second will appear in a special number of Interdisciplinary
Science Reviews in 2020.
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) (trans. Chinese, 2015)
2012 Being, Humanity and
Understanding, Oxford (pp. 136)
2014 The Ideals of Inquiry, Oxford (pp 163)
2015 Analogical Investigations: historical and
cross-cultural perspectives on human reasoning, Cambridge
(pp 139).
2018 The Ambivalences of Rationality:
Ancient and Modern Cross-Cultural Explorations, Cambridge
(pp. 125).
2020
Intelligence and
Intelligibility: Cross-cultural studies of human
cognitive experience, Oxford
(pp. 158).
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), (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)
2018 Ancient Greece and China Compared
(with Jingyi Jenny Zhao in collaboration with Qiaosheng
Dong), Cambridge (pp. 430).
2019 (with R. Gagné and S. Goldhill)
Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in
History, Religion and Anthropology, Leiden, Brill (pp.
463).
Contact:
Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd , Scholar in Residence
Email:
gel20[put the "at" sign here]cam.ac.uk
Tel: 01223-311545