G E R Lloyd
Biographic Data
| ID | 119033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G E R Lloyd |
| GIVEN NAMES | G E R |
| FAMILY NAME | Lloyd |
| SIGNATURE | LLOYD G E R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The King's College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2626-4082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 101 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 263 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 99 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Reading Spinoza in the Anthropocene
This book offers a reading of Spinoza’s distinctive treatment of human presence in Nature, bringing his philosophy to bear on contemporary climate change debate. Centred on close commentary on The Ethics – with some diversions into Spinoza’s political writings – it highlights the contrasts with Descartes’s treatment of the nature of human knowledge and of mind-body relations, arguing that a Cartesian framework has profoundly influenced current wa…
Reading Spinoza in the Anthropocene
Reply to Nichols’ “The Unfulfilled Promise of Cross-Cultural, Interdisciplinary Ancient History”
A critical reply to Ryan Nichols’ commentary on my book The Ambivalences of Rationality: Ancient and Modern Cross-Cultural Explorations (2018) published in this issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography
The problems of exceptionality
The points at which Greek mathematics in general and Archimedes' contributions in particular are exceptional are here assessed by way of a comparison with the extensive evidence from ancient China. While underlining the need for caution concerning the extent to which concrete conclusions are possible, the outcome is broadly to confirm Netz's argument that a key factor in Archimedes' success and influence was the way in which in a social and intel…
Expanding Horizons in the History of Science
This book challenges the common assumption that the predominant focus of the history of science should be the achievements of Western scientists since the so-called Scientific Revolution. The conceptual frameworks within which the members of earlier societies and of modern indigenous groups worked admittedly pose severe problems for our understanding. But rather than dismiss them on the grounds that they are incommensurable with our own and to th…
Maleness, Metaphor, and the "Crisis" of Reason
Some feminist dismissals of reason as male do seem to come perilously close to Eco&s;s picture of a poignant search for a sardine can opener. The feminist critique of reason is centered on its alleged maleness, but it shares in the strengths and confusions of broader criticism of reason. The book The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy directly addressed neither the sex-gender distinction nor the distinction between the metap…
Ancient Greece and China Compared
Ancient Greece and China Compared is a pioneering, methodologically sophisticated set of studies, bringing together scholars who all share the conviction that the sustained critical comparison and contrast between ancient societies can bring to light significant aspects of each that would be missed by focusing on just one of them. The topics tackled include key issues in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in mathematics and the life …
The Ambivalences of Rationality
Is rationality a well-defined human universal such that ideas and behaviour can everywhere be judged by a single set of criteria? Or are the rational and the irrational simply cultural constructs? This study provides an alternative to both options. The universalist thesis underestimates the variety found in sound human reasonings exemplified across time and space and often displays a marked Eurocentric bias. The extreme relativist faces the dange…
Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture
Being, Humanity, and Understanding
This volume is the latest, and worthy, installment in Lloyd's long project, in progress since his Magic, Reason and Experience [1979] or even his Polarity and Analogy [1966], to understand ancient mentalities, especially in the realm of natural science. The five chapters of this slim volume engage their material and the reader with verve and vigor, and deepen Lloyd's work in confronting ancient mentalities, particularly Greek and Chinese. 1 In th…
Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science
Contents: Introduction. Greek Medicine: The transformations of ancient medicine The definition, status and methods of the medical techne in the 5th and 4th centuries Scholarship, authority and argument in Galen's Quod animi mores Theories and practices of demonstration in Galen Mathematics as a model of method in Galen. Greek Mathematics and Philosophy: The alleged fallacy of Hippocrates of Chios The Meno and the mysteries of mathematics Plato an…
Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections
In Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, G. E. R. Lloyd makes an often persuasive case for the relevance and use of comparative studies of ancient cultures in relation to two areas of contemporary concern.This concern is of two sorts-there are philosophical questions bearing on science and its history, and questions about the relevance of reconstructions of ancient thought to such modern social and political issues as higher education, human 'right…
The Ideals of Inquiry
Ontologies and Values
This chapter examines the various ontological presuppositions of ancient investigations, and the values and motivations that underpin them. It argues that we should reformulate questions about ancient studies. Rather than asking what science studies and what it is good for, we should ask what the investigators themselves thought about what they were studying and how they saw its value.
Democracy and Demonstration
This chapter explores the relation, if any, between democracy and demonstration. It focuses on just what the bid to demonstrate originally amounted to in Greek thought, and how far that ambition reflects or can be related to political institutions and practices. The historical evidence suggests that while in origin the demand for strict demonstration securing incontrovertibility was inherently antidemocratic, in that it turned its back on democra…
On the very possibility of mutual intelligibility
This paper acknowledges that the issues of translation and of translatability are general and concern the possibility of mutual intelligibility in many registers and including within a single natural language. Both anthropologists and ancient historians are faced with such problems, where the historians are at a disadvantage in not being able to check their understandings with those whom they are seeking to understand. But faced with seemingly pa…
Enlightenment Shadows
Genevieve Lloyd presents a new study of the place of Enlightenment thought in intellectual history and of its continued relevance. She offers original readings of a range of key texts, which highlight the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted in their writing - and reflected on - the interplay of intellect, imagination, and emotion.
‘Changing the Common Mode of Thinking’
The chapter opens with a discussion of metaphors of light and of motion in Bacon’s essay On Truth, leading into an examination of the tensions between timelessness and change in the Enlightenment understanding of knowledge. Those tensions surface in reflections which d’Alembert and Diderot offered on conceptual aspects of their Encyclopedia project—concerned both with displaying the timeless structure of the human mind and, on the other hand, emp…
The Attractions of Instability
Diderot’s work Rameau’s Nephew is a fictional exploration of a form of consciousness dominated by mental fluidity rather than stability. The chapter discusses Hegel’s interpretation of the character in his Phenomenology of Spirit, and Foucault’s in his History of Madness. The reading offered here emphasizes what the work shows about the tensions between the attractions of an unstable flow of consciousness and, on the other hand, the stabilizing f…
Response to comments on Being, humanity, and understanding
Previous articleNext article FreeResponse to comments on Being, humanity, and understandingG. E. R. LLOYDG. E. R. LLOYDUniversity of Cambridge Search for more articles by this author University of CambridgePDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is a great privilege to have such careful readers of my book. In particular I app…
Reasoning and Culture in a Historical Perspective
After a preliminary discussion of some of the problems of the nature of reason and argument and the difficulties of investigating them, this paper uses the rich evidence from ancient civilisations, Greece and China especially, to explore the relationship between reasoning and culture. While argument and persuasion are evidently widespread in all human populations, the modalities they take may differ depending on the differing pragmatic circumstan…
The Philosophical History of Wonder
Imagining Difference
Being, Humanity, and Understanding
"G. E. R. Lloyd explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics: being, or what there is; humanity --what makes a human being a human; and understanding, both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. Lloyd juxtaposes the evidence available from ethnography and from the…
Multidimensional Reality
This piece is a response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, "The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy," in the Common Knowledge symposium on "comparative relativism." The theme is complexity-as distinct from simple contrast or binarism of any kind-similarities as well as differences are observed in ancient Chinese and ancient Greek responses to cultural difference; also the significantly different views of these matters among the Greek philos…
Science, folklore, and ideology
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
The Cambridge Ancient History
Volume VI of the new edition of The Cambridge Ancient History begins with Sparta attempting to consolidate its leadership of mainland Greece and ends with the death of Alexander the Great after he had conquered the Persian Empire and marched far into India. It is correspondingly wide-ranging in its treatment of the politics and economy, not only of old Greece, but of the Near East and the western Mediterranean. The century also saw the continued …
Early Greek Science
This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers, and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of early Greek science; and he analyzes the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers
Saving the Appearances
‘Saving the appearances’, , is a slogan that, in its time, stood or was made to stand for many different methodological positions in many different branches of ancient natural science. It is not my aim, in this paper, to attempt to tackle the subject as a whole. I shall concentrate on just one inquiry, astronomy. Nor, with astronomy, can I do justice to all the complexities of what was certainly one of the central methodological issues, if not th…
Being, Humanity, and Understanding
"G. E. R. Lloyd explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics: being, or what there is; humanity --what makes a human being a human; and understanding, both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. Lloyd juxtaposes the evidence available from ethnography and from the…
Humanity between gods and beasts? Ontologies in question
Wherein lies the humanity of human beings? Many conflicting answers have been attempted in ancient and in modern times, with many focusing on the triadic relationship between humans, gods, and beasts. This article will review a wide range of suggestions, from those of ancient Greeks and Chinese, to recent anthropological proposals (by Viveiros de Castro and Descola in particular) of alternative ontologies. We have every reason to take rival human…
Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections
In Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, G. E. R. Lloyd makes an often persuasive case for the relevance and use of comparative studies of ancient cultures in relation to two areas of contemporary concern.This concern is of two sorts-there are philosophical questions bearing on science and its history, and questions about the relevance of reconstructions of ancient thought to such modern social and political issues as higher education, human 'right…
On the very possibility of mutual intelligibility
This paper acknowledges that the issues of translation and of translatability are general and concern the possibility of mutual intelligibility in many registers and including within a single natural language. Both anthropologists and ancient historians are faced with such problems, where the historians are at a disadvantage in not being able to check their understandings with those whom they are seeking to understand. But faced with seemingly pa…
Woman as other
1989). Woman as other: Sex, gender and subjectivity. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 4, No. 10, pp. 13-22
History and Human Nature
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses
No One's Land
Drawing on the work of Michèle Le Dœuff, this paper uses the idea of “philosophical imagination” to make visible the historical intersection between philosophical ideas, social practice, and institutional structures. It explores the role of ideas of “terra nullius” and of the “doomed race” in the formation of some crucial ways in which non-indigenous Australians have imagined their relations with indigenous peoples. The author shows how feminist …
The Hippogratic Question
The question of determining the genuine works of Hippocrates, a topic already much discussed by the ancient commentators, still continues to be actively debated, although the disagreements among scholars remain, it seems, almost as wide as ever. In comparatively recent times, Edelstein's IIEPI AEPQN and two subsequent studies of his written in the 1930s (Edelstein ( b ) and ( c ) marked a turning-point in that they presented a particularly clear …
The Power of Spinoza
As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as in relation takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homo-geneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualizatio…
Plato and Archytas in the Seventh Letter
Le lien entre Platon et la politique pythagoricienne a partir d'une analyse de la Cinquieme Lettre
The Development of Aristotle's Theory of the Classification of Animals
Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science
Contents: Introduction. Greek Medicine: The transformations of ancient medicine The definition, status and methods of the medical techne in the 5th and 4th centuries Scholarship, authority and argument in Galen's Quod animi mores Theories and practices of demonstration in Galen Mathematics as a model of method in Galen. Greek Mathematics and Philosophy: The alleged fallacy of Hippocrates of Chios The Meno and the mysteries of mathematics Plato an…
Methods and Problems in the History of Ancient Science
Expanding Horizons in the History of Science
This book challenges the common assumption that the predominant focus of the history of science should be the achievements of Western scientists since the so-called Scientific Revolution. The conceptual frameworks within which the members of earlier societies and of modern indigenous groups worked admittedly pose severe problems for our understanding. But rather than dismiss them on the grounds that they are incommensurable with our own and to th…
Imagining Difference
Who is attacked in On Ancient Medicine
On Ancient Medicine' is generally acknowledged to be a document of the first importance for our understanding of the developnment of early Greek thought. Yet the problem of its relation to the medicine and philosophy of its time is still a very open one. In their editions of the treatise both W. H. S. Jones2 and A. J. Festugiere3 discuss some of the conflicting opinions of earlier writers who tackled this question. H. Wanner,4 for example, follow…
Reasoning and Culture in a Historical Perspective
After a preliminary discussion of some of the problems of the nature of reason and argument and the difficulties of investigating them, this paper uses the rich evidence from ancient civilisations, Greece and China especially, to explore the relationship between reasoning and culture. While argument and persuasion are evidently widespread in all human populations, the modalities they take may differ depending on the differing pragmatic circumstan…
Imagination, truth and social critique
Aids and Philosophy
Public reason and private passion
Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology …
The Development of Aristotle's Theory of the Classification of Animals
Right and Left in Greek Philosophy
The purpose of this article is to consider how the symbolic associations which right and left had for the ancient Greeks influenced various theories and explanations in Greek philosophy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The fact that certain manifest natural oppositions (e.g. right and left, male and female, light and darkness, up and down) often acquire powerful symbolic associations, standing for religious categories such as pure and impur…
Who is attacked in On Ancient Medicine
On Ancient Medicine' is generally acknowledged to be a document of the first importance for our understanding of the developnment of early Greek thought. Yet the problem of its relation to the medicine and philosophy of its time is still a very open one. In their editions of the treatise both W. H. S. Jones2 and A. J. Festugiere3 discuss some of the conflicting opinions of earlier writers who tackled this question. H. Wanner,4 for example, follow…
The Hot and the Cold, the Dry and the Wet in Greek Philosophy
In a previous article ( JHS lxxxii (1962) 56 ff.) I examined some of the theories and explanations which appear in Greek philosophy and medicine in the period down to Aristotle, in which reference is made to right and left or certain other pairs of opposites (light and darkness, male and female, up and down, front and back), and I argued that several of these theories are influenced by the symbolic associations which these opposites possessed for…
Polarity and Analogy
Polarity and Analogy
Popper versus Kirk
Plato as a Natural Scientist
Widely differing opinions have been expressed on Plato's place in the history of Greek science, as on many other features of his work. The view that Plato's attitude and influence were nothing short of disastrous for science has been widespread. Platt, for instance, put it that ‘Plato, being first and foremost a metaphysician with a sort of religious system, would not have us study anything but metaphysics and a kind of mystic religion’. Dampier-…
Aristotle
Dr Lloyd writes for those who want to discover and explore Aristotle's work for themselves. He acts as mediator between Aristotle and the modern reader. The book is divided into two parts. The first tells the story of Aristotle's intellectual development as far as it can be reconstructed; the second presents the fundamentals of his thought in the main fields of inquiry which interested him: logic and metaphysics, physics, psychology, ethics, poli…
Essay Review
The role of medical and biological analogies in Aristotle's etbics
Polarity and Analogy
Aristotle
Book Reviews Get access Aristotle : The Growth and Structure of his Thought. By G. E. R. Lloyd. (Cambridge University Press. 1968. Pp. xiii + 324. Price 40s) Christopher Kirwan Christopher Kirwan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 76, July 1969, Pages 280–281, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218118 Published: 01 July 1969
Aristotle
Early Greek Science
This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers, and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of early Greek science; and he analyzes the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers
Greek science after Aristotle
"In his previous volume in this series, 'Early Greek science : Thales to Aristotle', [the author] pointed out that although there is no exact equivalent to our term 'science' in Greek, Western science may still be said to originate with the Greeks. In this new volume, the author continues his discussion of the fundamental Greek contributions to science, drawing on the richer literary and archaeological sources for the period after Aristotle. Part…
The Hippogratic Question
The question of determining the genuine works of Hippocrates, a topic already much discussed by the ancient commentators, still continues to be actively debated, although the disagreements among scholars remain, it seems, almost as wide as ever. In comparatively recent times, Edelstein's IIEPI AEPQN and two subsequent studies of his written in the 1930s (Edelstein ( b ) and ( c ) marked a turning-point in that they presented a particularly clear …
Saving the Appearances
‘Saving the appearances’, , is a slogan that, in its time, stood or was made to stand for many different methodological positions in many different branches of ancient natural science. It is not my aim, in this paper, to attempt to tackle the subject as a whole. I shall concentrate on just one inquiry, astronomy. Nor, with astronomy, can I do justice to all the complexities of what was certainly one of the central methodological issues, if not th…
Cultures and Time
Magic, Reason and Experience
Public reason and private passion
Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology …
The Cambridge Ancient History
Published in 1928, Volume VII of the Cambridge Ancient History orginally covered both the history of the Hellenistic world from the battle of Ipsus in 301 BC down to the Peace of Naupactus and the battle of Raphia in 217 BC and the history of Rome from its foundation down to the same date. In the new edition the Greek and Roman sections have been assigned to two separate volumes. Of these, VII part I opens after the death of Alexander, in 323 BC,…
Science, folklore, and ideology
Texts, Metaphors and the Pretentions of Philosophy
Journal Article Texts, Metaphors and the Pretensions of Philosophy Get access Genevieve Lloyd Genevieve Lloyd Australian National University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 January 1986, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist19866914 Published: 17 December 2014
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
Philosophy (77 works) · Epistemology (66 works) · History (38 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (33 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Art (29 works) · Classics (27 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Psychology (22 works)