Being, Humanity, and Understanding by G. E. R. Lloyd

by G.E.R. Lloyd

G. E. R. Lloyd explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main 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 study of ancient societies, both to describe that diversity and to investigate the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical, to the point where they have often been described as irrational or frankly unintelligible. Many implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements, where again we may seem to be faced with an impossible task in attempting to arrive at a fair-minded evaluation. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we happen to belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? Being, Humanity, and Understanding examines these questions cross-culturally and seeks to draw out the implications for the revisability of some of our habitual assumptions concerning such topics as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

Paperback Bunko

First published September 7, 2012

About the author

Sir Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the Needham Research Institute. His University career has been based chiefly at the University of Cambridge, where he held various University and College posts, first at King's College and then at Darwin. From 1983 onwards he held a personal Chair in Ancient Philosophy and Science and from 1989 until retirement in 2000 he was Master of Darwin College. He served as 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 afterward Senior Scholar in Residence at that Institute.

Prof. Lloyd has 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; also lectured at Harvard, Princeton, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, Yale, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Austin, Chicago among other places).

He has served on the editorial committees 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.