Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation

by G.E.R. Lloyd

The organisation of higher education across the world is one of several factors that conspire to create the assumption that our own map of the intellectual disciplines is, broadly speaking, valid cross-culturally. Disciplines in the Making challenges this in relation to eight main areas of human endeavour, namely philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, religion and science. Lloyd focuses on historical and cross-cultural data that throw light on the different ways in which these disciplines were constituted and defined in different periods and civilisations, especially in ancient Greece and China, and how the relationships between them were understood, particularly when one or other discipline claimed hegemonic status (as happened, at different times, with philosophy, history, religion and science). He also explores the role of elites, whether positive (when they foster the professionalisation of a discipline) or negative (when they restrict recruitment to the
profession, when they insist on adherence to established norms, concepts and practices and thereby inhibit further innovation). The issues are relevant to current educational policy in relation to the ever-increasing specialisation we see, especially in the sciences, and to the difficulties encountered in making the most of the opportunities for inter- or trans-disciplinary research.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

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.