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 26 books (listed below) and edited a further 10, and various of these books have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, 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
While I continue to work on the problems in comparative history and philosophy of science that I identified in my 2021 book I am currently also engaged in collaborations with scholars in a variety of academic disciplines in the series of workshops under the title “Science in the Forest Science in the Past” and in particular with the Brazilian anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça. We are planning a sequel to our 2023 book Of Jaguars and Butterflies, provisionally entitled Bodies, Gods and other Imponderables: Cross-cultural metalogues which will discuss cross-cultural and interdisciplinary issues to do with such concepts as those of dreams, sickness, and myth as well as the bodies and gods of the title
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).
2021 Expanding Horizons in the History of Science: the Comparative Approach, pp. 155. Cambridge University Press.
2023 Of Jaguars and Butterflies: Metalogues on issues in anthropology and philosophy, (with Aparecida Vilaça) pp 122. Berghahn, Oxford (Portuguese trans 2025 Japanese trams forthcoming).
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).
2019 (with A. Vilaça) Science in the Forest, Science in the Past, in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 19.1, University of Chicago Press.
2019 (with Aparecida Vilaça) Science in the Forest, Science in the Past (HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Special Issue) 9.1. University of Chicago Press. Published as an e-book Chicago 2020 and as a standard book Chicago 2021.
2021 (with W.McCarty and Aparecida Vilaça) Science in the Forest, Science in the Past II (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46,3: 213-425. reprinted as Science in the Forest, Science in the Past: Further Interdisciplinary Explorations. Routledge 2022.
2024 (with W.McCarty and Aparecida Vilaça) Science in the Forest, Science in the Past III (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 49,1: 1-178.