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 in ancient and modern times. Lloyd describes that diversity and investigates the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, evenparadoxical; they implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we 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 explores topics such as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

G. E. R. Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of nineteen books, including Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (OUP, 2007) and Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation (OUP, 2009). He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983, and received the Sarton medal in 1987. Lloyd was elected to an 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 an Honorary D.Litt by the University of Athens in 2003. He was knighted for 'services to the history of thought' in 1997, and received the Kenyon Medal for Classical scholarship from the British Academy in 2007.