G. E. R. LloydAnmeldelser

A thoroughly scholarly work. Maybe later.

12/8/21

12/5/21

12/5/21

This book started me on a years-long interest in the ancient Greeks. It does an excellent job of presenting the immense variety of contributions that that the Greek's made in a very large number of disciplines. The articles are detailed and lengthy; I found any one article to be plenty for an evening's serious reading.

This book is a short treatise about scientifically inclined thought in ancient Greece and China. Indian and Mesopotamian explorations are also discussed occasionally. The author has already written many books on this subject, but this might be the first one where his comparisons extend all the way to the political systems which were prevailing when research was conducted, and to the values which may have motivated ancient investigators. He argues that ancient sciences were idiosyncratic, and they should not be compared or judged based on modern science. Somewhat unnecessarily, he also emphasizes that modern science is a more multifaceted enterprise than many of us realize.

This book is a bit too short for its topic. The number of pages devoted to each subtopic is very limited, just enough to arouse your curiosity and interest but not to investigate any question at depth. I would therefore recommend the author's earlier books before this one. He has produced a unique corpus on ancient societies, but this one is only a supplementary work, not the main course.

Lloyd nació en Londres en el año 1933. Sus progenitores eran, ambos, médicos nacidos en Swansea (Gales). Su padre era especialista en tuberculosis. Su hermano iba a ser médico, y Geoffrey Lloyd pensó seguir esa senda que, en todo caso, le ha interesado históricamente. Gracias al empeño familiar, Geoffrey se formó en diferentes centros, obtuvo una beca para Charterhouse, donde destacó en matemáticas, y aprendió de forma autodidacta el italiano. Entre 1954 y 1955 pasó un año en Atenas donde llegó a dominar el instrumento bouzouki, aparte de aprender griego moderno.
Fue llamado para el servicio militar en 1958, y le enviaron a Chipre durante la insurgencia del EOKA. Nada sabían los militares de que hablara griego, lo que produjo una sorpresa.
El análisis de textos de antigua filosofía griega fue su objetivo, pero lo hizo con una mirada muy original, pues ya tenía interés por la antropología. Los estudios de doctorado los realizó bajo la dirección de Geoffrey Kirk, centrándose en los patrones de Polaridad y Analogía en el pensamiento griego, una tesis doctoral que, una vez revisada, apareció finalmente publicada en 1966. A su regreso a Cambridge en 1960, por influencia de Edmund Leach leyó profundamente el nuevo enfoque de la antropología estructural, gracias a la obra de una figura ya descollante, Claude Lévi-Strauss. En 1965, mediante al apoyo de Moses Finley, fue nombrado profesor ayudante.
Después de una visita para impartir clases en China durante 1987, Lloyd se dirigió al estudio del chino clásico. Esto ha añadido una amplia visión comparativa en su más reciente trabajo. Siguiendo la estela de los estudios del gran sinólogo Joseph Needham analiza cómo las distintas culturas políticas de la antigua China y Grecia han influido en las diferentes formas de discurso científico de esas culturas.
Ha desempeñado diversos cargos en las facultades del King’s College y, posteriormente, en el Darwin College. Mantiene cargos de responsabilidad en el Needham Research Institute, gran centro de estudios de la cultura china.
En 1997 se le concedió el título de “Sir” en reconocimiento a su contribución en la “historia del pensamiento”. Actualmente vive gran parte del año en su residencia en España, donde se dedica a la escritura.

In The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin examine ancient China and ancient Greece to “explore complexes of similarities and differences in both to throw light on how each society articulates its experience. Only by comparative studies…can such correlations be reliably established” (pg. 9). To this end, they examine the social structures in both ancient China and Greece, the types of questions philosophers and academics sought to answer, and the role of the state in facilitating inquiry.
Of the social structure of China, Lloyd and Sivin write, “Philosophers and scientists generally were born into the shih, which gave them an opportunity to be educated. Only a few people found unconventional routes to literacy and even literary eminence” (pg. 22). Though they admit difficulty in tracing the origin of medical doctrine, Lloyd and Sivin argue that works like the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor established the form that later medical texts followed, as a dialogue between the emperor and a minister or ministers (pg. 40). Describing medical writings, Lloyd and Sivin write, “Of the earliest extant medical books, excavated from a tomb of 168 B.C. at Ma-wang-tui, Hunan province, the Movibustion Canons are short individual writings (or versions of the same writing) rather than a compilation, and Formulas for Fifty-Two Ailments is a diverse collection of drug and ritual therapies, perhaps the personal accumulation of one healer. These do not contain explicit rationales or doctrines. The Book of the Pulsating Vessels, buried about the same time in Hupei province, writes of the pathological ch’i as agents of three yin and three yang disorders” (pg. 75). Lloyd and Sivin conclude that the Chinese texts lack an exact analogue to Greek documents.
Unlike China, where literacy was confined to the upper echelons of society, Lloyd and Sivin conclude that literacy was fairly widespread in ancient Greece. For parallels with the patronage system in China, Lloyd and Sivin compare the situation in which a doctor might find themselves, identifying four such roles: “(1) A doctor being paid to set a shoulder or prescribe a drug falls clearly into the employment category. (2) When a doctor was paid a retainer to be a public physician in a particular city-state, he was accountable to the body that appointed him…and he had certain contractual obligations…(3) A court physician…might in certain respects be in a similar position to a public doctor…(4) A king, ruler, or wealthy individual could decide to support someone…specifically to release him from some or all of his usual tasks or duties” (pg. 96). Lloyd and Sivin identify debate as central to Greek science, whether in the public sphere or in print. Debate also helped one demonstrate their credentials to the world.
In comparing the two systems, Lloyd and Sivin identify “the circumstances in which Greek philosophers and scientists operated, where the key contrast with China lay in their comparative isolation from positions of political influence. The classical Greeks had no emperors to persuade; they had no sense of working toward an orthodox worldview that would at once legitimate and limit the emperor’s authority, as well as bolster their own positions as his advisors” (pg. 186). According to Lloyd and Sivin, “A basic feature of systematic thought about the external world as it arose in China is that the body and the state were miniature versions (not just models) of the cosmos” (pg. 214). Both the Chinese and the Greeks maintained a “conception of cosmic order as a matter of good government and harmony” (pg. 181). Describing this cosmic worldview, Lloyd and Sivin write, “First, both Chinese and Greek ideas on these topics are deeply value-laden, although the values greatly differ. In neither case is cosmology divorced from the domain of the moral and political. Second, ideas about the macrocosm mirrored and were mirrored in ideas about the two microcosms of the body and the state” (pg. 174). Even with this similarity, the two had different understandings of how the body worked. While the Greeks sought to discover which organ governed the rest, the Chinese were content that they all worked as they should (pg. 222). Discussing the essential questions and goals of the sciences, Lloyd and Sivin write of astronomy, “For Greek astronomers, the reduction of planetary phenomena to combinations of circular motions also amounted to the imposition of order, and occasionally moral implications were drawn from that orderliness. However, in China the meaning of astronomical order was essentially and primarily political. Its moral significance was a corollary of that” (pg. 229). Lloyd and Sivin describe Chinese philosophers and physicians as using science to recover “what the archaic sages rather knew” rather than find “stepwise approximations to an objective reality” (pg. 193).

A slightly repetitive book, but packed with great insights. The author argues that any talk about distinct mentalities among historical or primitive peoples is misguided. Human thought is much more complex than such a simple concept allows. He discusses at length the diversity of ancient scientific thought and draws some parallels to the social and political conditions of the time. As an added bonus he also frequently refers to anthropological studies to illustrate his points. He also emphasizes how little we can know for sure about other peoples' thought. You will learn a lot from this book.

This book has one flaw: it's too short. The author emphasizes that it is pointless to evaluate ancient conceptions of science on any other criteria than those accepted by ancient scientists themselves. He points to some interesting aspects of Chinese which had no counterparts in the Greek tradition, and vice versa. But it's all presented very briefly and it seems like much is left unsaid.

509 LLO