Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern Societies - Hardcover

Lloyd is a genial Herodotus of modern academia, traveling widely, absorbing broadly and returning with marvels (Paul Keyser, Aestimatio)

Lloyd's nuanced comprehension of the historiography of science studies is compellingly employed to unack previous misunderstandings and misreadings, while speaking to the future of the field. ... For the scholar of the history of science, Lloyd's study is an insightful and often philosophical examination of the nature of the human condition in ancient societies. (Jessica Evans, BJHS)

Being, Humanity, and Understanding wrestles with some of the most important and thorny questions in the philosophy of science as it bears on the humanities in general and the study of anthropology and history in particular Lloyds book is one of the best pleas I have read in recent years for the unremitting importance of the humanities. (Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Bryn Mawr Classical Review)

Being, Humanity, and Understanding is first and foremost a beautiful book. A specialist in Ancient Greece and classical China and a studious reader of ethnographic works on native peoples from numerous parts of the world, including Amazonia, Lloyd presents in clear and precise language a wide array of different expressions of human creativity in configuring worlds or, in other words, of elaborating ontologies. (Aparecida Vilaça, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory)

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 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.