Raphals, Lisa

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

117 Reviews 
G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient 
Greece and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Ideas in Con-
text), 2002, xvi, 175 pp. 
 
Lisa Raphals 
 
[Lisa Raphals is Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Compara-
tive Program in Ancient Civilizations, and cooperating faculty in the Philosophy 
Department at the University of California, Riverside. She received her Ph.D. 
from the University of Chicago in 1989. She is the author of Knowing Words: 
Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, 
1992), Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China 
(Albany, 1998), and other studies, including “Skeptical Strategies in the 
Zhuangzi and Theaetetus” (Philosophy East & West), “Chinese and Greek Cal-
culations and Categories” (EASTM), and “Thirteen Views of the Self in China” 
(History of Philosophy Quarterly). She is currently completing a study of predic-
tion and divination in early China and Greece.] 
 
 
The Ambitions of Curiosity is one of a series of ground-breaking books in which 
Sir Geoffrey Lloyd has undertaken systematic comparisons of the social context 
and epistemology of the origins of science in early China and Greece. Other 
volumes addressed the nature of authority (Adversaries and Authorities, 1996 
and (with Nathan Sivin) The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early 
China and Greece, 2002), what we can learn form the ancient world on contem-
porary problems (Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, 2004; The Delusions of 
Invulnerability, 2005), and the unity or diversity of human perception, cognition 
and other aspects of mind (Cognitive Variations, 2007). This book addresses the 
origins of systematic inquiry. 
It is immediately striking that Lloyd does not frame his problem as the history 
of science. Instead, he investigates the modes of inquiry of which science is a 
part, and arguably the most successful. What courses, he asks, did an interest in 
systematic inquiry take in ancient Greece and China? Who held this ambition, 
who carried it out these inquiries, and with what support or restrictions? Who 
benefited? The book draws on Lloyd’s Isaiah Berlin lectures at Oxford in 2000. 
Each piece is self-contained, but he uses this format adroitly to present separate 
perspectives on “the ambitions of curiosity” in six chapters.  
“Histories, Annals, Myths” examines the role of systematic inquiry in the ori-
gins of history and historiography. In both cultures, the creation of historical 
records was considered important. History arose out of politics and became a 
potentially subversive means to understand the present. But this mode of exper-
tise developed in very different ways. In China it took the “official” route of 
court-sponsored history; in Greece it took an “unofficial” route within a climate 
of independence, debate and competition between peers. Official histories such 
118 EASTM 30 (2009) 
as the Shiji 史 記 (Records of the Grand Historian) provided record-keeping and 
advice to the throne, including accounts of dynastic houses, chronological tables, 
technical treatises and didactic biography. This position offered the advantages of 
support and access to official records, but it also had its dangers, as Sima Qian’s 
(c. 145-c. 86 BC) own history makes clear. It could be argued that this account 
neglects unofficial histories, including family records and other independent 
compilations. Yet the existence of many such documents does not undermine the 
force of the contrast between the existence of Chinese (or for that matter Babylo-
nian) court-sponsored history and record-keeping and the lack of any such insti-
tution in Greece. With the exception of Alexandria under the Ptolemies, Greek 
historians and other technical experts had no official status or support. The 
recognition of expertise was thus subject to competition and persuasion. The 
history of Greek scholarship in any field thus becomes one of ongoing debate, 
competition, and often attack on competing specialists. But this very independ-
ence protected Greek historians and other masters of techne from government 
interference or constraint.  
One of the greatest ambitions of curiosity is the ambition to predict the future. 
“The Modalities of Prediction” focuses on two: interest in celestial phenomena 
and medical diagnosis by the pulses. Lloyd frames this inquiry in two ways: the 
tenacity of the human desire to read the future and the vexed relations between 
the history of divination and the historiography of science. The chapter begins 
with Mesopotamian divination and its antiquity, state sponsorship, practical 
goals, and the early use of conditional predictions in both medicine and the study 
of the heavens. These took the form: if X (a sign or omen) then Y (a result or 
expected outcome). Differences emerged between two styles: statements about 
good or bad fortune that result if a celestial event occurs, and predictions of ce-
lestial events themselves. The latter further stimulated the desire to know the 
future (pp. 27-28). This account provides a comparative context for Chinese 
divination, also closely connected to state patronage. Lloyd surveys the early 
origins of turtle shell and yarrow stalk divination, the transformation of the Yijing 
易 經 (Classic of Changes from a mantic text to a guide to the human condition, 
and the hermeneutic skills used in Yijing interpretation, including the use of pre-
diction as a mode of advice or remonstrance toward rulers. Both Mesopotamia 
and China provide a strong contrast to Greek divination. Here Lloyd emphasizes 
its diversity, mixed attitudes toward diviners (combining respect for divination 
with attacks on particular diviners), the growth of new predictive techniques, 
especially in Hellenistic astronomy, and finally, the central importance of compe-
tition between practitioners or modes of prediction. Lloyd concludes that the 
ambition to predict is widespread and diverse, with multiple important social 
roles, and by no means a monopoly of science. Some predictions were non-causal 
connections, either purely symbolic or empirical conjunctions of events. These 
could not be tested empirically. Nonetheless, prediction did become more refined 
over time as “patterns of regularity” were discovered.   
119 Reviews 
“The Numbers of Things” considers changing notions of mathematics, meas-
urement and quantification. The problem here is that there is no uniformity in 
“what counts as “mathematics” in a given society, what modes of reasoning are 
cultivated, and with what aims” (p. 65). Lloyd argues that the distinctive feature 
of Greek Euclidean mathematics was axiomatic-deductive demonstration. De-
spite its advantage of incontrovertibility (given clear axioms and valid infer-
ences), it is striking that no other ancient society developed this emphasis to the 
Greek degree. Chinese mathematicians, by contrast, interested themselves in a 
different goal: a mathematics unified by both its procedures and guiding cosmo-
logical principles. 
“Applications and Applicabilities” turns to the practical arts of agriculture 
and military and civil engineering. Both civilizations produced technical litera-
tures devoted to practical problems, but they differed in theoretical approach and 
political structures for implementing new ideas. Lloyd contrasts a Greek predilec-
tion for geometrical idealizations and Chinese interests in “the propensities of 
things” (shi 勢). Chinese engineers were less interested in “mastering” their ma-
terials than in exploiting their inherent predispositions (pp. 96-97). As a result, 
Chinese and Greek treatises emphasize different motifs.  
“The Language of Learning” takes up the nature of technical language. Sys-
tematic inquiry strained ordinary language and introduced a new self-reflection 
on the adequacy (or possible adequacy) of language to express new knowledge. 
Two sets of terminology are studied: descriptions of the human body and of 
plants. Much Chinese terminological “fluency” was directed at effective persua-
sion of hierarchical superiors: rulers and their officials. Greek political life, by 
contrast, encouraged the skills of public debate, including logical and mathemati-
cal demonstration of philosophical and scientific arguments.  
A recurring theme in all these studies is the importance and implications of 
state patronage of intellectual institutions. In “Individuals and Institutions” Lloyd 
uses the issue of state patronage of intellectual inquiry to reflect on the inherent 
tensions between state support and freedom of inquiry. Chinese rulers (like Mes-
opotamian kings) devoted substantial patronage to history, astronomy and other 
areas of inquiry. Their support provided employment, security, continuous writ-
ten records and other advantages, but also led to restrictions. The Greek “market-
place of ideas” was independent, decentralized and largely unsupported. Lloyd 
concludes that society and politics profoundly affected modes of systematic in-
quiry into nature, but did not determine them in any simple way. He concludes 
with three recurring patterns. The first is the inherently destabilizing potential of 
inquiry itself (p. 143). The second, which he terms “the momentum effect”, is the 
tendency of a successful mode of inquiry to develop its own momentum, includ-
ing elaboration and new problems; an example is the casting of horoscopes. The 
“extrapolation trap” is the application of a method that is successful in one con-
text to others where it may not fare so well. An example is Chinese Five Phases 
(wuxing 五 行) theory, which over-extended numeric relations to other domains 
where they did not apply.  
120 EASTM 30 (2009) 
Many of the arguments, comparisons and caveats of this book will be familiar 
to readers of Lloyd’s other comparative studies. What distinguishes this volume 
is its fascinating focus on the most basic levels of human intellectual ambition, 
and the diverse ways in which they developed in the ancient world. As in his 
other comparative studies, Lloyd is finely attuned to the roles of social and politi-
cal conditions and institutions, and the need to avoid generalizations about “civi-
lizations” or other imagined communities. He persuasively shows that no society 
has a monopoly on innovation, and that in the ancient world there was no one 
cultural, institutional or ideological formula for success in understanding the 
world. 


G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China

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G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China

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