Raphals, Lisa

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

 103 
REVIEWS 
 
G. E. R. Lloyd, Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science, 
Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, xvi+302 pp.   
Lisa Raphals 
[Lisa Raphals (Rui Li 瑞麗) is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of 
California. She is the author of Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the 
Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Cornell, 1992), Sharing the Light: 
Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (SUNY, 1998), 
Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 
2013) as well as many scholarly articles on comparative philosophy (China and 
Greece), history of science, religion, and gender. Contact: lisa.raphals@ucr.edu] 
Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science is a second 
collection of papers by Geoffrey Lloyd. Unlike his earlier collection, 
Methods and Problems in Greek Science (Cambridge, 1991), this Aldershot 
collection selects fifteen of what he considers his most important or 
influential of some ninety articles published between 1987 and 2005. All 
but four deal primarily with Greek material. However, four concluding 
comparative pieces make clear the importance of comparativism to Lloyd’s 
overall project. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses 
problems in Greek medicine, with three of the five chapters devoted to 
Galen. Part 2 turns to Greek mathematics and philosophy, including three 
studies published in non-Anglophone collections, two in English transla-
tion for the first time. Part 3 consists of four comparative studies, on the 
diverse topics of appearance versus reality, mythology, literacy and the 
future of ancient science. As is typical of Aldershot variorum republica-
tions, texts are presented in their original format and pagination, with 
additional bibliography and notes provided after each section, as well as an 
index and supplementary notes at the end of the volume. 
Although the book covers a wide subject matter, three themes reoccur. 
One is a preoccupation with disciplinary boundaries, expressed variously 
as relations between fields, the “right” way to investigate a given field, and 
who counts as colleagues or rivals. A second concern is rhetoric and polem-
ics, including questions of legitimacy and prestige. A third is the “open-
endedness,” and the unpredictability of the scientific investigations under-
taken in ancient civilisations” (ix). Lloyd emphasizes that, in order to 
104                                                                                                  EASTM 42 (2015) 
 
understand their development, we need to combine an “externalist” study 
of social and institutional factors with an “internalist” understanding of ab-
stract or intellectual questions (x). 
The first section begins with two broad studies on Greek medicine. 
Lloyd emphasizes its heterogeneity and the questions of legitimacy inher-
ent therein. “The Transformations of Ancient Medicine” considers modern 
and ancient histories of the reception of Greek medicine. Instead of seeking 
to unify the “Hippocratic corpus” Lloyd argues that the very diversity that 
proved an embarrassment to idealizing and romanticizing views of Greek 
medicine provides a starting point for newer studies of ancient medicine. 
He identifies four features of ancient medicine ignored or underestimated 
by positivist interpretations. The naturalist medicine of the Hippocratic 
corpus was one of several rival medical traditions. Others included mid-
wives (maiai), root cutters (rhizotomoi), drug-sellers (pharmakopōlai), and 
Asclepian temple healers. Even “rationalist” Hippocratic medicine was not 
a unified phenomenon. In working through these and other claims, Lloyd 
focuses on the paradoxes of tension between image and reality of the 
authority of medical experts and between open-endedness and the even-
tual dominance of Hippocratic medicine. The chapter also takes up Greek 
understandings of gender difference. All the ancient medical writers 
agreed on a fundamental difference between males and females, but they 
had no consensus on what it was, and used the same evidence (e.g. men-
struation) as evidence for competing conclusions. Theories justified prac-
tices which in turn justified theories (I, 123). The chapter also discusses 
disagreement in theories of what constitutes health and disease, including 
their relation to the gods. 
“The Definition, Status, and Methods of the Medical Technē in the Fifth 
and Fourth Centuries” asks what arguments were used to describe the 
technē of medicine and the authority of its practitioners. Medical traditions 
were diverse throughout the ancient Mediterranean, but what is excep-
tional to Greek medicine is the degree of explicit attack by some groups on 
their competitors. Hippocratic writers do not attack midwives or women 
healers and may have cooperated with them, but they do attack itinerant 
purifiers and root cutters, often for self-justification (II, 250-51). The chapter 
focuses on the definition of medicine in three Hippocratic treatises: “On the 
Art,” “On Regimen in Acute Diseases” and “On Ancient Medicine.” The 
three offer divergent views on the methods of medicine and use different 
rationales to stake claims for its status as a technē.  
The remaining three studies address aspects of the work of Galen, the 
most famous physician of late antiquity. “Scholarship, Authority and Argu-
ment in Galen’s Quod Animi Mores” focuses on Galen’s treatise on the 
soul’s dependence on the body. Galen drew his arguments in part from 
Reviews                                                                                                                  105 
 
citation of earlier authorities, especially Plato, Aristotle and Hippocrates. 
He supposes general agreement among them, but also points out important 
differences, for example, between Plato and Aristotle on the faculties of the 
soul. He argues that the qualities of the soul follow those of the body, but 
the exact relation of the capacities of the soul to the mixtures of the body is 
not made clear (III, 33ff). 
“Theories and Practices of Demonstration in Galen” turns to Galen’s 
view of the proper methods of science, especially axiomatic deductive 
demonstration. Galen was unique among practicing physicians for his 
interest in, and mastery of, logic. It alone, in his view, could provide valid 
reasoning and yield incontrovertible conclusions. As a result, Galen offers a 
particularly good opportunity to examine the benefits of the Greek preoc-
cupation with demonstration (IV, 256-57). Lloyd identifies four strengths in 
Galen’s approach. Galen insisted on orderliness in reasoning and checking 
the validity of inferences. He also distinguished between different types of 
premises and made effective use of logical analysis in exposing the flaws in 
his opponents’ arguments. But even Galen acknowledged that parts of his 
logic were useless, and the ambition to give clear demonstrations could be 
harmful when certainty is not obtainable. Lloyd argues that Galen pursued 
the methods of geometrical demonstration, modelled on Euclid, beyond the 
point where they supplied good models of deductive rigor. He argues that 
Galen’s use of the geometrical method reflects the intense competition that 
characterized Greek medical writings since the Hippocratic corpus, and 
further that Greek medicine strongly exhibits the competitiveness charac-
teristic of most areas of Greek speculative thought (IV, 273-74). “Mathe-
matics as a Model of Method in Galen” takes up further problems that arise 
in applying methods of demonstration to medicine. 
Part 2 consists of six studies in the history of Greek mathematics and 
philosophy, three reprinted from journal articles. “The Alleged Fallacy of 
Hippocrates of Chios” (Apeiron 20, 1987) argues against the claim that the 
fifth-century BCE mathematician Hippocrates of Chios used fallacious 
reasoning in his work on the quadrature of lunes. This study pits the views 
and claims for Simplicius against the earlier Aristotelian commentator 
Alexander of Aphrodisias. (Lloyd exonerates Hippocrates himself from any 
fallacy.) “The Meno and the Mystery of Mathematics” (Phronesis 37, 1992) 
turns to the use of mathematics in Meno 86e, where Socrates guides a slave 
through a mathematical exercise in order to illustrate Plato’s claim that 
knowledge is a process of recollection. Lloyd argues that Plato’s famous 
obscurity is deliberate, but does not attempt to resolve the scholarly contro-
versies that still surround this famous passage. “Plato and Archytas in the 
Seventh Letter” (Phronesis 35, 1990) takes up another famous conundrum, 
the authorship of Plato’s Seventh Letter. Lloyd argues that Plato might be 
106                                                                                                  EASTM 42 (2015) 
 
the author, but whoever wrote the Seventh Letter tried to dissociate Plato 
from Archytas and Pythagoreanism (VIII, 173).  
Three additional studies are reprinted (and in two cases translated) 
from collections published in Portugal, France and Spain. “Philosophy and 
Medicine in Ancient Greece: Cognitive Models and their Repercussions” 
casts doubt on the plausible claim that medicine and philosophy were 
allies, and argues instead for a rivalry between one strand of medicine 
(exemplified by the Hippocratic text “On Ancient Medicine”) and one 
strand of philosophy (Platonism). The analogy to medicine is crucial for 
Plato’s claims for political and moral truth and the need to obey the advice 
of experts in both, and Aristotle too draws on the analogies between health, 
morality and good government. But when we examine the pluralism of 
both philosophy and medicine a very different picture emerges, visible in 
important differences between the cognitive models proposed by Plato and 
by medical writers in theories of memory.   
“The Pluralism of Intellectual Life before Plato” questions the category 
of so-called “Presocratic” philosophy. Lloyd argues on the one hand that 
the intellectual fluidity associated with the concerns of the physiologoi per-
sisted well into the fourth century, and despite increasing specialization, 
the boundaries between many disciplines remained both contested and 
fluid. In mathematics, medicine, historia, and wisdom in general, “there 
was exceptional room for manoeuvre as to what these activities should 
comprise” (X.12-13). He argues on the other hand that no actual “unity” of 
interests characterized those termed “Presocratics” by the nineteenth-cen-
tury coiners of the term.   
Perhaps the most interesting piece in the entire collection in this 
reader’s view is “The Evolution of Evolution: Greco-Roman Antiquity and 
the Origin of Species.” First published in Spanish in 2001, it appears here in 
English for the first time. Here Lloyd reviews a range of Greek and Roman 
assumptions and theories about the evolution, or transformation, of animal 
species and their implications for theories of the origins of human beings. 
He emphasizes the wide range of perspective and interest of the ancient 
sources. Some (including Empedocles, Plato and Lucretius) introduced 
religious perspectives on the question. Others, Aristotle especially, pre-
ferred empirical investigation of the animal kingdom, including arcana 
such as the behaviour of sea squirts.  Others responded to (or deliberately 
distanced themselves from) popular or traditional belief and the “mytho-
logoi,” especially Hesiod. 
The third section consists of four comparative papers. “Appearance 
versus Reality: Greek and Chinese Comparisons and Contrasts” argues that 
the pre-Buddhist Chinese reflective thinkers made no strong ontological 
distinction between appearance and reality. They did express doubts about 
Reviews                                                                                                                  107 
 
perceptible reality in many concrete contexts; well-known examples in-
clude Zhuangzi’s famous “butterfly” dream and Confucius and his intellec-
tual descendants’ repeated questioning of the application of the name junzi 
(“gentleman”). But such questions posit no ontological divide between 
perception and some underlying or transcendent reality, accessible only to 
reason. By contrast, Lloyd argues that appearance-reality distinctions were 
central to Greek philosophers’ and scientists’ claims for special knowledge 
of hidden realities (however much they disagreed on what these were). 
These differences bespeak very different accounts of the nature of wisdom 
to which a “sage” claims access, and throw light on the aims of philoso-
phizing in early China and Greece.  
“Mythology: Reflections from a Chinese Perspective” questions whether 
the ostensive category of “mythology” is useful for cross-cultural compari-
son. This essay comes from the volume From Myth to Reason? Studies in the 
Development of Greek Thought (ed. R. Buxton, Oxford, 1999), a sustained and 
critical re-examination of Bruno Snell’s claims of a Greek progress “from 
myth to reason.” Lloyd argues that, as with appearance and reality, early 
Chinese reflective thinkers made no particular distinction between “myth” 
and “reason” as modes of thought or exposition. Lloyd also questions the 
Greek “mythos-logos” distinction in its own cultural contexts, arguing that 
pejorative accounts of mythos were particular to some philosophers seeking 
to police the boundaries of fields of inquiry and to establish “correct” 
methods within particular disciplines. The early Chinese reflective thinkers 
did their fair share of criticizing popular belief and their own opponents, 
but without recourse to “myth” as a category of deliberate fiction. 
The next chapter turns to claims arising from the work of Jack Goody, 
Ian Watt and Eric Havelock that the distinctively Greek penchant for cri-
tique and polemics in philosophy and science were linked to the develop-
ment of literacy and an alphabetic script. “Literacy in Greek and Chinese 
Science: Some Comparative Issues” argues that this hypothesis fails to 
account for observable differences in styles of mathematical reasoning. 
Lloyd argues that the characteristically Greek demand for axiomatic-
deductive demonstration owes less to technologies of communication than 
to conflicts between competing intellectuals and their desire to secure 
incontrovertibility. He concludes that the importance of written texts grew 
over time in both societies, but for different reasons and in different ways. 
The differences depended less on a specific technology of the written word 
or on specific modes of writing (alphabetic or logographic) than on wider 
political, social and cultural values. This chapter also address problems 
taken up at length in Adversaries and Authorities (Cambridge, 1996), where 
Lloyd argued that early Chinese reflective thinkers preferred styles of 
reasoning and rhetoric based on authority, consensus and harmony, in 
108                                                                                                  EASTM 42 (2015) 
 
strong contrast to a culturally Greek predilection for competition in rheto-
ric and prestige in the production of wisdom.   
“Is There a Future for Ancient Science?” caps the volume with Lloyd’s 
valedictory lecture on the occasion of his retirement from Cambridge in 
2001. Where if at all, he asks, does ancient science fit amid recent develop-
ments in the history and philosophy of science? He argues that the recent 
revolutions of contemporary science do not change the key questions in the 
study of antiquity, for example, what did the ancients think was worth 
investigating, and why and how did they go about it? (XV, 198). He argues 
for the importance of a comparativist approach because no one ancient 
culture provided the model for how inquiry should develop. Greek and 
Chinese society and philosophy offer different kinds of strengths and 
weaknesses that mirrored each other in important ways. Lloyd concludes 
that a comparativist approach is essential to deparochialise our own inquir-
ies, and that the best recent work at Cambridge in ancient science, mathe-
matics and medicine is either explicitly comparativist or else is informed by 
awareness of alternative traditions (XV, 208). 
This volume is beset by an ongoing tension between the breadth and 
quality of Lloyd’s magisterial work over many years and the limitations of 
Aldershot’s variorum publishing model. Only a few items in the collection 
are not available elsewhere. For all their excellence and importance, it must 
be asked whether they justify poor production and the hefty price of this 
volume. But a more significant problem is the contrast between these disso-
ciated pieces and Lloyd’s subsequent work. Cognitive Variations (Oxford, 
2007), published only a year later, presents an entirely new and different 
method for comparativism in the study of ancient science, juxtaposing 
balanced comparisons of Chinese and Greek evidence with detailed 
excursions into relevant evidence from several contemporary scientific 
disciplines. 
 
 


G. E. R. Lloyd, Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science

http://www.eastm.org/index.php/journal/article/download/740/639

G. E. R. Lloyd, Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

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