Sir Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd (born 25 January 1933) is a historian of Ancient Science and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He is the Senior Scholar in Residence at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England.[1]
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Lloyd was raised in London and Wales. His father, a Welsh physician, specialized in tuberculosis. After a nomadic early education in six different schools, he obtained a scholarship to Charterhouse, where, despite an indifferent academic culture, he excelled in mathematics, and learned Italian from Wilfrid Noyce. The curriculum was biased to classics, which he was advised, misleadingly in his later view, to pursue. On obtaining another scholarship to King's College, Cambridge he came under the influence of the pre-Socratics specialist John Raven. He spent a year in Athens (1954-1955) where, apart from learning modern Greek, he also mastered the bouzouki.
A keen interest in anthropology informed his reading of ancient Greek philosophy, and his doctoral studies, conducted under the supervision of Geoffrey Kirk, focused on patterns of Polarity and Analogy in Greek thought, a thesis which, revised, was eventually published in 1966.
He was called up for National Service in 1958 and was posted to Cyprus after the EOKA insurgency.
On his return to Cambridge in 1960, a chance conversation with Edmund Leach stimulated him to read deeply in the emerging approach of structural anthropology being formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 1965, thanks to the support of Moses Finley, he was appointed to an assistant lectureship. A recurring element of his approach was the consideration of how political discourse influenced the forms of scientific discourse and demonstration in Ancient Greece.
After a visit to lecture in China in 1987, Lloyd turned to the study of Classical Chinese. This has added a broad comparative scope to his more recent work, which, following in the wake of Joseph Needham's pioneering studies, analyses how the different political cultures of ancient China and Greece influenced the different forms of scientific discourse in those cultures.
In 1989 he was appointed Master of Darwin College, where he remains as an Honorary Fellow. Presently he spends a part of each year in his other home in Spain, where much of his writing is now done.
Professor Lloyd was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983 and received the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society in 1987. He was elected 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, the year in which he was knighted for 'services to the history of thought'.
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Arnold Burgen |
Master of Darwin College, Cambridge 1989 - 2000 |
Succeeded by William Brown |