Adversaries and Authorities
Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science

This book examines the reasons why science and philosophy developed differently in ancient Greece and ancient China.

G. E. R. Lloyd (Author)

9780521553315, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 July 1996

276 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.58 kg

'It is in fact a comparison of ancient Greek and ancient Chinese science and philosophy. This is an important subject [and] … this is a book which everyone interested in anceint philosophy and science must read. Let us hope that Lloyd goes on to write many others on the same theme.' Greece and Rome

This is a wide-ranging exploration of the similarities and differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese science and philosophy, concentrating on the period down to AD 300. Professor Lloyd studies such questions as the attitudes towards authority, the practice of confrontational debate, the role of methodological inquiries, the development of techniques of persuasion, the assumptions made about causal explanation and the focus of interest in the study of the heavens and in that of the human body. In each case the Greek and Chinese ways of posing the problems are carefully distinguished to avoid applying either Greek categories to Chinese thought or vice versa. Professor Lloyd shows that the science produced in each ancient civilisation differs in important respects and relates those differences to the values and social institutions in question.

1. Comparative studies and their problems: methodological preliminaries
2. Adversaries and authorities
3. Methodology, epistemology and their uses
4. The techniques of persuasion
5. Causes and correlations
6. Greek and Chinese dichotomies revisited
7. Finite and infinite in Greece and China
8. Heavenly harmonies
9. The politics of the body
10. Science in antiquity: the Greek and Chinese cases and their relevance to the problems of culture and cognition
Glossary of Chinese and Greek terms
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA]