Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle

G E R Lloyd

Sep 2012 · Random House

About this ebook

In this new series leading classical scholars interpret afresh the ancient world for the modern reader. They stress those questions and institutions that most concern us today: the interplay between economic factors and politics, the struggle to find a balance between the state and the individual, the role of the intellectual. Most of the books in this series centre on the great focal periods, those of great literature and art: the world of Herodotus and the tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Caesar, Virgil, Horace and Tacitus.

This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of Greek science; he analyses the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers.

About the author

G. E. R. Lloyd, University lecturer in Classics at Cambridge, was born in London in 1933 and educated at Charterhouse. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, where he later took his MA and PhD, and in 1957 became a Fellow. He has been Senior Tutor since 1969. His published works include Polarity and Analogy: two types of argumentation in early Greek thought and Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought, both published by the Cambridge University Press, and numerous articles in such periodicals as Phronesis, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Classical Review, Gnomon, Cambridge Review and The Times Literary Supplement.