The 2024 SAGP Distinguished Lectureship

Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science
∙ University of Cambridge ∙
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January 15, 2025
12:00pm EST (US)
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Topic: “What is the Use of Ancient Philosophy?”
Commentator: Brad Inwood

Abstract: Despite the obvious differences between social anthropology and the study of antiquity, whether in the Greco-Roman world or indeed elsewhere, I shall argue that the former provides an important model to get the most out of the latter, by introducing us to multiple ways of being in the world and more specifically by challenging some fundamental assumptions, some substantial, some methodological, we still take too much for granted.  I shall illustrate briefly by taking four examples, the concepts of nature, of univocity, of proof and of mind/body dualism.

Geoffrey Lloyd
Geoffrey Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge where from 1989 to 2000 he was Master of Darwin College. His interests in ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, science and medicine have increasingly drawn him into comparative studies drawing on social anthropology, evolutionary psychology, ethology and cognitive science, as for example in his contributions to the publications of the interdisciplinary group Science in the Forest, Science in the Past, and in his most recent monograph Expanding Horizons in the History of Science: The Comparative Approach (Cambridge 2021). Of Jaguars and Butterflies (Oxford 2023), with the anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça, is a series of ‘metalogues’ on cross-disciplinary issues.

Brad Inwood
Brad Inwood is William Lampson Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale, where he moved after more than three decades teaching at the University of Toronto. He has published on Stoicism, especially Seneca and later Stoicism, as well as on several other aspects of ancient philosophy.
Major works include Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, The Poem of Empedocles, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome, Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters, Ethics After Aristotle, and Later Stoicism 155 BC to AD 200: An Introduction and Collection of Sources in Translation.