G. E. R. Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of nineteen books, including Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (OUP, 2007) and Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation (OUP, 2009). He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983, and received the Sarton medal in 1987. Lloyd was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at Kings in 1991, 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, to an Honorary Fellowship at Darwin in 2000, and to an Honorary D.Litt by the University of Athens in 2003. He was knighted for 'services to the history of thought' in 1997, and received the Kenyon Medal for Classical scholarship from the British Academy in 2007.

"[T]his slim volume engage their material and the reader with verve and vigor..." --Aestimatio

"Being, Humanity, and Understanding wrestles with some of the most important and thorny questions in the philosophy of science as it bears on the humanities in general and the study of anthropology and history in particular ... Lloyd's book is one of the best pleas I have read in recent years for the unremitting importance of the humanities."--Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"Being, Humanity, and Understanding is first and foremost a beautiful book. A specialist in Ancient Greece and classical China and a studious reader of ethnographic works on native peoples from numerous parts of the world, including Amazonia, Lloyd presents in clear and precise language a wide array of different expressions of human creativity in configuring worlds or, in other words, of elaborating ontologies."--Aparecida Vilaca, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory