Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, G. E. R. Lloyd makes an often persuasive case for the relevance and use of comparative studies of ancient cultures in relation to two areas of contemporary concern.This concern is of two sorts-there are philosophical questions bearing on science and its history, and questions about the relevance of reconstructions of ancient thought to such modern social and political issues as higher education, human 'rights', internationalism, and democracy.At 179 pages (excluding the bibliography), this is a large project for a comparatively small volume.However, it is also a work written from a vantage point attained through a career's worth of inquiry into such problems in the context of antiquity, especially ancient Greece, and subsequently through comparative analysis of the history of science in ancient Greece and China.This has been the dominant project of the last two decades in Lloyd's research and writings, through Demystifying Mentalities [1990], Adversaries and Authorities [1996], The Ambitions of Curiosity [2002], and The Way and the Word [2002] (written with the Sinologist and historian of science Nathan Sivin).Of these, Adversaries and Authorities and The Way and the Word are the most similar to Lloyd's earlier and extremely influential works on ancient 'scientific' cultures and problems, notably Magic, Reason and Experience [1979], Science, Folklore and Ideology [1983], and The Revolutions of Wisdom [1987].These were sustained pieces of often thematic analysis, characterized by being carefully contextualized and substantiated by a broad range A paperback edition has now appeared.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".