Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern Societies

G. E. R. Lloyd explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics: being, or what there is; humanity–what makes a human being a human; and understanding, both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues in ancient and modern times. Lloyd describes that diversity and investigates the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical; they implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? Being, Humanity, and Understanding examines these questions cross-culturally and explores topics such as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.