Across several intellectual disciplines there exists a tension between an appreciation of the cognitive capacities that all humans share and a recognition of the great variety in their manifestations in different individuals and groups. In this book G. E. R. Lloyd examines how, while avoiding the imposition of prior Western assumptions and concepts, we can reconcile two conflicting intuitions: that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities and yet their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. Lloyd investigates the cultural viability of analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrasts between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture themselves) and the categories that we employ to organize human experience (like mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics). The end result is a robust defence, within limits, of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility?one which recognizes both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding.

Introduction 1: Where does the problem come from? 2: Modes of discourse and the pragmatics of communication 3: Magic: efficacy and felicity 4: The argument from language 5: The argument from sociability 6: Turning the tables: Obstacles to mutual intelligibility 7: The evolutionary issues 8: Test case 1: Mathematics 9: Test case 2: Religion 10: Test case 3: Law 11: Test case 4: Aesthetics: Art and music 12: Conclusion

G. E. R. Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of twenty-eight books, including Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern Societies (Oxford 2012) and The Ideals of Inquiry: An Ancient History (Oxford 2014). 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.