It says something about the tenor of our times that G.E.R. Lloyd's work has been increasingly embraced – even by philosophers – over the last twenty years he has been pursuing the comparative epistemology of ancient Greece and China. Lloyd, now close to eighty, earned his academic reputation as a scholar of ancient Greek science, having studied under the great modern translators of pre-Socratic philosophy, Geoffrey Kirk and John Raven at Cambridge. Lloyd learned Chinese in his mid-fifties, partly inspired by Joseph Needham's grand attempt to determine why China, in spite of its long-standing economic and technological advantage, never experienced a scientific revolution. However, Lloyd quickly came to believe that Needham was asking the wrong question – or at least one that oversimplified the cognitive situation in both China and the West. All of his subsequent books of comparative epistemology (I count this as the ninth) puzzle over what, if any, are the right cross-cultural questions to ask. The result is a body of work that strikes this reviewer as a well-cooked meal served by someone incapable of eating it. Such is la nouvelle cuisine philosophique.

Like another such master chef and admirer, Ian Hacking, Lloyd serves up big topics in suggestively arranged small portions. And so Disciplines in the Making treats the reader to successive chapters of less than ten thousand words on Philosophy, Mathematics, History, Medicine, Art, Law, Religion and Science. Yet, while Lloyd never tires of reminding us how diverse and complicated everything is, when he alights upon a generalization, it is one already familiar from the work of less cautious inquirers. Thus we are told that the Greeks privileged epistemology and the Chinese ethics in philosophy, the Greeks axiomatics and the Chinese analogy in mathematics, the Greeks a more critical and the Chinese a more legitimatory approach to history. In medical matters, the Greeks focused on restoring the body to a presumptive normal state, the Chinese on enabling the body to channel efficiently the forces of nature. Western art is more fixated on mimesis than non-Western art, and Western law more keen on fixing blame than non-Western law. And while the West has combined intensely personal and personified conceptions of religion with increasingly abstract and technical science, the non-West has promoted more diffuse cognitive approaches on both fronts. All of this is not so very different from the ‘stereotypes’ that Lloyd decries in Richard Nisbett's popular psychology book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … And Why (2003).

One might have hoped that in light of his extended careful studies, Lloyd would have arrived at more counterintuitive general conclusions, or if not, denounce the search for cross-cultural generalizations altogether. For example, when Lloyd declares, ‘It is, of course, more important to analyse what Chinese thinkers achieved than to settle the terminological issue of whether that should count as philosophy’ (p. 17), I wonder why he bothered to engage in cross-cultural comparisons that only leave the impression that he is addressing problems that vex latter-day epistemologists. He should have simply written one (perhaps large) book on Chinese intellectual life understood in its own terms, respectful of all its internal diversity, without any reference to the Western benchmarks.

Lloyd's working epistemology, which is probably the main source of his appeal, is never discussed openly but is rather trailed by rhetorical questions that betray the chapters’ origins in lectures. Organizing Lloyd's epistemological assumptions in the form of an argument goes some way to explain his current popularity: (1) sensible answers to what and how people know require adopting the standpoint of the knowers in question; (2) there is significant cognitive variation not only between cultures but also within cultures; (3) thus, instead of the sort of incommensurability across cultures favoured by relativists (and loathed by universalists), it is more plausible to imagine a patchwork of similarities and differences, each explicable in terms of a complex natural history; (4) this conclusion is unsurprising, since an epistemology fixated on the relativism–universalism dispute itself requires training in certain modern Western philosophical modes of thought. Lloyd turns this point to good effect by noting that the well-evidenced capacity of non-Westerners to, so to speak, see through Western eyes says more about human powers of cognitive adaptation to different environments than about any innate universal semantics that might cut across those environments.

This argument rests on further background assumptions that may themselves be queried. First, Lloyd seems to believe that however much cognitive variation there is within cultures, the difference in the cognitive norm between cultures is always greater. Otherwise, the very idea of comparing ‘Greece’ and ‘China’ could not get off the ground. Moreover, as this book especially makes clear, cultures for Lloyd are rather like biological species, distinguished primarily by lines of descent (aka schools) within self-contained populations, whose rate of reproduction is controlled by local elites. In this context, he surprisingly omits mention of Randall Collins's similarly themed and equally cross-cultural The Sociology of Philosophies (1998). But in any case, Lloyd is led to underestimate the role of trans-cultural movements – from Christianity to capitalism – in both homogenizing and hybridizing cognitive dispositions. Finally and most crucially, Lloyd presumes that it makes sense to speak of ‘the same ideas in different cultures’, implying that differences in politics, economics and values – rather than strictly cognitive issues – explain an idea's pattern of development. While superficially a sop to relativists, it is really grist for the mill of the universalist, who is ultimately targeting the normative adequacy of native cultures as such. This point does not weigh more heavily on Lloyd because he fails to appreciate that one of the principal means by which we define who we are is by passing judgements on others.