Bibliographic record
Abstract
Babbling about pleasure According to G. E. M. Anscombe, pleasure was the topic that finally and “astonishingly reduced Aristotle to babble, since for good reasons he both wanted pleasure to be identical with and to be different from the activity that it is pleasure in.” That is by any measure a harsh judgment – babble , she says: inarticulate, incomprehensible, childish prattle. She does allow that Aristotle was reduced to this sorry state for good reasons; so, she evidently thinks that there is a partially exculpatory diagnosis for his woes. Woes he has, however: as she represents him, Aristotle fumbles and stumbles over himself twice over. He first identifies pleasure with an activity and then denies that it is an activity. That is perhaps not so bad in itself, since he may after all simply have changed his mind; but when he denies that pleasure is an activity, he does so for all the wrong reasons. Instead of relying on the sensible thought that pleasure is not an activity but rather a feeling , Aristotle instead offers a bewildering corrective: “Pleasure,” he says, “perfects the activity ( energeia ), not in the way a state ( hexis ) does, by being in the activity, but as a sort of supervening end ( telos )” ( teleioi de tên energeian hê hêdonê ouk hôs hê hexis enuparchousa, all’ hôs epiginomenon ti telos ; E.N . 1174b31–33). If Aristotle is not babbling here, then neither is his meaning exactly pellucid. At the very least, it seems an overly technical treatment of what is at root a perfectly familiar phenomenon. Pleasure, we may be assured, is a feeling, a welcome sensation of some sort, a sensation of satisfaction or gratification, in general an enjoyable or delightful experience. Aristotle’s account of pleasure – if it is intelligible at all – seems at the very least needlessly baroque.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".