Arguing about Nothing: Henry More and Robert Boyle on the Theological Implications of the Void
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Those who are philosophers cannot see [Pascal's vacuum experiments] without wonder; and those who are not, become philosophers when they consider them. There, is observed that brave nothingness against which so many excellent Philosophers have fought for such a long time, that fearful void that frightens all nature, and against which she uses all her forces, that fine nothing which is going to supply arms for its defence, and solid matter to construct discourses in its favour. As people learned of Robert Boyle's exciting air-pump experiments, published in 1660 as New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects , the question of whether a vacuum could exist in nature was more keenly debated than ever before. Matthew Hale remarked that the subject of the experiments “is seeingly trivial …yet it hath exercised the wits and pens of many learned men.” Some of the “many excellent Philosophers” debating the possible existence of “that brave nothingness” continued to uphold the view that nature was frightened by empty space, that “fearful void,” and would fight to prevent it. This view had long been accepted as a fundamental tenet of Aristotle's, who had predicted that after reading arguments in his Physics the concept of “the so-called void will be found to be really vacuous.” In the 1660s, however, the view that nature abhors a vacuum was no longer widely held. Of course, the Cartesian version of the mechanical philosophy of nature reflected the Aristotelian notion that there were no empty spaces in nature. The atomic version of mechanism, however, asserted the existence of void between the atoms.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".