Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thinkers such as Althusser and Deleuze and Guattari have long recognized the importance of Spinoza’s “anti-humanism” for politics. They emphasize Spinoza’s materialist ontology, which entails a rejection of human exceptionalism with respect to the rest of nature. Anti-humanism calls into question the locus of human agency in the will and underlines the necessity of structural transformation. Ecological philosophers have embraced Spinoza’s anti-humanism insofar as it entails a critique of anthropocentrism and the instrumentalization of nature. Neither Marxists nor ecological thinkers have not appreciated, however, the flipside of Spinoza’s anti-humanism. This paper examines Spinoza’s remarks on animals, or “beasts,” to reveal that his materialism likewise rejects the elevation of pristine, wilderness to the status of a norm. This paper argues that a turn to the nonhuman can represent a “perverse effect” of an anthropocentric worldview and thereby undermine potential political action. Spinoza’s remarks on animals militate against a kind of misanthropic despair that erupts as a reaction complex to the impossible ideals involved in the institution of the superhuman norms that so often accompany a humanist politics. Study of his words on “brutes,” especially as the threat of environmental catastrophe signals dark times, is invaluable for maintaining an affirmative rather than a reactionary politics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".