Writing Nature Otherwise: Natural History and the Paradox of the Product
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If one begins reading Friedrich Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature from the opening lines of the appended “Outline of the Whole,” from the outset the First Outline already encounters its first insurmountable obstacle, the point, or the moment, from which nature begins. “Because to philosophize about nature,” writes Schelling, “means as much as to create it, we must first of all find the point from which nature can be posited into becoming.” 1 This problem results from nature’s determinate identity. Nature, as Schelling defines it, is “being itself;” 2 it is at once both the infinite production and absolute inhibition of itself. Yet how did nature as unconditioned and pure productivity ever encounter such a radical and absolute inhibition that could have resulted in the first point of becoming? It turns out, as David Farrell Krell notes, that “Schelling is never able to answer these questions, each of which circles about the very problem he calls “insoluble.” What he learns repeatedly is that heterogeneity can never be merely “introduced” into homogeneity.” 3 It is precisely because of this circular rotation around this insoluble problem that Schelling’s First Outline immediately overturns homogeneity in favor of heterogeneity, although the text still calls for the process of heterogeneity to end. For once the text has begun, its beginning is always eternally beginning, so that the text calls out for that homogeneous point to put an end to nature’s endless productivity. Whereas some may point to nature as being this unified point, since Schelling represents nature as the point of identity between both productivity and product, the First Outline is unable to convincingly demonstrate that point at which heterogeneity transitions into absolute homogeneity. This duality inherent to nature gives way to a writing of nature in the First Outline that unworks the progressive history and organization that is ascribed to nature, evolution, and
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| 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 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".