Dialectical Envisioning: <i>Daniel Deronda</i> and British Ethical Idealism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Daniel Deronda often comes across as a more futuristic novel than the rest of George Eliot’s oeuvre. Its moral idealism tends to puzzle the reader for being too metaphysical and ethereal. So far, Eliot’s general idealism has been discussed in terms of her engagement with philosophers such as Feuerbach, Spinoza, Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, and Herbert Spencer. In this article, the same issue is explored by way of historical significance rather than direct influence. By reading Daniel Deronda in the context of British ethical idealism, especially the writings of F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green, I argue that the novel contributed significantly to a major development of Victorian moral philosophy. In particular, the novel deploys a dialectical language of speculation that helped to shape a shift of interest to a more metaphysical approach to moral ideals. Addressing issues such as the fallibility of present judgment, the importance of integration rather than antithesis, and the heuristic value of a teleological future, Daniel Deronda self‐consciously tests out the validity of a dialectical form of moral envisioning. To read Daniel Deronda this way can help define a crucial aspect of Eliot’s thinking that cannot be easily or sufficiently articulated in such terms as scientific positivism and German idealism, though both of which have been important in shaping Eliot’s other novels before Daniel Deronda . In creating independently an ethical idealism that is equally metaphysical but intellectually less restrictive than that of Bradley or Green, Daniel Deronda shows not only the convergence of literary and philosophical writings but also the importance of considering literary works for the study of Victorian moral philosophy.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it