“If There Were an Eye on the Back of the Heaven…” (Plotinus, Ennead 4.5,3 and 8)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our paper discusses two curious passages of Plotinus’ treatise On some difficulties concerning the Soul III. On vision (Enn. 4.5,3 and 8), where the philosopher seems to contemplate the possibility of another universe outside this one. Yet we could never know this other universe, nor could we even decide whether it exists or not, even if “there were an eye on the back of the Heaven” able to look at it at close range. In fact, Plotinus explains, different universes cannot communicate at all among themselves. If they could, they would no longer be separate universes, but only parts of the same universe, because communication (or in Plotinian terms, sympathy) flows only within the same universe. We compare this interesting argument to some modern astrophysical ideas, as well as to the “philosophy of possible worlds” of David Lewis, while trying to avoid any “modernizing” perspective on Plotinus.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".