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Record W2125635298 · doi:10.3138/cbmh.26.1.129

Medicine and the Science of Soul

2009· article· en· W2125635298 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
R. J. Hankinson

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Health History · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistory of Medicine Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSoulEpistemologyRelation (database)PhilosophyObject (grammar)MaterialismIntellectPsychoanalysisPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Central to Don Bates's thesis about the role of medicine in the Scientific Revolution is the Greek concept of psyche. This article explores this connection in relation to Galen. Paradoxically, Galen declined to commit himself to any particular view of the soul's real nature, and held aloof from both materialist and Platonic positions. His medical approach, however, offered a way through these difficulties: we may not know what the soul is, but we know it exists, because we can see what it does. Medicine can also reveal other truths about the soul, such as the location of its various parts in the brain, heart and liver, or its transmission through the nerves. Different souls exhibit different "powers," i.e., causal postulates conceived in relation to their specific effects. Thus the soul can be a proper object of scientific inquiry if one concentrates on its evident manifestations, and seeks to make causal and categorical sense of them within a general theory of functioning. Galen's stance can be compared to some positions of Galileo, and even to La Mettrie, who claimed Galen's support for his contention that the powers of the soul are affected by bodily conditions. Both of them concentrate on the evident facts of animal and human life; both put their considerable medical learning to work to make sense of these facts; and they shared a common aversion to dogmatism. Though Galen, unlike Galileo, would make some place for talk about substances and essences in science, he is in some respects more modern than many thinkers of the Scientific Revolution in his willingness to accommodate a wide range of modes of physical causation.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.998
Threshold uncertainty score0.040

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.064
Scholarly communication0.0080.008
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0050.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.185 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations9
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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