THOMAS HERRON and MICHAEL POTTERTON (eds). Ireland in the Renaissance: c. 1540-1660.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Bishop Berkeley said ‘there was no matter,’ And proved it—‘twas no matter what he said: They say his system ‘t is in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it? I would shatter Gladly all matters down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the world a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it. (Don Juan XI.1) The opening stanzas of Don Juan's Canto XI stage Byron's most explicit encounter with British skepticism. These lines, discussed in the final pages of Emily A. Bernhard Jackson's The Development of Byron's Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty, exemplify Byron's ambivalent attitude toward the skeptical philosophy with which Bernhard Jackson places his poetry in conversation. That is, if the above passage suggests that matter does not matter, Bernhard Jackson's contention is that this not mattering matters quite a lot. The pun here brings matter as physical material into proximity with matter as symbolic significance. So freighted, the word, however, loses stability, fracturing rather than joining physical and intellectual domains. Like Manfred's ‘I have shed/Blood, but not hers—and yet her blood was shed’ that displaces the putative explanation it offers concerning his relationship to Astarte (p. 144), Byron's poetry is remarkably self-cancelling at the instant of imminent revelation. We see this in nuce when the speaker's affirmation of Berkeley's successful argument (‘there was no matter’) is, uncannily, refurbished (“twas no matter’) as a denial of the significance of that same argument. As the convoluted structure of this critique suggests, the speaker's resistance to Berkeley's philosophy springs not, however, from bare materialism—for he ‘would shatter/Gladly all matters down to stone or lead’ in search of ‘a spirit.’ Rather, Byron's skepticism is a liberating resource for self re-creation; if skepticism suspends dogmatic claims to actual knowledge of metaphysical reality it nevertheless opens an affirmative, performative—though provisional—field of ‘knowledge-claims’ (p. 2). Hence, Byron's epistemology incorporates a vertiginous skepticism toward nihilistic doubt: Oh Doubt!—if thou be'st Doubt, for which some take thee; But which I doubt extremely—thou sole prism Of the Truth's rays, spoil not my draught of spirit! (Juan XI.2)
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.087 | 0.036 |
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".