Method, Madness, Magic: Plato's Phaedran Dialectics in Politics and Understanding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our modern understanding of the autonomy of human reason is always being read into the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” identified in the Platonic dialogues. On this understanding, philosophy itself assumes a self-evident distinction from “fiction” (poetry, myth, religion), and anything that cannot be circumscribed by its rationality is simply madness. But consider what is said in the Phaedrus vis-a-vis philosophy’s dialectical method. Here, this supra-rational method is first applied to an investigation of the emotional and irrational, namely love and madness, and ultimately uncovers the truth that god-given madness is better than human sobriety. Second, dialectic here reaches its own methodological limit, transposing itself from the sensible to the intelligible as a type of “vision of the soul.” This move from method to vision is manifest in the dialogue as a move from discursive analysis to myth: the philosophical enquiry at hand is completed by an act of poetry. There is no quarrel. Platonic philosophy, Phaedran dialectics indicate, is in fact an opening up of the soul to the vision of reality that obviates the distinction between rational and irrational as they are tied to human understanding. And in their highest form, philosophy and poetry are not only indistinguishable, but mediate the dynamic interrelationship Plato envisaged between the individual and society.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".