Aesthetics and Material Beauty: Aesthetics Naturalized, by Jennifer A. McMahon.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Philosophers and beauty, it must be said, have had a rather erratic relationship. While most find beauty unworthy of much attention, those who notice it seem completely smitten, praising it in the most lofty and elevated terms. Beauty, it seems, is always either humdrum or holy in the philosopher’s eyes. Jennifer McMahon’s Aesthetics and Material Beauty falls squarely into the latter camp. For McMahon, beauty is no ephemeral tickling of the senses, but a ‘deeply moving experience’ (p. 85) that takes us ‘beyond the merely empirical’ (p. 30), putting us into contact with fundamental ideas — infinity, immortality, freedom — that cannot be captured in language. Further, the experience of beauty ‘serves to enhance our feeling of integration into nature’ (p. 18) and produces a ‘bond between people’ that is ‘more powerful … than shared perceptual and cognitive structures’ (p. 82). Beauty even lies at the heart of our identities, for ‘to some extent, a person establishes who they are in their aesthetic engagement with objects’ (p. 102).
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
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".