Bibliographic record
Abstract
In outlining the history of the discipline, I have already indicated a number of ways in which specific theories and concepts provoked philosophical responses from the mechanical theorists themselves. I shall now consider evidence from ancient Greek natural philosophers – including philosophically inclined medical theorists – concerning the reception of ideas from mechanics. On a number of specific issues, natural philosophers engaged with the implications of mechanical theory and took seriously the question of its relationship to natural philosophy. There is, moreover, some evidence of a commitment, in a few ancient thinkers, to the use of mechanics as a heuristic . There are reports in late antiquity of those who considered whether the natural world might be understood to ‘work like that’: to function in ways that could be illuminated by appeal to the working artifacts that were available at the time. This latter evidence tends to cluster in three areas: the functioning of organisms, the motion of the heavenly bodies, and – at a more general level – the operation of causality in nature as a whole in relation to a directing intelligence. The existence of complex working artifacts exhibiting regular, pre-programmed causal sequences in their operation showed vividly what could be achieved by material arrangement alone. This, in turn, threatened some of the classic arguments for teleological explanations, which are typically based on the impossibility of adequate explanation of the phenomena using the resources of materialism alone.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".