Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article recovers the understated engagement with the question of mortality and the relationship to death in life through a reading of the classics of sociology – Durkheim, Marx, Simmel and Weber–in order to dramatize the relationship of such a concern to the imaginary of perpetual happiness idealized by the bourgeoisie of each generation and exemplified by Lacan as the ‘problem’ of the city. If engaging mortality is conceived as an example of the thinking of limits, I suggest that this ban parallels disavowing the question of meaning that the bourgeoisie have cultivated and perfected in the name of practical thinking. In this way, the bourgeoisie can be said to have mastered the secret of life and the connection between mental hygiene and intellectual parsimony celebrated by Kant as the advance of enlightenment. This adjustment is located at least as far back as the Stoics and replayed in much thought and in popular culture as a symptom of the self-destructiveness of the fixation on ‘ultimate meaning’ and its realistic pursuit in life. In this sense, the conditions of citizenship in the city are said to require a systemic disregard of such ‘deep’ concerns on Kantian grounds that their inaccessibility and irresolute character can only distract circumspection from its limited goals. Georg Simmel is maintained as the classical figure who both engaged death (and so the risk of thinking limit) and suffered marginalization for this, making his resolution of this tension not tragic, as his idiom suggests, but an exemplification of sociological artistry and of the playful relationship to life that it promises when unencumbered by the fear of the bourgeoisie.
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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".