Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence regarding the thought of the Presocratics, there is little doubt that recognisably epistemological claims and questions arise practically simultaneously with philosophy itself. In this chapter, I will try to explain why epistemology was inseparable from the enterprise of philosophy as the ancient Greeks understood it. Among other results, I hope to show why the Sceptic Sextus Empiricus, some eight hundred years later, looking back on the entire history of philosophy as he knew it, was correct in seeing that an attack on the possibility of knowledge was virtually an attack on philosophy itself. As Sextus realised, philosophers supposed that they were aiming at wisdom and wisdom was a sort of knowledge. If knowledge is not possible, the quest for wisdom as traditionally conceived is vain. Philosophy begins in ancient Greece with a simple hypothesis: nature ( phusis ) is or has an order ( kosmos ) or structure. If nature has an order or is structured, that order is intelligible. It is subject to reasoning or argument or understanding, in short, to logos . The idea of a kosmos is closely related to the idea of a universe or world. The idea that nature is a kosmos appears to sit closely alongside the idea that there is a single or unique order to nature. In this sense, ancient cosmological speculation from its inception bears the hallmark of scientific reductionism, that is, the operating assumption that multiple explanations are themselves ultimately reducible to or derived from a single explanation.
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 | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".