Bibliographic record
Abstract
If death by definition erases you, why should you fear it? For where you are, death will never be, and where death is, you will never be; it can never touch you. This intuition underlies Lucretius' famous argument that there is no reason to fear death. Taken seriously, it implies that you should be indifferent at the prospect of unexpectedly dying in your sleep tonight. To fear it would be to expect some experience that you will never undergo. In his paper The Makropulos case Bernard Williams develops the notion of categorical desires to refute this argument. In this paper, I will (I) explain Williams' argument that, contra Lucretius, we have reason to fear death; (II) raise, and subsequently amend, the objection that Williams' argument begs the question; and (III) argue that there is a response on Williams' behalf that blunts the force of the objection.
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 | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".