Ask the philosopher: practical advice and self-help in antiquity and today
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the genre of practical philosophical treatises in antiquity, contrasting it with contemporary literature in philosophical practice. Its main focus concerns the role of the philosopher as a guide to practical everyday concerns and the relationship between theoretical and practical ethics. An important question for ancient works on practical philosophy (and to a lesser extent their contemporary equivalents) has to do with whether, and to what extent, adopting the philosopher’s advice also requires an adoption of that person’s broader philosophical framework (Stoicism, Neoplatonism, Skepticism, etc.). Philosophers tend to put heavy emphasis on the existence of a broader philosophical theory that coheres logically with the practical advice a philosopher may offer. This emphasis is clearly reduced in contemporary works on practical philosophy. I discuss some evident advantages of the ancient philosophical approach in connecting theoretical principles with practical advice, and conclude with some thoughts on how philosophers might write popular works on practical philosophy nowadays.
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 | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| 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".