Sextus Empiricus: <i>Against the Physicists</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What are sceptics doing when they do physics?Richard Bett's new translation of Sextus Empiricus' Against the Physicists [AP] should help shed light on this question.In my view, it will do so by making AP eminently more readable than it previously was.Readability, here, includes many features relevant to philosophical analysis: above all, a precise translation, a crisp introduction, and a masterful focus on the structure of the argument.In a nutshell, Bett offers a philosopher's translation.It brings out the precise version of scepticism found in AP.And it will enable those who care primarily about the topics discussed in AP-god, causation, body, parts and whole, place, time, number, generation and perishing-to access arguments of independent interest.Bett's introduction to AP achieves much in a short space: it situates the treatise within Sextus' work and sketches longstanding issues about different versions of Pyrrhonian scepticism.Bett's AP completes his series of translations of comparable treatises by Sextus, namely, Against the Ethicists (1997) and Against the Logicians (2005).These three texts are traditionally contained in a larger work called Against the Mathematicians [M], wherein books 7-8 cover logic, books 9-10 are devoted to physics, and book 11 to ethics.Bett argues, more clearly than I have seen before, that referring to the three treatises as M 7-8, M 9-10, and M 11 is nonsense.So is the customary translation of the collective Greek title, Against the Mathematicians, since « Προς μαθηματικους » means 'Against the Learned' [ix].The traditional rendering is not just a mistranslation.It is misleading in so far as it suggests a focus on mathematics that is not characteristic of Pyrrhonism or of the relevant dogmatic philosophies.And the title Against the Learned really only
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".