Bergson contra Bergson: Race and morality in <i>The Two Sources</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interest in the work of Bergson has seen a revival in political theory over the past two decades. Initially, this interest focused primarily on Bergson’s earlier writings. However, recently there has been increased attention to Bergson’s controversial last book – The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. This has had the benefit of bringing attention to a book frequently maligned as uneven and disappointing. At the same time, mostly absent from this renewed interest has been the subject of race. One of the great ironies of The Two Sources is that, even as it calls for an open morality, it relies on a series of regressive, racist and Eurocentric assumptions. It is this article’s contention that, if we are going to see a renewed turn to The Two Sources, we must grapple with these assumptions, both to investigate how they limit the effectiveness of Bergson’s argument, and to ensure that they are not smuggled into our own work. The article goes on to argue that Bergson’s philosophy ultimately gives us the tools to challenge these reactionary elements; that his focus on morality as a dynamic and open-ended process provides us with the opportunity for recognizing the contingent limitations of Bergson’s worldview.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it