Indivisible, Inexplicable, and the Center of All Certainty: Herder's Concept of Being
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Unifying Idea for Herder THE CASE IS INCREASINGLY BEING MADE for the importance of Herder as a ph ilosopher of first rank. However, the range of his production presents any reader approaching his work with the difficulty of arriving at a general characterization of his thought. His authorship is immense and spans a multiplicity of fields, with the result that we are often presented with many versions of Herder depending on which aspect of his work is being focused upon: philosophy, anthropology, theology, linguistics, historicism, and so forth. The interpretative task is to locate a unifying idea that will help us to hold Herder's diverse writings together, and come to an understanding of his overall aim as a thinker. This represents a substantive endeavour, to which this examination aspires to make a contribution by suggesting the central role of Being, which he refers to as “unanalyzable – unproveable – the centre of all certainty” ( FHA 1:20; EB , 71). It will explore Herder's very first surviving philosophical work, the Essay on Being , in which he offers a response to Kant's pre-critical consideration of the ontological argument as set out in Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund . In this text Kant proffered a revised version of the ontological argument. Kant's consideration puts forth an early version of his rejection of Being as a predicate; one which we later see revised and expanded in the context of his critical philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason (see AA 3:A592–602, B620–630). However, what concerns us here is less Kant's critique of the philosophical locus classicus than his argument for the necessity of Being and the equation of this Being with God. Because Being contains the basis for all possibilities, all things are only possible through its function as their ground. Since the possibility of the existence of all a posteriori reality rests upon Being, Kant maintains that he can offer an a priori argument for the necessary existence of Being, and therefore of God. Herder's Essay accepted the spirit of Kant's exploration of Being, and its claim that Being constitutes the ground of predication, but it rejected the a priorism of Kant's elaboration.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".