Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of my thesis arose from competing intuitions I have about Stoicism.I am irresistibly attracted to Stoic esteem for rational agency, where rational agency is understood to be the ability to correctly interpret life, to appropriately judge which things have value, and correspondingly, judge how the presence or absence of these things can disrupt your capacity to live well.Here is a philosophy that is promising you that no matter what happens in life, no matter who you are, where you come from, nothing but your own judgement has the power to threaten your dignity and happiness.A big promise, but possibly, an empty one.I cannot help thinking that human experience gives us reason to be skeptical of this optimistic picture.Stoic or not, life events have the power to invade us in terrible ways, so much so that they can impair our capacity to judge and evaluate events correctly.Some traumas are so abrupt and intense that there is no way that the agent can experience them with the equanimity Stoic rational agency promises.I could not imagine, for example, a bereaved parent standing over the body of their child, thinking that this loss is not so great, after all; that this loss serves a purpose in the unfolding of the universe, and that they can simply carry on with their lives, undisturbed and tranquil.Contra the dictates of Stoic theory of value then, I am convinced that there are some events in life which we cannot face with ethical indifference.More strongly, I think that to do anything but feel invaded, powerless and sad in such situations seems to token an inappropriate, even pathological understanding of the world and human vulnerability.For the same reasons then that Stoicism is attractive, Stoicism becomes repulsive.Being Stoic vii seems to constitute an extreme violence against the self, against truth, and our common sense understanding of what really matters in life.I thought there is no better place to start examining this tension than in the corpus of the most eclectic Stoic philosopher: Lucius Annaeus Seneca.As a Stoic, Seneca is weird.Beyond his appeals to Epicurean thought in his letters and moral discourses; beyond his self deprecating confessions of moral weakness-particularly with respect to his proclivity towards the anti-Stoic passion of anger, and beyond his dissonant attachments to the accumulation of external wealth in his aristocratic life, Seneca wrote eight tragedies, all of which appear to challenge the Stoic vision of a providential rational universe, depicting the triumph of passion towards indifferent things, chaos, revenge and evil.Perhaps, I thought, Senecan tragedy has something important to tell me about my conflicting intuitions about Stoicism.I had hoped that a project on Stoic tragedy could resolve this tension in some way, such that I could have the best of both worlds.Stoic invulnerability on one hand, and the reality of human experience on the other.This is not quite what happened.Yet, following the spirit of my project as it has unfolded, I leave it to the reader to decide for themselves whether such a reconciliation is possible.Picking up on my conflicting intuitions about Stoicism, my thesis examines the compatibility of Senecan Stoicism with the tacit ethical content contained in tragedy and the tacit ethical content contained in Senecan tragedy proper.I attempt to develop a framework for thinking about Senecan aesthetics which could render these anti-Stoic tragedies coherent with the practical and ethical ends of Seneca Stoicism.I argue that viii aesthetic exposure to the tragedies served in some ways to the edify their audience and creator, ultimately contributing to a critical theorizing of the passions in human life.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".