Review of Kojin Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy . Durham: Duke UP, 2017. 176 pages.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a book for anyone interested in: the origins of philosophical thinking, the idiocy of the designation 'pre-Socratic', the coincidence of western and eastern cultures, the political economy of intellectual life, the nexus democratic-anarcho-communist, the power of movement, and, in short, anything critical to do with the structure of thought and world history (a grand scope, perhaps, but one that fits with the course of the Japanese Kantian-Marxist's recent work, as this book grew out of a larger project on economic modes of exchange and production entitled, in English, The Structure of World History (Durham: Duke UP, 2014)).So, this book is for just about anyone with interests in philosophy; it is, accordingly, accessible, written in a clear, uncluttered prose, and short, yet shatteringly good and widespread and intense in its consequences, if the argument is received.The argument, in outline, is as follows: the standard understanding of the Ionian philosophers of the two or so centuries preceding Plato and Aristotle-the so-called pre-Socratics-is wrong; this wrong understanding is due largely to the influential revisionist account of them by their arch opponents, the self-same Plato and Aristotle, who make Socrates, and hence Athens, appear to be the origin of philosophy, and in doing so turn philosophy idealist and theological; whereas a rereading of the extant fragments of the Ionians, together with a critical reconsideration of Ionian political economy, leads us to conclude that Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus et al practised philosophy, including ethics and political philosophy, similarly to Socrates (such that it becomes conceivable to say that 'if one wants to properly consider the pre-Socratics one must include Socrates in their number' (134)) and, furthermore, and finally and most boldly, that if philosophy was born in Ionia in the time preceding Socrates, it was born in conditions of nomadic communism, or, in other words, of a culture of migration, handicraft manufacture, trade and the absence or negation of rule (which is Karatani's preferred translation for isonomia).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.034 |
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".