Harold Innis and the Greek Tradition: an essay concerning his ontological transformation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transition of Harold Innis’ work from staples research to communications studies commonly is understood to have been an extension of his earlier research rather than a dramatic break from it. While in agreement, we argue that a significant transformation in Innis’s ontology (but not his epistemology) also took place. This can be understood by referencing his concerns about the fate of civilization and his views on the prospectively strategic role of what he called the Greek tradition. To explain this, herein we concentrate on Innis’ largely forgotten book Political Economy in the Modern State, initiated in 1943 and published in 1946, as a window into his intellectual processes. By the latter year, Innis had come to believe that a second Greek-inspired renaissance was needed. Vestiges of the Greek tradition, Innis thought, had to be recalled through the university and the humanities in order to provide society with the reflective universal perspective needed for survival. This transitional and transformational period involving his embrace of the Greek tradition as a kind of ideal type constitutes an important but under assessed aspect of Innis’s intellectual development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".