The “Absence of Chance” and the “Serving of Ends”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aristotle’s concept of nature, captured in quotations such as “nature does nothing in vain” and “man by nature is a political animal,” is a topic consistently discussed within scholarly literature. This paper’s primary aim is to demonstrate how Aristotle’s concept of nature underpins his political theory. It first uncovers Aristotle’s concept of nature, then it demonstrates how this concept underpins his political principles. Aristotle’s concept of nature is first broken down to two ideas: the “absence of chance,” which describes the regularity and permanence of phenomena, and the “serving of ends,” which explains Aristotle’s teleological approach. As such, Aristotle’s nature is used both to describe and explain phenomena, and therefore it shows both how and why certain phenomena occur. Armed with this understanding of nature, this paper shows how Aristotle applies this concept of nature to derive two political principles - the “principle of rulership” and the “social instinct.” These political principles in turn underpin his political theory and approach to political science. This paper shows that, through an understanding of Aristotle’s concept of nature, we can better understand the foundation of his politics.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".