Feke, Jacqueline. Ptolemy’s Philosophy: Mathematics as a Way of Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jacqueline Feke's book presents the results of her efforts to elucidate Claudius Ptolemy's philosophical system. That Ptolemy conceived his mathematical studies as forming part of a broader investigation is especially clear in the elaborate preface of the Almagest, in which he defends the thesis that mathematics is the only non-conjectural part of philosophy. For Ptolemy, only with mathematics can we advance in physics and theology, the two other branches of theoretical philosophy in the classification of knowledge that he proposes; and, furthermore, only mathematics helps us approach the divine. Thus, even if at the beginning of this preface he posits that ethics is independent of theoretical philosophy, Ptolemy ends up making it dependent upon it. As Feke notes [78], this is typical of several philosophical passages in Ptolemy's works, in which his writing takes the form of a serious, ongoing philosophical investigation, as in his discussion of the constitution of body and soul in On the Criterion and the Commanding Faculty. We would perhaps expect that short philosophical excursions by a mathematician adopt a more expositional, handbook tone; but they turn out to be original and valuable records that are worth studying for his thinking process, the vivid style of which (I dare propose) demonstrates Ptolemy's admiration for Plato's dialogues and of Aristotle's treatises. 1 Ptolemy's philosophy is mainly to be connected with Middle Platonist trends that appropriated key concepts from Aristotle's esoteric works, which were made available sometime during the first century bc, the time of Androni-1 The two authorities seem to be alluded to in the preface of the Almagest: this is obvious for Aristotle, who is cited for the classification of the theoretical parts of philosophy, but a typical form of Socratic criticism of other philosophers in Plato's dialogues is probably also in Ptolemy's mind at the very beginning, when he uses the expression 'the true philosophers' ( ). Cf., e.g., Resp. 473d .
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".