The Encounter of Faith and Reason in the Western Tradition and Its Significance Today
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a transcription of a lecture on faith and reason that was delivered by Alexander Altmann at the University of Chicago in 1961, preserved in a tape recording and recently discovered by the editor. Altmann’s lecture is a far-reaching discussion of the interrelationship between faith and reason in Western thought, explored from a range of vantage points: philosophical, theological, and historical. The article also contains a brief introduction to the original lecture by the distinguished scholar Leo Strauss. In addition, the editor has added his own introduction, which presents an overview of the biography and achievement of Alexander Altmann, some comments highlighting the prominent literary features of the lecture, and a brief analysis in point form of the contents of the lecture. Also added to the lecture are detailed annotations by the editor, in an effort to provide the sources for Altmann’s numerous references to philosophers and theologians (ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary). Those notes also offer further elucidation in aid of understanding Altmann’s greater argument about faith and reason, by focusing on some of those matters in the lecture that may be either perplexing or obscure to readers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".