Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis attempts to determine whether Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ever read Plato's dialogues, in the Confessions, Augustine cites the importance of certain libri Plafonicorum, books of the Platonists, to his own understanding of the nature of God and the universe. It is clear from his account that exposure to these books was a watershed event in his life. The insights communicated by them contributed to his conversion to Christianity and laid the foundation for the development of his own Christian philosophy. The questions of the identity of the libri Plaloniconim and of Augustine's knowledge of Plato generally have been addressed in scholarship many times before. Previous studies have used the methodology of Quellenforschung, comparing the texts of Augustine's writings with those of Plato's dialogues and comparing them for similarities, almost always doctrinal. It was assumed that close correspondences would indicate Augustine's familiarity with Plato and suggest his influence on particular Augustinian doctrines. The present study differs from all preceding scholarly works in that it develops and applies a new method that allows for philologically based comparisons of texts. Some half-century of scholarship on allusions in ancient literature has revealed specific and demonstrable characteristics of allusion, techniques applied by the ancients to effect allusions and linguistic markers that indicate the presence of allusions. A body of theoretical knowledge has also been developed to interpret the significance of allusions. The current study approaches Augustine's citations of previous authors as literary allusions. Borrowing from allusion scholarship, it develops a methodology for identifying Augustine's allusions and suggests means of interpreting their significance. The findings of the study are replicable and easily evaluated; the method devised can be applied not only to Augustine's Platonic readings, but also to his knowledge and use of literature generally and to the relationships between ancient authors and texts across genres.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".