Representing, Defending, and Questioning Religion: Pragmatist Sociological Motifs in Plato’s "Timaeus", "Phaedo", "Republic", and "Laws"
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plato may be best known as a philosopher, but his depictions of people’s involvements in religion are important for social scientists not only because of the transcultural and transhistorical resources that they offer those in the sociology of religion, but also because of their more general pragmatist contributions to the study of human group life. Thus, although Plato (a) exempts religion from a more thorough going dialectic analysis of the sort to which he subjects many other realms of human knowing and acting (e.g., truth, justice, courage, rhetoric), (b) explicitly articulates and encourages theological viewpoints in some of his texts, and (c) sometimes writes as though things can be known only as ideal types or pure forms in an afterlife existence, Plato also (d) engages a number of consequential pragmatist (also pluralist, secular) aspects of people’s experiences with religion. In developing his materials on religion, Plato rejects the (popular) notions of the Olympian gods described by Homer and Hesiod as mythical as well as sacrilegious. Still, it is instructive to be mindful of Plato’s notions of divinity when considering the more distinctively sociological matters he addresses (as in the problematics of promoting and maintaining religious viewpoints on both collective and individual levels and discussions of the interlinkages of religion, morality, and deviance). Still, each of the four texts introduced here assume significantly different emphases and those interested in the study of human group life should be prepared to adjust accordingly as they examine these statements. All four texts are consequential for a broader “sociology of religion,” but Timaeus and Phaedo are notably more theological in emphases whereas Republic and Laws provide more extended insight into religion as a humanly engaged realm of endeavor. The paper concludes with an abbreviated comparison of Plato’s notions of religion with Chicago- style symbolic interactionist (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999; Prus and Grills 2003) approaches to the study of religion. Addressing some related matters, an epilogue briefly draws attention to some of the affinities of Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life with Plato’s analysis of religion.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it