Religious Beliefs, Practices, and Representations as Humanly Enacted Realities: Lucian (circa 120-200) Addresses Sacrifices, Death, Divinity, and Fate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lucian of Samosata (circa 120-200) may be primarily envisioned as a poet-philosopher from the classical Roman era. However, the material he develops on religion not only anticipates important aspects of contemporary pragmatist/constructionist approaches to the sociology of religion but also provides some particularly compelling insights into religion as a humanly engaged realm of reality. Following an introduction to a pragmatist approach to the study of religion, this paper presents a synoptic overview of several of Lucian’s texts on religion. In addition to the significance of Lucian’s materials for comprehending an era of Roman and Greek civilization, as well as their more general sources of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation, these texts also provide an array of valuable transhistorical reference points and alert scholars in the field of religion to some ways in which the study of religion could be more authentically approached within the social sciences. The paper concludes with a consideration of the affinities of Lucian’s depictions of religion with pragmatist, interactionist, and associated approaches as this pertains to the study of religion as a realm of human involvement.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".