Kircher, Timothy. Before Enlightenment: Play and Illusion in Renaissance Humanism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book provides an exploration of Italian and (to a lesser degree) French humanism, aiming for an analysis of the intersections between humanism and the areas of literature and philosophy.A helpful methodological aspect is the reference to visual sources (some of them supplied in colour reproductions) as well as textual ones.The book is organized in five chapters.The first one ("The Riddles of Renaissance Humanism") serves as an introduction to the whole.Its main sections explain the governing distinction used throughout the book of "finders" and "seekers" (see below) and how humanism fits (or doesn't) in current histories of philosophy.The core of the monograph is chapters 2 to 4, dedicated to the areas of knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics, respectively.Chapter 2 ("Esse et videri: To Be and to Seem") studies Trecento, Quattrocento, and (much more superficially) some sixteenth-century instances of this theme.The number of authors covered is very large: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Andrea Biglia, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, Carlo Marsuppini, and (to round things off) Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, and Rabelais.This chapter also discusses (70-78) "walking knowledge" (not quite to be identified with Peripatetic approaches), a concept that functions as a fulcrum for a good deal of the book.Chapter 3 ("The Procession of Virtue") considers various aspects of ethical thought explored by Kircher's humanists: the roles of reason and pedagogy, and themes such as love, fortune, and folly.There are several pages here (e.g., 121-24, 128-29, 142-43) on the fortuna of Lucian (Poggio, Alberti, Giovanni Pontano, Erasmus).The chapter's last section also discusses authors such as Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Francesco Guicciardini, and (at greater length) Rabelais and Montaigne.Chapter 4 ("The Beauty of the Whole") investigates discussions "of the One or the wholeness of things" (160) through a similarly extensive gallery of characters and writings; much of the emphasis falls on Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Nicholas of Cusa, but Kircher also provides readings of Petrarch,
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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".