John Scottus Eriugena and the Entangled Materiality of Vox
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to explicate John Scottus Eriugena’s arguments about the ontological status of vox in his commentary on Priscian, the In Priscianum. Eriugena draws from Stoic, Peripatetic, and early medieval philosophical definitions to arrive at an original analysis of vox as an intelligible, rather than physical, unit of speech, which is ultimately grounded in his concept of the letter (littera). For Eriugena, physical matter cannot be known by the mind because it is infinitely divisible, and so the physical nature of vox, i.e. air, cannot be known and therefore cannot signify. Only the letter guarantees a minimal, intelligizable unit that can structure speech. Thus, paradoxically, the written letter, usually thought of as a symbol of speech, comes to define significative speech as such. In the latter part of this article, I examine a grammatical commentary in Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 413 (394), which contains arguments similar to those forwarded by Eriugena, and several direct quotations from the In Priscianum. The entanglements of philosophical and grammatical concepts and the re-entanglement of these concepts in Eriugena and the Valenciennes commentary show how the reception and transmission of learning in the early Middle Ages followed anfractuous routes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".