MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4409038171 · doi:10.1080/02580136.2025.2467539

Was J. C. Smuts an idealist philosopher?

2025· article· en· W4409038171 on OpenAlexaff
William Sweet

Bibliographic record

VenueSouth African Journal of Philosophy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Philosophy and Ethics
Canadian institutionsSt. Francis Xavier University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhilosophyEpistemologyTheology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The history of South African philosophy is only recently becoming widely known. Recent books and articles have been written on figures such as Martin Versfeld, Mongameli Mabona, Andrew H. Murray, and Alfred Hoernlé. But perhaps the best-known book bearing on philosophy written by a South African is Holism and Evolution, by Jan Christiaan Smuts (and from whom the term “holism” entered popular discourse). Yet Smuts – who was both Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa (1919–24 and 1939–48) and a military leader in both world wars – never taught as a philosopher and denied that the book was a work of philosophy at all. Moreover, Smuts eschewed philosophical labels, denying specifically that he was an idealist. In this article, I describe the idealism of the late 19th/early 20th century in the Anglo-American world, and review some elements of Smuts’ work and personal biography to determine whether one might, in fact, describe him as a philosopher and, in particular, an idealist philosopher.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.029

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0040.009
Scholarly communication0.0030.005
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.055
GPT teacher head0.342
Teacher spread0.287 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueSouth African Journal of PhilosophySame topicPolitical Philosophy and EthicsFrench-language works237,207