The Nous of the Partial Soul in Proclus' Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I will examine Proclus' Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato in order to shed light on his doctrine of the partial soul's nous. Proclus' epistemology is in many ways the heart of his system. The human soul is a microcosm, and because each of its faculties corresponds to one or other order of the macrocosm, the soul's knowledge of reality is primarily through self-knowledge. We have, however, a paradoxical situation in Proclus on this point. On the one hand, he continually relates the doctrines he finds in the texts that he interprets to various psychic or noetic activities, and one sometimes gets the impression that he is more interested in how we grasp a feature of the cosmos than in that feature itself. On the other hand, his epistemological remarks are almost always in passing, and in the context of a discussion of some other point. This paradox is a source of frustration, to this interpreter at least, and leads one to wish dearly that Proclus' commentaries on Theaetetus and Sophist had survived, where presumably he explained his theory in a more orderly manner.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it