Restoring the theocentrism of Descartes' meditations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis aims to establish the theocentrism of René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. The common interpretation of contemporary scholars understands the Meditations as a primarily epistemological text, in which the focus is on the self – or ego. This has perpetuated an image of Cartesian thought as egocentric or individualistic; most significantly, this interpretation has secularized Cartesian thought. This idea of a secular egocentrism has been so widely accepted that even Pope John Paul II, a prominent voice within the Catholic Church – the Church to which Descartes belonged – has criticized Descartes as responsible for inaugurating ‘the great anthropocentric shift’ in Western thought. In this thesis, I will defend Descartes against the misguided claims made by Pope John Paul II and other commentators by returning to the text of the Meditations itself. Through this analysis, it will become evident that the secular egocentric view of the text is unsubstantiated. Furthermore, the metaphysical focus and primacy of God will be brought into focus. Thus, establishing the fundamental theocentrism of the Meditations.
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 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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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.
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".