Alexander of Lycopolis against the Manichean conception of matter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexander of Lycopolis is the author of an anti-Manichaean text from last quarter of the third century AD or maybe slightly later. Despite the fact that the author is clearly a Platonist, the text has been largely ignored by historians of Platonism, with the notable exception of Jaap Mansfeld who in 1974 published the only philosophical analysis of this text (in a collaboration with P.W. van der Horst). The text certainly deserves greater attention, as it is a rare testimony from an important transitional phase in the history of ancient Platonism. Since 1974, Platonic studies have boomed and hence it is worth our while to take a new look at this text. I will look at Alexander’s arguments against the Manichaean conception of matter. The analysis of these arguments and a comparison with contemporaneous sources will allow us to shed more light on Alexander’s own philosophical position and the traditions to which he belongs.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".