Culture and the Philosophy of Moral Life: The True, The Good, The Beautiful, and The Sacred
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Philosophy as a profession is blessed with leisure and exempt from an obligation to be socially useful or productive, and so has a special obligation to address fundamental questions about the meaning of the human project not otherwise on the contemporary agenda. This is not an undertaking that requires technical language or special skills. William James described the deceptively simple task of philosophy as saying something true about things that matter. That said, it is hardly the prerogative of philosophy to adjudicate which are matters of crucial importance to a given culture. Moreover, philosophical investigations are of a kind that remain open and without final resolution and there is at the heart of philosophical inquiry a deep conviction that everything matters. This suggests that there are important concerns for contemporary philosophy beyond professional disagreements about propositional validity and utility. Among these is the cultural task of providing a framework for accessing and assessing emergent issues that independently make claims upon the mind and spirit of the world‟s peoples. In the ordinary affairs of everyday life, philosophers have little to say that is not available equally to any thoughtful and sensible person—no special authority, for example. to make pronouncements on issues of abortion or euthanasia. Inevitable conflicts about such issues may resist definitive solution, and only be properly resolved meaningfully within the life-field of those persons for whom resolution is crucial. However differently it may be conceived, philosophical inquiry is rightly pitched at a deeper level of consideration than popular counsel on personal action or public policy. But just what is this deeper level and framework of accessibility to things that matter? In an age shorn of absolute values and eternal verities, there still exists a sense of eternal variables—foundational values common to a conception and continuance of the human project that I will try to address in the notes that follow.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| 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".