Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:35- 12:55 pm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
victor.boantza [at] mail.mcgill.ca Office hours: TBA Description: A historical-philosophical exploration of the relationship between science and the ‘occult’, broadly construed, in Renaissance and early modern Europe (circa. 1450-1750). The notions of ‘science ’ and ‘occult ’ (or ‘religion’) are traditionally considered as antithetical. Science is associated with rationality, objectivity, openness and quantitative reasoning; the occult is identified with irrationality, subjectivity, secrecy and qualitative dimensions. It is widely assumed that one of the leading achievements of the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution consisted in establishing a clear separation between the former and the latter, thus paving the way for the birth of Modern Science. This seminar challenges and critically evaluates this assumption by looking at the myriad ways through which early modern science interacted with (what are today seen as) distinctly occult trends of thought and practices, such as Magic, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Cabala, alchemy, astrology, mysticism, numerology, as well as widespread contemporary beliefs in demons, witches, supernatural powers, and the essential spirituality of the natural world. We shall address perplexing questions such as how could pseudo-sciences like astrology and alchemy contribute to the emergence of modern science or, why were some of the very heroes of the Scientific Revolution (Bacon, Boyle, Newton, and others) so dedicated to occult studies? The seminar requires commitment to serious research in the history and philosophy of science. Attention will be paid to social, economic, technological, and political contexts but this course is perhaps best understood as intellectual history or history of systems of thought.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.890 | 0.782 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".