Bibliographic record
Abstract
We now think that any serious religious person would be dismayed by the Bible scholarship of Spinoza and Father Richard Simon. But, though they shocked many of the theologians of the late seventeenth century and afterward, they also carried further historical and critical inquiries about the biblical text that had been developing from the late Middle Ages and through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Isaac Newton, who devoted about sixty years of his life to studies about the Bible seems to have been affected positively by points made by Spinoza and Simon. And this is curious in that two hundred years later Newton's own exegesis of the books of Daniel and Revelation was republished by the former head of the British Medical Association, Professor William Whitla of Queens College, Belfast, as an answer to the higher criticism of the Bible that had been developed from the ideas and methods of Spinoza and Simon by German scholars in the nineteenth century. First, did Newton actually know the texts of either of these radical biblical exegetes? We know that he knew of Simon's work, since he owned copies of five of his books, and cited them occasionally in his own work. We know he had ample opportunity to know of Spinoza's writings, especially the work that deals extensively with the Bible, the Tractatus Politico Theologicus It was in the library of Isaac Barrow that Newton had cataloged. The work was known to his colleagues at Cambridge, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, both of whom were exercised about Spinoza's views and attacked them in print.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
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".