When we rejoice in a sunny day, the expressiveness of the day is incorporated into our expression of joy.
the social ontology of the physical world
All human beings relate to the natural world symbolically.
Love creates deontic structures, for it is inherently creative.
the better-not, the culpable, the piacular
Most beliefs grow up in the context of inquiry, within the inquiries we make and not after them.
"The best way to convince yourself that there is a world of inner experience is to explore it." Owen Barfield
"Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand; aesthetic imagination when we do."
characters acting out of character in a way that makes sense given their character
(1) What begins to exist is capable of beginning to exist.
(2) Capabilities are only intelligibly identified in terms of powers to act.
(3) The power to act must exist in something.
(4) The power to act relevant to the capability of beginning to exist cannot be that of what begins to exist.
Literally nobody makes 'beginning to exist' to depend on infinitely precise measurements of time, and we do not in our experience identify separate discrete points of time, so it is false to say (as Fantl does) that for an object to begin to exist "it need only be the case that at one time there is no such object...while at the next moment the object is present." (It's also worth asking the question, "Present to what and by what means?")
Lived experience is understood by living, not by listening: living it oneself, living with another, living sympathetically through another.
the dignitative equality of husband and wife
monotonicity as a generalization of distribution
Strategy is policy with arms.
primary ends -> prioritization of subordinate ends -> plan of means -> means of execution -> means in appropriate execution
divine order as a postulate of creative imagination
poetic intimation by conveyance of associations
poetic intimation as playing an important role in movement from notional to real assent
(1) The system of things, having an order, cannot arise from mere chance.
(2) Therefore there is or are cause or causes for the system of things.
(3) The system of things having a multiplicity of distinctions cannot arise from mere natural causes.
(4) Therefore it must arise from a cognitive cause or causes.
(5) Taken as a whole, the system of things cannot derive from any secondary cause or casues, which would be included in the system of things.
(6) Therefore the system of things is caused by primary cause.
(7) This primary cause is cognitive.
The actual intelligible is the intellect acting.
All explanation is in terms of source, nature, or end.
"There is something in every truth which determines the proposition by excluding the opposite predicate." Kant
Every possible world implies the existence of an actual world (but not of the actual world being thus and so).
Every serious intellectual inquiry is completed in a prayer of thanksgiving.
"The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all." Auden
"...our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms." CS Lewis
We love because we exist by grace of Love.
the garden at the edge of dawn
regulative, educative, and nobilitative duties
first-nature ontology & second-nature (habitus-based) ontology
socially grounded vs socially constructed (cf. Epstein)
The firm is a byproduct of the household.
genres as socially constructed artifact-kinds that build on socially grounded features of particular artifacts
A coin buried in the ground is not functioning as money, and even whether it can depends on the broader economic system.
Signs are semi-arbitrary, not purely arbitrary.
Signs may be associated at the level of sign-vehicle, object, or interpretant.
People derive unearned benefits from every thriving social group to which they belong; joining together cooperatively so that not every benefit has to be earned is a major aspect of human sociality.
the cultivation of "the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Pet. 3:4) in the Church
the three Mysteries of the Life of Christ: private, ministerial, paschal
Love allegorizes the world in light of the beloved.
sacramental grace as imbuing us with the dignity of causality (esp. with regard to the sacramental character)
the ecclesial semiosphere
Constitutional law always implies a conception of the citizen.
time as relative mutability, probability as relative contingency
CPT symmetry: no change in laws would be required to describe the universe if, at once, all matter were instead antimatter (charge inversion), all momenta were reversed (time inversion), and all positions were reflected through an arbitrary point (parity inversion).
For an entire economic system without the introduction of new resources, value does not increase, and only remains the same under ideal conditions involving no irreversible exchanges.
Right and wrong are related to need for education; where one posits a need for education, one posits a standard of right and wrong, and where there is no such standard, there is no need for education.
Church politics is always tending (in different populations) to the complacent or the histrionic.
cold vs warm recognitions of beauty and sublimity
the intrinsic novelty of creation (its ever-newness)
Every work of fine art is simultaneously abstract, ideal, and dynamic; every kind of fine art has symbolic, classical, and romantic modes.
A thing is ugly only as contextualized by a beauty.
Some beauty presupposes ugliness; all ugliness presupposes beauty.
consilience of true, good, and beautiful
sublimity as the greatness our greatness makes experienceable
A painting does not need to be vast to express vastness, and it may represent vastness without expressing it.