As always, just things dashed off; add grains of salt as needed.
Reductionism is a set of views according to which physical theory has an intrinsic teleological tendency to its natural place.
The history of science shows that the norm is not reduction but mutual calibration.
It says something about the human psyche that people will not settle for rationality but must have rationalism, not merely empirical inquiry but empiricism, not merely capital investment but capitalism, etc.
One of the things Mansfield Park shows us is that moral endurance does not mean enduring forever; Fanny's constancy is shown not in that her moral endurance has no limits but in that she is not fickle and resists pressure: its measure is in just how much it takes to reach her limit.
"The spectator who sees the causes of suffering often lacks insight into the way in which it is faced by the soul that is on trial, and fails to allow for the faith that frees the spirit." (Sorley)
Scripture is useful for teaching, refutation, correction, and training, and it is the Church that so uses it.
the study of the relation of different kinds of knowledge to the intrinsic ends of human reason
Two kinds of polytheistic natural world: (1) the laws of physical nature preexist the gods; (2) the laws of physical nature are outcomes (consensus or equilibrium) in negotiations among gods.
one: integration; true: revelation; good: vocation; beautiful: inspiration
the Church as Mother of many ends
One value of the rabbinical tradition even for non-Jews is that almost nothing else displays so perfectly the sheer richness of rational dialectic
pendant nodes in influence networks & lost ideas
-> this has to take into account relativity to designated time to handle lostness
honor as rational thymos
cupiditas in Augustine's De Civ Book IV and pleonexia in Plato's Republic
analogy, coherence, familiarity
grounds of signification
(1) participation
(2) indication
(3) imputation
- link between indication & association
the breaking of the vessels as about knowledge of God, fragmentary except at summit, veiled pieces of aspects under which God may be known
Justice is written on pages of mercy.
the syncretisms of the naturalistic project
the dangerous conversion of a metaphysics into a mechanics
usuries & extortions & frauds of pleasure: demanding from people what is not rightful consolation (for real loss), encouragement (for real risk), or reward (for real service).
By 'revelation' we may mean (1) a sign, (2) the sign's manifesting to a cognitive power, (3) what the sign manifests.
epicyclical patterns of government
logical research as writing poetry with modal operators and inference-relations
modal logic as mereology of the intelligible
ancient rights of moot and muster, post and watch
Most doubts are manufactured doubts; they must be constructed. Spontaneous doubt throughout most of human life is, while not exactly rare, also not at all common: we accept or don't, where we are interested at all.
Explanation is formally time-symmetric but not necessarily reversible.
Every effect is at least a disjoint end for which the means of the corresponding efficient causes must be at least adequate.
effectin means vs integral means
Iconoclasts cannot break the images in their own imaginations.
moral circumstances as singularia
virtues as potestative wholes (Albert)
true principiation as activation
While the actual is obviously essential to it, most of scientific inquiry is directly concerned not with the actual as actual but with its potential, and most investigation is geared toward discovering potentialities and constraints on potential.
de-psychologizing (or de-imaginationizing) Hume's galley effect
phenomenology as metaphysics with shift of sign
Reason needs literature to help her cultivate a sense of adventure.
True, good, and beautiful are being insofar as it completes.
It is a sign of stupidity to think that an explanation ceases to be explanatory by being put in metaphorical terms.
agent intellect moves passive intellect as beloved moves lover.
agent intellect is to phantasms as art is to material
adaptation of impetus theory to mean speed rule
If you look closely you find that all serious arguments against the existence of natural ends are arguments from cognitive ends or the ends of inquiry.
The danger of the Myth of Progress is not in believng that there is progress but in making the better the enemy of the good, and thus not respecting first tries and initial approximations as the feats they often are.
From the perspective of common good, the test of a lending system is not facility of lending or size of profits but effectiveness in seeding beneficial projects, creating enduring profit-making ventures, and making possible enduring public works that could not otherwise be made. The public value of lending consists overwhelmingly in the flexibility it provides for effective organizing of resources.
It is a lesson not yet sufficiently learned, but amply attested by history, that every attack and argument of Christian group A against Christian group B will be mutated and modified later to be directed against any Christian group, if it is in any way possible for it to be.
Uncorrected pleonexia in gift economies leads to suspicious secrecies, which in term foment conflict.
the history of the Church as a history of deviations and remediations
All the capital vices are capable of severely distorting reaosning, but none worse than vainglory and envy.
The young often have wisdom, but it takes age to recognize it consistently for what it is.
He did not foresee it, but who can say that the Plato of the Timaeus would be surprised by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
probability as negation under possibly inadequate search conditions
evaluation of argument by precedent equivalences vs.
evaluation of argument by metastructural standards vs.
evaluation of argument by ritual template vs.
evaluation of argument by moral signs of character vs.
evaluation of argument by negotiated concessions
All genuine theology is catechetical, but not all in the same way.
It is not knowledge that is cumulative but experience; knowledge progresses not by accumulation but by synthesis of accumulated experiences; the accumulation is essential to progress in knowledge, but it is not such progress.
Questioning without listening is no more philosophical than not questioning.
contradiction explosion as characterizing the domain of the thinkable, the range of the mind; other domains as fragments of this
Much damage is done by the failure to recognize that although metaphor is selective and even in some sense arbitrary, it can nonetheless still be systematic.
Confirmation is always under a description and therefore confirmation of a statement does not confirm every statement equivalent to it except when the entailments ar eadded as additional premsies to be conduits between descriptions.
nonanalogical associative equivocals vs pure equivocals
constraints vs. restraints
Love wills the posisbility of its own eternity.
It is human anture that posits the most general practical problems faced by human beings.
We need to distinguish secrecies and oblivions; secrecies are maintained by active causes confining information to a few, oblivions by loss, either of the information itself (permanent) or of access to it (potentially temporary).
The true rhetoric of philosophy is to die well.
Friendship reaches where authority never will.
The danger of making theology about your relationship with God is that you can make, even contrary to all reason and sense, your relationship with God anything you please.
associativity, commutativity, and distributivity in poetic description
the elocution of the rain
coherence (cf IBE accounts) & constancy (cf analogy accounts) & other minds
Adversity is the environment for ascetic victory.
Technology in general is based on the facts that energy is conserved and that usefulness, although subject to limits, often is not.
philosophy as husbandry (cf. Xenophon's Oeconomicus)
The historical being of a people is found in its everyday life, not the state.
A philosopher's thought is immersed in an environment of habitual inclinations and temperament.
The True modality stops False bleed.
The body is myself as both instrument of myself and sign of myself, and thus myself as a form of reflective self-expression in the world and to others.
artificial intelligence as someone's stylized idea of intelligence
evidence threshold capacitance
Love is fulfillment of the law. But how can love be the true fulfillment of the law if God is not love? For God is the fulfillment of the law, and God is Love, and by grace through Christ we in love participate God, and thus the fulfillment of the law.
free & honest market as a symbol for communion of saints (able to be such because of (1) division of labor & property; (2) exchange; (3) investment)
Shared faith forces philosophers out of hermetic reflection so that they at least regard and consider the reflections of thsoe who are known to share the faith.
Reasonableness requires more than logic; it requires le bon sens.
Christ as the Word of God is the image of the Father; Christ as man is a sign of the Father.
A sign by incomplete substitution represents another to some cognitive power.
Representation or manifestation is not the genus of the sign, but its foundation.
Every extrinsic denomination originates in the real form of another being ('being seen' from sight).
All the forms of piety -- filial piety, national piety, religious piety -- have implications for rationality by way of standards set up by deference. For instance, we owe it to our parents and ancestors to respect their ways and to put them aside only for something established as better in some relevant way (more conducive to the spirit of what they were trying to do, tending to ends that were higher than theirs, etc.).
preface paradox & unknown sin
Ingenuity is no more limitless than any other resource to which we have practical access.
As notes preparing for lyrics, the Baptist's voice prepares for the Word.
The evidentness of a claim is relative to an intellectual frame of reference.
Who gives what is holy to dogs does not distinguish between the sacred and the profane; thus we are to mark off what is holy (cf. Didache) in our prayers and in our lives.
empathic portraiture as a philosophical method
Respect is hospitality detached from place.
the contemplative life, the music of Shao; the active life, the music of Wu
Glib friends are virtually enemies.
None grow wise who do not wander and return.
Public spirit does not drive out our private motives; it encompasses them and gives them new meaning.
Every virtue is a kind of authority.
All cognition regards being in some respect.
All of modern logic can be laid out dialectically.
social hagiography: community networks of saints -- e.g., the family of Basil & Emilia, the Arpad dynasty, the French School, the Spanish School, the beginnings of the Franciscans; etc.
Writing allows for intensive reiteration of arguments.
the correlating of different philosophical systems
the value of dreams as a mode of thought at an angle to waking thought -- makes salient features of waking thought that might be otherwise missed
Plato's Symposium & erotic desire as analogous to phantom limb syndrome
Since knowledge is in the mind, nothing about knowledge itself tells us whether the mind is that which is more fundamental, or the physical world, or both equally. Considering particular acts of knowing alone,a ny physical reduction or explanation has a corresponding psychological reduction or explanation, and they are equally supported by that evidence, for knowledge as a meeting & unity of mind and world is extraordinarily symmetrical or even-handed. In inquiry there are asymmetries, although often more subtle than one would would expect. In knowledge mind and world are virtually interchangeable.
To revere truth is an excellent thing, but as we know truth in our own minds, we often slide from reverence for truth to reverence for our own minds, which is much less excellent, and often confuse the two, which is not excellent at all.
Catholic pastors : Temple priests :: Protestant pastors : post-Temple rabbis
eclecticism as a position of withdrawal
As children play at being adult, so we play at being virtuous.
We know our bodies both as intelligent and as material; and they are, for we are both.
It is no more true to say the Church is constituted by the gathered congregation than to say it is constituted by the buildings in which they gather.
multiple belief sets & the diffusion of revisions across them
Moral deference is the ratchet of moral progress.
aspiration - literature
proclamation - rhetoric
devotion - ethics
inspiration - theology
Uncertainty is relative to judgment.
the Other as needed
(1) for my empirical self
(2) for the constitution of the world as world
(3) for mediation of self-knowledge
(4) for apparent co-existence of consciousnesses
(5) for the source of certain effects on me
No demonstration can be fully understood (by human beings) without understanding the dialectic it presupposes (genetically).
Atonement restores to integrity.
Being young is not an accomplishment; becoming old sometimes is.
Arguments do not proceed in geometrical rays; they froth and blur at the edges.
The reproducible experiment is in fact an abstraction from experimental probes that are not strictly reproducible.
Falsifiability becomes more valuable the greater the ease of reproducibility and less valuable the greater the difficulty of reproducibility, because it is only reproducibility that makes falsification more than a matter of good fortune -- it is what generally allows a systematic method of elimination.
Physics is the mathematical study of the invariances in things that vary, and the limits of those invariances.
Integrity alone is not an effective strategy for anything; even integrity must be applied.
Confirmation is not time-symmetric.
Our reconstructions of the past are as probabilistic as our predictions of the future. We must not confuse the ease of confirmation of past events with rigorous certainty.
Term logic & class logic have a common root in mereology.
We never prove without seeking to prove; what we seek in proving shapes how we go about it.
Truth contains representations of truth itself, as though the universe were in the universe inside the universe, infinitely rich.
Truths are uncountable and not discrete.
human beings as personators of the world
Logicians are the primary toolsmiths of philosophy.
Aristotelian categories as restrictors on search (this is especially obvious with place and time)
Search failure in an adequate search is negation.
Through the vowels the consonants become living souls.
icons as our first way of reading Scripture
