Some Links, Brief Notes

* Chris Thompson, From conservation to consecration: Towards a Green Thomism (ht)

* Alfredo Watkins has an interesting essay arguing that copyright infringement is unethical. For my own part I tend to be very skeptical of attempts to ground such claims on rights (author's entitlement) but fairly sympathetic to attempts to ground them on public good (creativity and incentive).

* Paul Newall corrects some common misunderstandings of Feyerabend.

* History Carnival 100

* Paul Raymont discusses Schwabing, Munich and the contrast between Munich and Vienna.

* Nobody involved cares, but I thought this periodic table of atheists and antitheists somewhat cute. As noted, there are some people on the table who really shouldn't be: Carl Sagan and T. H. Huxley are both agnostics, and explicitly denied that they were atheists (and that he was a nontheist who wasn't against theism as such was one reason why Huxley invented the term); given what evidence we have, and if we don't suppose he was always lying when he talked about it, David Hume considered himself a theist (also here), although it's such a minimal theism it's somewhat difficult to pin down what it would involve; we don't have all that much evidence, but given the importance the gods play as exemplars of happiness in early Epicurean ethics, it seems unlikely that Epicurus was an atheist; and Samuel Clemens is a famously ambiguous case because he's never entirely serious when he talks about such matters. But unlike some lists of atheists all of these are at least borderline (no attempt to claim Voltaire, etc.). And as a lark not intended to be taken too seriously it works very nicely; it's important in these matters at least sometimes to have a good-natured sense of humor. I like the symbol for Roddenberry.

* I'm as sympathetic to the 'college is a bad choice for many students' argument as any, but Joe Carter is exactly right.

* Some people have started up a Philosophy Stackexchange (on the model of a popular help site for programmers). I'm actually very impressed so far. There's an excellent question about Malebranche just a ways down, with serious attempts to answer it, for instance. The answer to the question is yes, with the qualification that Malebranche doesn't think ideas are in our minds -- they are in God, and therefore not actually caused at all. However, we are caused to attend to them (although we can veto, so to speak, certain kinds of attention). I'd give precise references, but I don't have much time at the moment. Perhaps in some future post.

* I remember once (a year or so back) intending to point people to some excellent writing at Wayne K. Spear's Acquired Tastes. I don't recall if I ever did, so here I am doing so.

Of Usury

"Romish Internet Graffiti" had a post a while back noting that, contrary to the view in some quarters, the Catholic Church still insists that usury is wrong. It says something about our age that people's minds are so boggled by this.

I find that there are a couple of stumblingblocks in the way of understanding what it even means to hold that usury is immoral and unnatural. Some of these have to do with the understanding of 'usury' itself.

(1) There is a common misunderstanding in which 'usury' is taken to cover any investment from which you receive a return or profit. This is not a reasonable understanding at all, but it shows how far the confusion extends.
(2) There is a rather more understandable misunderstanding in which 'usury' is taken to cover any loan with interest.

Neither of these is correct, but the fact that we simply don't make a distinction between different kinds of profit received on money given out goes a long way to showing how it has become plausible to think that usury is just a necessary part of social life.

Usury is when (to use the famous Fifth Lateran definition), from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense, or any risk. The basic idea in later condemnations of usury was always the treatment of lending as if it gave one intrinsic title to interest -- i.e., as if the mere act of lending gave one the right to have a profit. (Earlier condemnations were usually concerned with the injustice of the rich fleecing the poor for profit, and this always remained an issue, but receded in later days when extensive lending became more widely possible; it has, however, become increasingly important again as interest-charging has become more and more accepted as the norm regardless of who is borrowing.) This violates any notion of just exchange: for an exchange to be just, you must have done something to earn any profit you make. That's the "without any work, any expense, or any risk" part of the definition. If the interest charged is because you've done some work in making the loan (e.g., you are recuperating paperwork or delivery expenses in making the loan), or because making the loan has cost you something (e.g., you have to pull money out of a venture that is currently making money), or because the lending itself is risky (e.g., you could lose the whole loan, to detriment to yourself), this is what is called extrinsic title to interest. I've talked about extrinsic titles to interest before. Merely because one only appeals to extrinsic title to interest doesn't automatically make the exchange just, and, in fact Renaissance-era disputes about how just various extrinsic titles to interest could be were very heated. But such interest need not be unjust, and any injustice that arises from such interest is not the injustice of usury in the proper sense. Admittedly, things get a little more complicated when people do things that can be justified in terms of extrinsic title to interest but do so as if they had intrinsic title to it, but this is really just a point at which usury sinks below the ability of public sanction to handle directly, and not a point at which it ceases to be an issue for justice.

It's sometimes argued today, incidentally, that inflationary considerations give general title to interest: if I lend you money, and you pay me the same amount back later, inflation means that the real value of the money you gave me is less than what I gave you in the first place. Could this be considered extrinsic title to interest? Certainly -- if it is agreed upon beforehand, the interest is fixed to the level of expected interest (with possible fraction additional for any risk or damage in the loan itself), and if there is provision to pay it back (with possible fraction less for any risk or damage in the loan itself) should deflation happen instead. I find that apologists for usury who use this argument always conveniently overlook the question of what would be just should the expected inflation never happen. But certainly inflation can be taken into account to the extent it actually harms or increases the risk of the lender (and, it should be said, mere restriction of what one can do is in itself neither a harm nor an increase of risk).

One of the corollaries to this whole approach that is worth thinking about is that it means that interest can be charged for loans but its being charged and its amount always have to be explicitly justified. This is where our society falls down: we allow interest to be charged without even the shadow of a justification. This is, as we say, a lack of transparency.

Other confusions about the subject tend not to do with what makes something usury so much as with what it means to say that something is immoral and unnatural. But this is another can of worms.

Signers

After all the things I read about the Declaration of Independence for July 4th, I thought I would put up a list of the signers, in part because I was interested in how the list overlapped with the signers of the other two constitutive documents of the United States, the Articles of Confederation (which first began to be signed July 9, 1778) and the U.S. Constitution. I have bolded those who also signed the Articles and italicized those who also signed the Constitution. If you see anything that needs to be corrected, let me know.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

MASSACHUSETTS

John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

RHODE ISLAND

Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

CONNECTICUT

Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

NEW YORK

William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

NEW JERSEY

Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

PENNSYLVANIA

Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

DELAWARE

Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

MARYLAND

Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

VIRGINIA

George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

NORTH CAROLINA

William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

SOUTH CAROLINA

Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

GEORGIA

Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

In addition, of course, there are family links: for instance, Lewis Morris of New York had a half-brother, Gouverneur Morris, who signed the Articles and the Constitution; Charles Carroll had a cousin, Daniel Carroll, who signed the Articles and the Constitution; and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina had an older brother, John Rutledge, who signed the Constitution.

Note that two of the signers, Roger Sherman and Robert Morris (sometimes known as the Financier of the Revolution), signed all three documents. Morris originally voted against the motion for independence -- indeed, never voted for it; he simply abstained to let Pennsylvania cast a yes vote, and then signed the Declaration. He is usually said to have stated when he signed that it was the duty of every citizen to follow when he could not lead. (John Dickinson, Morris's fellow delegate from Pennsylvania also voted against, then abstained; but he never signed. Dickinson was in favor of independence broadly speaking, but thought that things were moving too quickly, and that certain things needed to be in place first. Dickinson went on to sign both the Articles of Confederation -- one of the things he thought needed to be drafted before independence, in fact -- and the Constitution, and so by his abstention missed being the third person to sign all three.) I find the pair interesting since together they seem to sum up so much of the character of the nation they were founding: Morris, a businessman through and through, seems to have been a purely nominal Episcopalian, got many of his early breaks in the slave trade, and was a war profiteer, eventually ending in debtor's prison because of his constant speculations; Sherman was a devout Congregationalist who opposed slavery and was active in education (he had fairly little formal education himself, but because of his facility with mathematics he became a surveyor, then a publisher of almanacs, then a lawyer, and eventually became a treasurer and professor of religion for Yale).

Havel on the Word

In the beginning was the Word; so it states on the first page of one of the most important books known to us. What is meant in that book is that the Word of God is the source of all creation. But surely the same could be said, figuratively speaking, of every human action? And indeed, words can bc said to be the very source of our being, and in fact the very substance of the cosmic life form we call man. Spirit, the human soul, our self awareness, our ability to generalize and think in concepts, to perceive the world as the world (and not just as our locality), and lastly, our capacity for knowing that we will die-and living in spite of that knowledge: surely all these are mediated or actually created by words?

Vaclav Havel, A Word about Words (1989)

The Land that Never Has Been Yet

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

The Fourth

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

The Brain-Trolley-Heart-Kidney-War Problem, Simplified

DarwinCatholic recently put up Michael F. Patton Jr's 1988 parody of trolley problems. For those who don't keep up with philosophy literature, Patton has a nonphilosopher's explanation page for a number of the references in it. He also gives a history of the parody, which is interesting in its own right and, as Patton argues, raises interesting philosophical questions about intellectual property.

In any case, the best thing was that sciencegirl rose to the challenge and actually diagrammed the problem. In her solution it looks like she's assuming for the sake of the problem act utilitarianism (either hedonistic or preference-based) without bells and whistles. In real life, of course, if a philosopher were to publish this explanation (at greater length and without the diagrams which make it worthwhile, no doubt), there would be an article in the same journal within a year arguing that what the problem shows is that you shouldn't be an act utilitarian but a rule utilitarian or an ideal utilitarian, or else that you should only be an act utilitarian in the company of such-and-such distinctions (i.e., bells and whistles). (This would change the unjust wars without war crimes / just wars with war crimes part of the analysis, for instance, and could have a big overall difference because of the fact that the brain on the trolley is a moral example for other brains, presumably also on trolleys; likewise, utilitarians who make a big deal out of intended and unintended consequences won't so easily block out some parts of the diagram as constant.) But, of course, that just is precisely part of what Patton was parodying. The awesome thing is the diagram.

Three Poem Re-Drafts

In the Dark and Dead of Night

In the dark and dead of night
I feel your glory still inside;
through the sorrow and the pain
I see your rainbow in the rain;
and as the wind moves through the leaves
your Holy Spirit moves through me:
though darkness draws each day to close
your light runs through the blooded rose.

In all death, in dark despair,
I turn around and you are there;
through the shadows in my soul
your glory shines undimmed and whole;
and as the wind moves through the leaves
your Holy Spirit moves through me:
though harm should come, and threat of war,
salvation's hope still lies in store.

In the storm that rises high
like lightning bursts your Presence nigh;
through the wilderness and fight
you as the pole star give your light;
and as the wind moves through the leaves
your Holy Spirit moves through me:
though trouble strikes and I must roam
and death will come, you draw me home.

The Word They Hear

"No word have I, no word at all
To tell of Him" - and yet He calls;
And even wordless, silence spread
Upon my tongue unformed and dead,
Devoid of all discourse and speech -
Despite it all, I rise to teach.
The call is come; none can ignore
The Word that through the wordless pours.
Though voice be weak, it yet is sure:
Though all fell dumb, it would endure,
Though overcome, it is yet known;
Though left unsaid it will be shown.
All things must be as it demands.
Though tongues be bound with iron bands,
our words unvoiced, that Word is better,
And you and I that Word in letters.

Aridity and Consolation

I walked one day, a wanderer amid the trees,
singing out a song, the sun now hid from view
but hot the air, no whisper in the leaves
nor breeze to blow like balm to heal heat's wounds.
Then came I on a course that cut through stone,
once water-widened as it wandered home,
now dry with dust, undamp, like ancient bone,
yet remembering mists and moisture long ago.

It seemed then that I saw in this silent wood
a phoenix, fireborn, that flew from bough to bough,
seeking that stream long slain by drought of old.
Coming to the course, it cried so soft and low
angels could but weep and echo it in dreams;
my hearing had hardly found its heaven in those strains
when the phoenix died by that drought-devoured stream
and lightly fell, finished, its fire stripped of glow.

Then, highing like a herald, a hind of silver-white
bounded up with bitter haste, pursued by baying hounds,
It vaulted, forceful-valiant, like silver moon in light,
leaping beneath the laurel, whose leaves were on it crowned.
It was taken by the dogs, it died and knew no more,
and, broken in its bone, its blood on forest floor,
it sank like sunset, thrice solemn in its woe,
a late moon: once alive, it at last was overthrown.

Then I wept. From my eyes the water fled in grief;
it bore the salt of sorrow, the sadness of my pain.
In rivers overflowing it rained and ruined on the leaves,
as mightily I mourned that the marvels I had seen
should die their death, no dawn at all in sight.
Overcome, I cried at the coming of the night.
With breath embittered I broke with sob and sigh:
my ache, a yearning to recover, alone remained.

But wait! one whisper wound among the trees,
rose and rushed and roared with living force;
a wave, as in war an army like the seas
will arm and rise, did water again the course,
a pouring-out with power like thundering clouds of rain;
from furthest foreign-land some fountain broke again,
as though the gods of glory with grace, or even whim,
compassionate for the creek, had created a new source.

First there broke a flood; then flame did burst to light
as, fire all around it, the phoenix winged in gold
rose in ruddy glory with rays that blinded sight,
winging up to heaven, the highest of high roads,
scion of the sun, with shining in its wings,
so holy in its egress as to humble we who sin,
bring penitent to prayer, spark seraphim to sing,
more glory in its going than gest has told.

Blood dripped down to pools from the death of hind.
With flood and flame it mingled, was forcefully imbued
with volumes of flowing fire, embracing as in kind
the conquered carcass and, covering it with blood,
woke it to new life, washed all weariness away,
and death undid, as night undone by day.
Then, leaping into life, litheful in its play,
the hind, silver flash, sped, shot, through primal wood.

The flood, I saw, was faith; the phoenix charity;
the hind was hope, the herald of new life;
and I saw with seeing vision and flux of ecstasy
that souls are saved that are sundered, made to die,
brought to solemn burial to be born anew.
Hearts grow old and ancient; to awful death they go,
but then a cycle starts, like this shadow of the true:
our hearts, renewed with life, leap to taste the light.

Music on My Mind

I do love Pearl Bailey. They just don't make entertainers like that any more. A little known fact: she had a bachelor's degree in theology from Georgetown University. She got the degree at the age of 67.

Comic Strips

In general comic strips try to have two attributes: funny and makes-you-think -- sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. Comic strips are, after all, witticisms in pictures. And setting aside soap and adventure comics, which by their nature have only long story arcs over a number of strips, it has to be done, of course, in a few panels. This is a pretty difficult thing to do consistently, and yet amazingly there are strips that consistently do it -- the two grand masters, of course, being Watterson and Schulz. You can pick almost any Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts strip and it's one of the two, usually both. I was browsing some classic Peanuts recently and was struck by how funny they were -- not usually rolling-on-the-floor-laughing funny, but somehow funny. There was one (this one, in fact) which was very simple -- it consisted almost entirely of Snoopy being hit repeatedly by a water sprinkler -- but nonetheless just tickled me pink. It was funny precisely because it's the type of funny thing you might see a dog do in real life, and the strip just summed up that whole type of experience. And there are just endless numbers of things one could say about this Calvin and Hobbes.

There really should be some philosophical work done on comic strips in the way that people have done philosophical work on novels or horror movies -- not, I mean, philosophy inspired by them, but the philosophy of them, looking in more detail at what makes comic strips funny and thought-provoking. But I don't think I've ever come across it.

Omnibenevolence

John Wilkins had a post up with this comic at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on theodicy and the "omniscience,omnipotence,omnibenevolence" approach to it. It does do a good job, albeit I think unintentionally, of showing that this way of stating the problem of evil owes more to rhetorical parallelism than real substance.

As I've mentioned before the 'omnibenevolence' leg of the stool has no real existence prior to the nineteenth century; nobody attributes the term "omnibenevolence" to God prior to that. Indeed, even in the nineteenth century, the term 'omnibenevolence' is usually used in ways that are too weak to formulate any sort of problem of evil, since the term originally seems to have meant merely, 'wishing everyone well' with all the vagueness and flexibility that can have, and which is, in any case, hardly a distinctively divine attribute. The first Christian I've found using it in definitely something like the sense in which it is usually used is Robert Browning, who has Guido argue, in The Ring and the Book:

Let the law stand: the letter kills, what then?
The spirit saves as unmistakably.
Omniscience sees, Omnipotence could stop,
Omnibenevolence pardons, — it must be,
Frown law its fiercest, there’s a wink somewhere.

(I have found a few prior to Browning, like William Penn; but in each case the force of the term is either ambiguous or obscure.) But, of course, it's still functioning in a different way: Guido's point is that "there's a wink somewhere", the claim being that Christianity is just paganism on the sly -- a higher moral tone, yes, but it's all a mask to allow sin loopholes. That is, we don't have the problem of evil here; we just have an argument (not Browning's own) that Christian doctrine is a breeding ground for hypocrisy. It's really only in the twentieth century that one finds any Christians using the term in a positive context and in a way that suggests its use in the argument from evil; and these are clearly backformations. The real source of all this seems to be Hugh MacColl shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, who, while not really read today, seems to be the only source who was widely read enough and who actually uses the formulation for the argument from evil. (MacColl also is the first to respond to the problem by arguing that evil is necessary, in particular for the progress of the universe; which, of course, was the whole point of his putting the argument this way, since progress as an 'omnibenevolent' objective would have been a relatively easy sell, even if the necessity of evil for it wasn't.) Even the freethinkers don't use the term for the argument from evil much earlier than the 1890's.

In any case, even if this isn't so, as it's not a traditional term, and as the root word, 'benevolence', does not generally convey any particular necessity or specific duty, the question does arise as to why one would think that anyone is committed to holding that God is omnibenevolent, at least in any sense that would cause a problem with regard to theodicy. Indeed, it's not even clear what the term means; it could mean 'wanting good for people in everything' or 'wanting what is best for each and every person' or 'wanting what is best overall for everyone' or 'always acting with a view to another's good', or any number of other things. In order to make the argument from evil work it has to be strong enough to establish a duty or obligation; but 'benevolence', as I've said, is a weak word as it is used colloquially, so it's not helpful for extrapolating any meaning. Why then does it persist? Because of the rhetorical parallelism: it makes it sound more distinctively divine, and gives the illusion that it is structurally parallel either to omniscience or to omnipotence -- an illusion because it is never explicated in a way that would actually make it so. The argument from evil is really the claim that, given the existence of any evil, every good is in some key way useless or ineffective; the parallelism conveniently hides the fact that the crucial issue in the argument is not one's account of God but one's account of good. It wraps it all up in what looks like a tidy and memorable package. Never mind that it isn't actually tidy when you start asking critical questions; packages that are memorable have a power to endure, as cognitive science shows us, and memorizing formulaic labels is easier than remembering entire theories of the good or of good will, which is what actually has to be doing the work.

In any case, as I've also said before, the intelligent person, faced with a relative neologism like 'omnibenevolence', will ask for the underlying account of the term, and only move on the basis of the account, not the similarity of the word to other words.

Two Poem Drafts

Unhand!

You catch my heart; yes, you presume
to catch my heart and my life doom
to love of you. Shall such demand
be satisfied? My heart unhand!
Be satisfied to know my smile,
in passing tarry but a while,
for never shall I know your brand.
Release me now, my heart unhand!

Faithless Summer

Fly from me, faithless summer, fly
and give me no more alibis,
but flee my wrath, and take your lie
to some sad soul more like to cry.

You shall not turn me, though you try;
I care not for your whats and whys;
your soft, persuasive arts go ply
on some sad soul more like to cry!

You said you'd love me till you died,
but sought to give me cuckold's sigh;
fly from me, O summer, fly,
to some sad soul more like to cry!

Rune of Roses

Sapientia Lunae
by Ernest Dowson

The wisdom of the world said unto me;
“Go forth and run, the race is to the brave;
Perchance some honour tarrieth for thee!”
“As tarrieth,” I said, “for sure, the grave.”
For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
Which to her votaries the moon discloses.

The wisdom of the world said: “There are bays:
Go forth and run, for victory is good,
After the stress of the laborious days.”
“Yet,” said I, “shall I be the worms’ sweet food,”
As I went musing on a rune of roses,
Which in her hour, the pale, soft moon discloses.

Then said my voices: “Wherefore strive or run,
On dusty highways ever, a vain race?
The long night cometh, starless, void of sun,
What light shall serve thee like her golden face?”
For I had pondered on a rune of roses,
And knew some secrets which the moon discloses.

“Yea,” said I, “for her eyes are pure and sweet
As lilies, and the fragrance of her hair
Is many laurels; and it is not meet
To run for shadows when the prize is here”;
And I went reading in that rune of roses
Which to her votaries the moon discloses.

Dashed Off

As always, notes to be taken with a grain of salt.

We spend our lives learning how to understand and deserve the goodness of being alive.

putting temptation ten thousand miles away from your heart

We expel dangerous fancies and recollections by replacing them with things that are good and noble.

the first step of conversion: Lord, what will you have me do? (Acts 9:6)
the second step: The Lord is my strength (Ps 117:14)

The life of the beginner consists in finding the good things that purify.

We cannot love God on our own in a manner suitable to Him; and thus we must love God with God's own love.

"Let knowledge be used to erect the structure of charity." Augustine Ep. 55

Jesum quaerens in libris

purgative
(1) cultivation of discipline
(2) acquisition of prayer
illuminative
(1) preparation for infused virtues
(2) habituation to (consolidation of) prayer
unitive
(1) preparation for spiritual gifts
(2) simplification of prayer

study as a form of mortification

Plato's Cave & the Witch of the Green Kirtle

Proslogion II: not just 'quod sit Deus' but 'quod vere sit Deus'

Anselm tells us (Inc Verb vi) that he wrote the Mologion and the Proslogion in order to reply against those who, unwilling to believe what they do not understand, deride believers; and also to aid the religious study of those who humbly seek to understand what they firmly believe. And the remarkable thing is that, even if not in the way he hoped, his argumetns have fulfilled these purposes to an extraordinary extent. For it has touched off in believers many new ideas; and, often and repeatedly, those who have argued against Anselm have been shown to argue not from clear understanding but from the belief that the argument must be wrong somewhere. Over and over again Anselm has shown, in case after case, that we may believe in order to understand, and do nto always need to understand in order to believe.

As charity gives supernatural form to virtue, so also it gives supernatural form to honor.

The Spirit works through the words of a confessor who takes his task seriously and does what he ought.

We mortify the intellect directly by study and reflection (which dissipate ignorance) and indirectly by patience (which opposes diseased curiosity) and humility (which opposes pride).

three aspects of purity: intention, moderation, and mortification

Acquired virtues presuppose a power and by presupposed repetition come to give a tendency and facility to an operation; infused virtues give us a power and a tendency, but only give facility as a result of repretition that presupposes the virtue.

The radication of infused virtue has as an incidental result the acquisition of acquired virtues.

The Spirit makes the Son clear to us.

adapting Hume on causation as a theory of inquiry into certain kinds of signs

poetic, rhetorical, and dialectical forms of evidence

Ming is that which can proceed from an interior word, and zheng ming is the purification of these expressions so that they are appropriate.

cheng as truthfulness

the proper mean between Yang Zhu and Mo Di

correspondence to, supplementation of, and transcendence of Confucianism (Zhang)

Paul was given the privilege of writing more for the canon precisely because he had been an enemy (cf. Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat Lect 10.18).

divine energies : divine essence :: good (or true) : being

Music concerns itself with non-verbal analogies.

Nothing can be an organ unless it can be instrumental to an end; it is precisely this that allows us to identify something as one organ.

We should think not so much in terms of laws of nature as in terms of laws of natures.

One of the valuable features of Lent is that it provides you an opportunity for seeing how limited your will really is.

"In teaching the instructor often learns more than his pupils." Clement of Alexandria Strom.

Evolutionary theory concerns the generation and corruption of pluralities or populations over iterations of the generation and corruption of individuals. Obviously what is essential to this is reproduction and death, but the generation and corruption of populations cannot be reduce to reproduction and death because there are secondary changes that affect the generation and corruption of populations but do not reduce to reproduction and death: migration and isolation, for instance.

Harvey's omne vivum ex vivo rule

Psalm 4 as a prayer concerned with natural law (both St. Albert and Aquinas make this connection).

The market to which Smith attempted to appeal was a market ordered to public interest, and to the interest of sellers only in a secondary way, insofar as the latter could contribute to the former. This is why Smith is both pro-market and highly cynical and critical when it comes to business.

Ps. 38 as a sabbath psalm (Augustine)

Natural philosophy & moral philosophy are alike in the extent to which they consider contingent particulars.

Wholes and parts are explicable in terms of divisions and indivisions.

Time is not number abstracted from the numbered things but number in the numbered things.

light as it were the primum mobile

Humean psychology as the imagination in reminiscence

Natural philosophy gives fullness, and moral philosophy completeness, to the contemplation at the heart of philosophy.

The Johannine Gospel gives the beginning, the Johannine epistles the middle, and the Apocalypse the end.

Christ clings to the Church, His helpmeet, having descended from His Father to cling to her, and thus she becomes the mother of the living.

to observe & ponder in her heart is an essential capacity of motherhood

We understand mysteries by examination of analogies and of coherences.

True politics is simply ethics given cooperative social life and its tradeoffs.

Good catechetical instruction is seen in that it refutes not only the heresies of the day but also, as was said of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, later heresies "by a kind of foreknowledge."

Scientific inquiry is the cooperation of prudence and art to the end of understanding natural beings in their changes.

Skepticism requires holding that the relation between cognition and truth may be accidental.

Sacraments are more properly things we receive than things we do; it is especially important to remember this with reconciliation, matrimony, and ordination, for we are tempted to treat these things as though we did them rathern than as is the case, that we are showered with them.

eremitic life : monastic life :: celibate life : married life

I Sam 21:5 and the priesthood

The Old Testament (& Mt & Lk) shows that genealogy is extraordinarily important to covenant & thus to theology.

The laity are only sane when they largely follow such common sense as is rooted in the saints and hallowed by custom, making their aim not to bend the rest of the Church to their will but simply to be the Church, doing whatever they do. But flesh, the world, and the Devil constantly push to make it otherwise.

Every inference which is truth-preserving with negated premise (or conjunction of premises) & negated conclusion is falsity-preserving.

Scientists generally go wrong in philosophical matters when they fail to adequate means to ends properly. This typically occurs in two ways: either through excessive confidence in the means or, more commonly, through failure to distinguish ends that are in fact different.

First Commandment: to revere God in our hearts
Second Commandment: to revere God in our words
Third Commandment: to revere God in our actions

We cannot keep the Sabbath holy by our Sabbath life alone.

praying that the saints' prayers for others may be effective

In the life of the Church, ritual and music provide the pattern for authority.

Who does not understand providence has no way of becoming a good bishop.

Ture authority is an activity of virtue.

philosophy as euporia with aporia

There are philosophical activities that are to what we usually call philosophical activities as flower arranging is to gardening; and, however limited and derivative flower arranging may be, a world without flower arranging is a world less congenial for gardening.

Liberty cannot be protected without protecting the home, for home is for most people the primary, or even the only, space for freedom.

How often people trade adamantine arguments for weak & watery feelings! But in truth the two must be conjoined, bright sentiment growing on rigorous reasoning like roses on trellises, or great vines on strong stone cliffs.

That poetry is more philosophical than history does not imply that history is in no way philosophical.

mythology in the service of ideas

experimenting with lightness & multiplicity in the search for truth (Novalis)

Who loves wisdom finds it everywhere.

God called His people to remember the Sabbath because of creation and to observe it because of salvation.

Exodus tells us not to bear false witness, Deuteronomy not to bear vain/empty/worthless witness.

Why was the Virgin immaculately conceived? That she might consent on behalf of the whole human race, and not merely on her own behalf.

Ritual derives from imitation of regularity and order in things
(1) in order to teach that regularity;
(2) in order to celebrate that regularity;
(3) in order to conform ourselves to that regularity;
(4) in order to imitate that regularity by serving as a stable background for other things.
It presupposes the ability to distinguish right and wrong with respect to that order.

Ritual and respect are closely related.

Authority is neighborly by nature.

music of Shao : kallipolis :: music of Wu : timarchy :: tunes of Cheng : oligarchy &c.

To make one's life a sort of music, balanced in its patterns and proportions, is a worthy task.

The body by the water partakes of the grace.

If we live in the light of God, from us, as if through crystal, every kind of goodness, justice, and truth will proceed, fruitful works pleasing to the Lord.

Dali was right about time -- it is not so mucht hat it flies as that it melts. All of our lives is time melting through our fingers, the world drooping and liquefying in a great sun that will never stop.

In one's mind one may both answer a fool according to his folly and not do it; and this is an aid to prudence. Outside the mind, of course, the solution is to avoid fools.

theological incentives in philosophy
-> analogy, parsimony & the like can be seen as philosophical incentives in experimental inquiry; likewise there are many ethical incentives in scientific work
-> incentives as such may or may not dominate, may or may not impede
-> incentives weight theories & approaches
-> incentives of this sort arise when a field of inquiry is considered in light of what would be most convenient in another field of inquiry

the prefinition of worlds (Eph 3 Douay-Rheims 1582)

heirloom seeds of tradition

Behind every error is a power for truth.

We see the sum in the cogito only because being is first in the apprehension of anything, even ourselves.

We know even indemonstrable principles by abstracting them from singulars.

The universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one can be saved, is that in which the Priest is the Sacrifice, saving by His body & blood.

What Vatican I actually defined with regard to infallibility is (1) that the Church itself is infallible in defining doctrine in faith and morals; and (2) that the Roman Pontiff understand conditions adequately represents the Church in this respect, as heir to Peter.

The Church rarely defines but always teaches.

Hos. 2:19-20 & marriage

Judas, Peter, & John as 3 types of Christian loyalty to Christ

the Rock that begot you, the God who birthed you (Dt. 32:18)

As active magisterium the bishops do not impose the truths of faith on the laity but educe them from the laity themselves, who already bear the potential. And both are required for the full magisterium of the Church as teacher of all mankind.

"Other effects only point out their causes in an oblique manner; but the testimony of men does it directly, and is to be consider'd as an image as well as an effect." T 1.3.9.12
-> Hume, of course, draws skeptical conclusions from this because of his account of causal inference; but a more robust account of causal inference can take this true insight in very different directions.
-> We have to be very careful about the sense in which testimony is an image; in effect this is handled by a proper theory of naming.

What gives a philosophical system force is both the coherence of its parts and the support for each part.

"'Tis evident an experiment in the past proves at least a possibility for the future." T 1.3.12.14

"beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary consitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul" T 2.1.8.2

(1) Not all causes are of the same kind.
(2) There is more than one kind of necessity.
(3) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
(4) From the effect we can form at least a partial idea of the cause.

Christ's prayer in Gethsemane was heard (Hb 5:7).

Practical deliberation is always a study of appropriate classifications.

Divine mission is divine principiation with appropriated temporal effect.

Psychology is a sort of philosophy of novels.

"Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them." Santayana

At the associative level of Scriptural study, anything may be juxtapose dwith anything else; this raises possibilities, questions, and puzzles. At the reflective level of Scriptural study, the results of association are sorted out dialectically.

Youth is very sincerely inauthentic.

Human joys and sorrows never stop to ask what year it is.

relevance under a notion
relevance intrinsic to the thing

The greatest delusion of economists consists in thinking that economic policy is or even can be governed primarily by economic reason rather than (from below) by the reasoning implicit in the social life of the people and (from above) by the reasoning implicit in the political structures and procedures of the nation.

the importance of developing more commodious arrangements and constructions of arguments

inquiries of light, of distinction, of fructification

Liturgy, taken in a broad sense, is the ecology of faith.

4 grounds for evaluating liturgy
(1) internal consistency
(2) relevance to love of God and neighbor
(3) symbolic adequacy to theology
(4) pedagogical force

Economics has no value for policy unless it provides ways to provision families better.

What does the City of God share with the City of Man? The mortal condition. But the relation between the understanding of this in each is analogical, not univocal.

(1) Knowledge of effects & their cause in the effects themselves
  (a) as to particular details
  (b) as to general character
  (c) as to participation in the cause
(2) knowledge of effects in universal causes
  (a) as to removal of impediments
  (b) as to action of cause
  (c) as to directive principle in cause
(3) knowledge of effects in the first cause
  (a) as to how effects considered in themselves participate divine ideas
  (b) as to how effects are in the divine ideas
  (c) as to how effects are in God as last end

Deuteronomic theodicy does not explain why troubles come, but why we cannot rise above them.

liturgy as memorative prenotion

Love casts out fear because faith casts out fear.

Since truth coheres, sciences interpenetrate, sometimes in conclusions, sometimes in methods; and sciences admit of analogies even in many of the facets in which they differ.

propositional dynamic logic as a calculus of strategies

It is poets & artisans who most properly exercise human dominion over the world.

realism about the beautiful ont eh basis of truth as congruence of mind and thing

Note association between circumcision & purification of the mother in Lev. 12 (& also the redemption of the firstborn Son)

Whoever claims that sexual reproduction is merely a biological function has clearly not given much thought to the amount of planning and practical adjustment required for having children.

the experience of skin as a limit of ourselves

We cannot even consider a thing as a possible miracle without considering it as being possibly a means to an end.

Pr. 31:10-31 describes a woman's life in heroic terms (note vocabulary especially).
->It is a woman's might, not beauty, that is lauded.

the ecclesiology of Pr. 31:10-31
-> Then Pr. is bookended by the call of divine Wisdom & the Church as wise Bride working the world in response to this call.

The proper language of poetry is the common language of people who read poetry.

3 forms of participation
(1) by intimate possession (reception/imitation)
(2) by knowledge (reflection)
(3) by subordinate action (aspiration)

Light is a more general feature of the background of human life than the sun is; light precedes the sun in dawn and outlasts it in dusk; and light goes where the sun does not reach. Indeed, there is no feature of the background of human life that is more fundamental or more far-reaching.

In moral life our liabilities exceed our culpabilities.

Original sin is privation of suitability as a candidate for beatific vision.

effects of original sin
in person
  (1) four wounds
  (2) death
between persons (distributive)
  (1) complicity
  (2) imitation
in persons as a society (collective)
  (1) pleonectic deterioration
  (2) corruption of the world

original sin as languor of nature (ST 2-1.82.1)

Pelagianism confuses effects for causes.

Torah as pure image of truth is changed into Logos as pure and incorruptibel truth.

It makes sense of a Kantian to say that cause & effect do not apply beyond the (broadly) empirical (cf. CPR B 705) because cause & effect are in his view a principle governing temporal order (although not necessarily temporal lapse) among empirical appearances. BUt this is not essential to all ideas of cause & effect.

A precondition for justice in society is unity of heart.

convalidation of rationalization (sanatio in radice of post-hoc reasoning)

Etiology is always telic or tychic or a mixture of the two.

The blues are an echo of gospel music in a world of sin and sorrow.

All of secular philosophy is merely a surface volume and facet of the tesseract of Christian thought.

What matters in Buddhism is not the answer to the question but the openness of the mind when faced with the question.

The avoidance of surprise is an irrational object for a mutable intelligence in a mutable world.

Marriage is a peculiar sacrament because it was instituted as a sacrament in stages; thus, for instance, marriage under the Mosaic law was sacramental, but not as completely so as under the New Law, since it did look toward Christ's passion & the church, but only confusedly and by figure, and, so to speak, by mediation of God's covenant with Israel, itself a holy prefiguration of the New Covenant. Unlike any other sacrament, matrimony was constructed in stages over millenia.

We receive reason as a gift from God, and reason gives itself to others in communication. Practically everything in reason's activity intimates its communicative meaning.

the munus of conscientious scholarship & the officia to God, self, and others that follow on it

On Peirce's account of abductive inferences, they only preserve possibility, not truth -- i.e., from two or more true premises we get a possible conclusion (problematic or conjectural) as our strongest conclusion. Givent eh truths, the conclusion is not ruled out -- it si possible, but no more. Contrariwise, everything in the conclusion is in the premises, but not so as to be formally truth-preserving, i.e., the conclusion is in the premises but only qua possible.

The power of personality depends on the capacity of others to remember.