Saturday, January 04, 2014

Dashed Off II

dependent origination of ideas

(1) The human person is a single whole with a plurality of attributes.
(2) The human person is not infinitely divisible.
(3) The human person is a subsisting agent in relation to others.
(4) The human person is a possibility of experience, an active existent, and a necessary condition of a kind of life and thought.

how we derive apodeictic knowledge from experience -- the empirical apodeictic
->Aristotelian epistemology is precisely the epistemology of the empirical apodeictic
-> phenomenology as also concerned with the empirical apodeictic

The unity of thought lies not in its representations but in its character as immanent action.

Note Kant's abstraction point A355, which is a good one.

Categories are not deduced but reached by division.

T(p or q) iff (Tp or Tq)
This is a modal fallacy if we are considering all T-style modalities, for exactly the same reason that [](p or q) iff ([]p or []q) is fallacious for some interpretations of [].

Predication requires the introduction of being or not being.

We are all only dialecticians in any field we have not made our own

a Buridanian account of endoxa: They are important because people, following their natural inclination to the true, accept them, having found no counterexample.

ends as endpoints consistent with nature vs as endpoints consistent with the functioning of nature

enthymeme as the body of persuasion
but its aim is judgment which requires preparation of audience & presentation of oneself as an appropriate kind of person;
this requires the study of character and of the kinds of soul
and of the passions and dispositions of mind.

Poetic catharsis is a civic or political end; it has to be understood as something involving our sociality, as bearing directly on social life.

note Iamblichus on inborn knowledge of the gods

Extended practice of prayer nurtures our mind, enlarging its receptivity to truth, revealing to us a more-than-human order and divine life and light, elevating our mind to good things, stimulating trust, communion, friendship, making us to be familiar with divine things.

Schrodinger's anschaulichkeit has less to do with literal visualizability than with concreteness of explanation, the discernible unfolding of identifiable processes in space and time.

Schrodinger's two principles of science: intelligibility of nature, objectivity.

Instrumental rationality qua coherence of intention and belief is different from instrumental rationality qua appropriateness of means-taking, which are both different from instrumental rationality qua means-construction.

climacteric ideas

rhetoric as consensus-building

"In the products of his activity man beholds himself as in a mirror." Susan Blow

mutual aid, inventive thrift, structured sociability, just exchange

The Holy Spirit is the purest traditionalist and the agent of holy tradition; He is, in truth, the only full evangelist.

Metaphor is a way of thinking with the world as one's cognitive instrument.

In becoming we recognize both being and nothingness.

The quality of an argument is partly determined by context.

The finite is that which admits of the infinite as a possibility.

the precursive character of the Holy Spirit's work

the Virgin Mary as instrumental part of the mission of the Son and the Spirit (Mary as Seat of Wisdom)

the body as itself an economic system

money as expansion of exchange vs money as a restriction of exchange
(note that flexibility of money disappears for those without a surplus to use in a system in which everything requires money; in a less restrictive system they would not be so confined, but could barter or service-borrow and steward their money for more general exchanges)
-> it follows from this distinction that a money-only system loses much of the benefit of money
-> No economic system currently in existence is strictly money-only; but there are subsystems of major economies that are.

It follows directly from Thomas Reid's account of the sense of sublimity that the experience of the sublime in nature is evidence for an intelligent Author of nature.

Lent as a giving of firstfruits to God (and thus asceticism generally as the same)

Who apprehends the genus apprehends the species potentially -- indistinctly and confusedly.

That which is sensible may also be taken intelligibly.

Something's being a fallacy is not a fact about its formal structure.

measurement as the uniting of quantity and quality

The primary mechanism of democratic debate is not reasoned argument but sympathy.

existence as relative necessity

categorical judgment
(1) of inherence: accidental quality of its substance
(2) of reflection: essential property of its substance
(3) of necessity: essence of its substance

think about Hegel's association of 2nd Figure with induction & 3rd Figure with analogy

Nothing can be identified as an explanatory mechanism except in terms of its tendencies.

mockery as concerned with wrongness having such weak support or defensibility as to be incongruous

play and playthings as mediating between inner and outer worlds

"Comparisons are always favorable to the promotion and application of truth." Froebel

Personal need is a form of obligation. It is a dangerous one to consider, however, in the sense that there are many ways to go wrong in one's assessment of it, not least because we tend to be confused about what we genuinely need.

forms of deontic []
to be done always
to be done everywhere
to be done by everyone
necessarily to be done

Experimentation is in a sense merely greater attention to the instrumental element of cognition.

original justice as not being a merely personal justice but a justice of the human race itself

Nothing prevents us from knowing as object what must be presupposed in order to know any object; for there is no contradiction between something having each character in different moments of cognition.

Remission of powers is not remission of substance.

"Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature." ST 2-2.31.3

As Lent in some sense joins Epiphany and Easter, so Penance joins Baptism and Eucharist.

Aristotelian place as containment with orientation

To the extent that anyone is a tool prior to other tools, existing instrumentally to impart instrumental purposes to instruments, they are slaves.

seven causes considered by rhetoric: chance, nature, compulsion, habitus, reason, passion, desire (appetite)

Language arises out of rational cooperation (cf how Deaf languages develop automatically if you just have enough Deaf in one place).

Leibniz's law of continuity: "In any supposed transition, ending in any terminus, it is permissible to institute a general reasoning in which the terminus may also be included."
-> This is where Whewell must (directly or indirectly) have found the idea for his principle for Limit.
-> Robinson took the transfer axiom (Every real statement holding for all real numbers holds for all hyperreal numbers) as a specification and precisification of this.

Law can only legitimately approach rights by remotion, recognizing causation and eminence, however.

marriage as a tradition of oneself and one's body

The sacramentality of marriage is an extension of that of baptism. (cp Familiaris Consortio no. 13)

genius as superassociation

picturesque : eye :: expressive : ear

The general structure of defensive war is to impede and that of offensive war is to overcome impediment.

The military art is a casuistic art.

the military as representative, as advisory, and as instrumental

Origen on Joshua: "the book does not so much indicate to us the deeds of the son of Nun, as it represents for us the mysteries of Jesus my Lord" (Hom 1 in Jos)

Josiah // Joshua
2 Kg 22:2 // Josh 1:7; 23:6

Term functor logic needs to be supplemented with an account of ampliation, and it needs something suitable for reduplication. (Note that Englebretsen's dispute with Angelilli seems to turn partly on E's ignoring of any reduplicatively modulated predication.)

The unity of the Trinity is the principle of the unity of the Church.

The Notes of the Church are Christ unifying, sanctifying, catholicizing, and apostolocizing the community of the faithful.

The unity of the Church is Christ communicating His life to the Church; the holiness of the Church is Christ giving Himself for the Church; the catholicity of the Church is Christ present in the Church; the apostolicity of the Church is Christ present through the Church.

There is a sense in which chemistry is the science most natural to human beings, the one we all dabble and progress in, although rarely beyond the two paths of recipe and trial-and-error; thus it is unsurprising that mixing, boiling, sampling things to find out something is almost the universal image of natural science itself.

Only in our own case do we derive our notion of possible experience from actual experience, and even that is arguably not exceptionless. We rather determine conditions for possible experience and then establish what would be a possible experience for any hypothetical experiencer.

The causality of the cause needs to have come into being only if causality in itself is temporal.

Sublimity is involved in the larger branch of each of Kant's antinomies.

The intelligible appears, and appearances are intelligible: the intelligibility of appearances themselves.

To test is to cause to produce an effect, or else to register some effect.

The sum-total of all possibility contains itself as a possibility.
the sum-total of all possibility as branching or 'chunked'
The possibility of the sum-total of possibilities could only have an actual ground in an intellect.

The Christian theologian may draw from all myths and religions insofar as they reflect on the common principle and ultimate end of the human race, insofar as they are shadows and images that prepare for truth.

Existence proofs of any kind may start from determinate experience, or from indeterminate experience, or from something abstracted from any and all experience.

NB: Kant has no adequate answer to Malebranche, for whom 'the thought, which is in us, is the thing itself', i.e. God

The principle of causality does not apply to the world precisely as sense but rather as intelligible.

Postulation is the attempt to reach by hypothesis what is or must be presupposed.

Kant's primary problem is his uncritical and naive acceptance of the empiricist account of experience. Before his critique of pure reason he needed a critique of experience. (The Critique of Judgment partly, but only partly, remedies this.)

arguments that prove vs arguments that prepare (give a natural leaning)

The Beatific Vision is precisely the doctrine that God is a possible object of experience, and may appear as given to (intelligible) intuition.

Kant's account of intuition in the Aesthetic is so abstract that nothing prevents it from including things we do not usually regard as sensation.

The Transcendental Ego, Freedom, and God should all have been considered the same thing: the rationalists did not take the soul or the will to have the particular unconditional Kant draws upon; only divine substance and will did. Thus the three are really just divine substance, divine intellect, and divine will.

The Church participates the mission of Son and Spirit; and the Holy Spirit is the principal agent of her as missionary.

The Church is apostolic as being called to be with Christ and to be sent out to preach. (Mk 3:13-14)

Winnowing out error is the fasting and temperance of the mind.