Dashed Off XVII

Feasting and fasting alike are for the sake of the beautiful and the good.

rationality, order, stability, integrity

Pleasure and pain are such as to be signs by nature; distinction between intrinsic and instrumental good does not work here as elsewhere.

A "brute fact" is only brute relative to a model; otherwise there is no way to identify bruteness.

The effectiveness of an argument depends in part on the habitus of the one who receives it.

charity as what makes satispassion possible

Grand Rounds as humanitarian ritual

The virtue of charity is required in order to assess divine love's actions properly.

to consider: the extent to which conservation laws imply simultaneity of causation (momentum has historically explicitly been taken to do so)

Accuracy conditions are causal conditions.

wu wei and honesty

People will generally tend to press their rhetorical advantages rather than their dialectical advantages.

the 'splendid models of the Holy Family' -- (1) domestic virtues (2) bonds of charity (3) joy of household

Moral law cannot be harmed, and yet one can offend against it.

National churches necessarily presuppose that the government bodies and agencies concerned with the church are legitimate representatives within the liturgical commonwealth.

homiletics as concerned with living and not merely hearing doctrine

the confusion of intellectual or volitional numbness with the doubt of genuine inquiry

Leading questions and rhetorical questions make obvious that questions can have assumptions, but that all questions have assumptions is made clear (1) by the fact that they make sense in some contexts and not others; and (2) by the fact that they distinguish relevant and irrelevant answer-candidates. (Assumptions are determined by analysis of possibilities.)

The first minimal level of making amends is simply accepting, and thus bearing and enduring, one's being responsible.

the desire to impart something genuinely precious to the world

general culture of mind as a requirement for professional life

nonmaleficence and gentlemanliness (Newman)

notional and real as poles of assent

spontaneously grown arguments vs deliberately synthesized arguments

the role of Catholic Marian piety in supporting the doctrine of papal infallibility (e.g., Lourdes)

the royal prerogatives of the Church

the problem of corruption of supplementary institutions as the primary problem of the liturgical commonwealth

Mere reason cannot overcome apathy.

assessment of conceptual analysis
(1) explains an array of paradigmatic cases
(2) makes sense of history of concept
(3) clarifies marginal cases without violence
(4) exhibits consilience
(5) survives aporetic/dialectic inquiry

Human rituals are rational communications, just as much as language is.

physical equations as summations of relevance among measurements

Style is not a uniform thing but a pattern of effects requiring causal analysis.

Humean causal theory as stylistic analysis of the world

humanity as a system of loyalties

It is quite clear that we often think of the necessity of the principle of noncontradiction in practical terms.

While law works itself out systematically, one should not overestimate the systematicity of law.

Every Is is an Ought to Be Regarded as True.

Positive law is relative to the formation of a community standpoint.

The assessment of evidence cannot occur independently of all practical reasons (cost of inquiry, promising character of evidence, etc.).

Classification requires abstraction from corruptions and contaminations.

In law one must start not with concepts used by the ends for which they are used.

the obsessive patience of genius

motherhood as paradigmatic friendship in Aristotle (it is his typical case of asymmetric friendship, and plays a key role in several arguments about the nature of friendship in general)

Fear of ridicule often distorts assessment of evidence, since it interferes with commitment to recognizing probabilities.

causation by diffusion (Shepherd is perhaps a very good start here, given her concept of causal mixing)

a common fallacy: the conditions for X came together gradually; therefore X emerged gradually (quite obviously it in fact depends on the relation between X and its conditions)

Most of what is called politics is an excuse for not attending to politics.

true romance as involving honestas and verecundia

the wish for truth as remedy against some biases (cp. Ward)

People in assessing their own characteristics tend to try to focus not on what they do but on what they do not do.

fruitful virginity of Mary expressed in being (1) Mother of God; (2) intercessor; (3) Mother of Church

mortification and eliminating mismatch between fantasy and reality

books that are pleasure-friends, utility-friends, or virtue-friends

ordered structures anticipatory of rational inference

relation between self-evidence and goodness

Modern generations describe computing in ways similar to the way former generations described literacy; computers are the gramarye of our day.

Arguments like characters in stories must be seen from many angles.

Much of what we call misfortune is just leaving a womb, or growing out of a childhood, in which prior props and supports are taken away.

orders as the sacrament of the unity of the sacramental economy

Darwin's argument for sexual selection is partly teleological: without sexual selection, display would be purposeless, which is incredible.

the role of integrity of body in cognition

baptized : foundations :: confirmed : major means :: ordained : ends

Isaiah 60, temporal prosperity, and liturgical commonwealth

human dignity & capacity for communion with God: the infinity implicit in our
(1) openness to Truth Itself
(2) openness to Good Itself
(3) openness to Beauty Itself
(4) capacity for attending to the Infinite Sublime

rejections of God arise from
(1) bad example of believers
(2) hostile philosophies
(3) trauma of evil
(4) preference for vice
(5) poor handling of perplexity
(6) excessive attachment to the sensible world

The capacity for theistic reasoning is a precondition for receiving revelation.

good as 'fit for purpose' vs good as 'precondition for fitness and purpose'

All measurement requires memory of at least an elementary kind.

Common sense can be recognized as rigorously certain when it is also recognized as (1) experiential (2) practical (3) perspectival and (4) approximate.