Dashed Off XX

the 'unconscious' as a reification of inspiration

Every virtue is said of things according to more and less, and thus according to how they resemble the pure case of that virtue. But this pure case is the measure and reason for every virtue of that kind; and thus there is something that is the ultimate measure & reason for each virtue' and this we call God. Thus we see that every virtue is a way to God. ((perhaps should be 2 step like Third Way))

Part of the ministry of Christ Ascended is the repentance of Israel. (Acts 5:30-32)

Let ◊ be 'at least variable part' and □ be 'invariable part'. Then common modal axioms are:
D = What is an invariable part of X is an at least variable part of X.
M = What is an invariable part of X is X.
4 = What is an invariable part of X is also an invariable part of an invariable part of X.
5 = What is an at least variable part of X is an invariable part of an at least variable part of X.
B = Everything is an invariable part of an at least variable part of itself.
CD = What is an at least variable part of X is an invariable part of X. (All parts of X are invariable parts.)
C4 = What is an invariable part of an invariable part of X is an invariable part of X.
C = What is an at least variable part of an invariable part of X is an invariable part of an at least variable part of X.
(D, B, 4, and C4 seem most promising for most things.)

personal identity // time travel
(personal identity is, of course, time travel in one sense)

time travel involving subjects going back in time to the past seem to require a strong subject-relativity of time

Fairy tales often have grotesque violences because such violences are as out of nature as fairy tale wonders.

Note that Paul's two referneces to the Cretica (Acts, Titus) suggest, in full context, the divinity of Christ: They made a tomb for you, holy great one, / Cretans, ever liars, evil beasts, idle bellies, / But you are not dead: you live and abide forever / For in you we live and move and have our being.

Attacks against legalism often serve as cover for attacks on the idea that there is any society other than the state, esp. the idea that the Church is a society in its own right. (They give state monopoly on law.)

human rights and the pluralism of societies

How others have attempted to deal with a problem is part of the evidence for what the problem is.

scarecrow arguments (ad hominems are often examples)

The attitudes of a Pythagorean or a Neoplatonist to truths of arithmetic are simply not the same as the attitudes of modern-day ultrafinitist. Humanity is always shifting its attitude towards mathematics. There is no agreement as to the most general conception of mathematics, and mathematical platonists and formalists, for instance, do not even agree as to what is meant by mathematical truth.

Even our innermost lives have a social aspect.

Ritual is such that it is simultaneously emotional expression, a teaching of participants and observers, and a system tending to coherence, so that it is a sort of overlap of all three.

Beliefs ritually practiced and beliefs about ritual practices are not the same.

Myth at root is spoken ritual.

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom precisely because God is love.

breaking out of the solipsism of the now // breaking out of mental solipsism

development of doctrine
(1) inspiration of the Holy Spirit
(2) exemplarity of articulated faith
(3) rational community

parallels between Kant on immortality and certain universalist arguments

The rigorous rises out of the allusive and suggestive. Anyone who has constructed a rigorous argument has had this experience.

Many things are possible, not all of these are probable, and fewer still of these are presumptively true. If something is possible by free will, it may be something I never consider, or, considering easily reject; its being possible says nothing about its being easy, or being likely, or being more likely as time goes on, or being something that can be done at once rather than only over time with practice, or being compossible with other things, or being something that i even ever consider, or being something that I would ever accept given my history, or any other such thing.

virtues and vices as traditions of choice

The faith admits of definition because it is neither arbitrary nor merely subjective.

articles of faith // icons
(our minds do not terminate in propositions or images but in what they express)

the relation between awe and ungaudy simplicity

the task of youth: to walk as the heart leads and the mind sees fit, but to remember that there is a reckoning and to be mindful of one's Creator

Man cannot be transfigured by improving the body or augmenting the intelligence -- this merely shifts modalities.

The greater part of the power of reason is that it does not have to rely on itself alone.

metric mereotopology

Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and the various aspects of artistic life (as well as the relations between art and violence)
- note that the horse imagery expresses this in addition to the main storylines

an extended mind conception of history

To know the end of a thing is to know an immense amount about it; the end is in some ways the most powerful principle of knowledge.

No one needs to plumb the soul of the painter to know that his painting is intended to represent a bison.

How do those who claim science is not causal explain cases needing control groups or distinguish important from incidental correlations?

The nodes of an economic transaction may be all one person or more than one -- almost any two-person transaction, for instance, has an isomorphic one-person counterpart. (Bookkeeping and budgeting often exhibit many of the latter.)

Competition gets its value from unpredictability (Hayek; note Vernon Smith on experimental confirmation)

Experimental observation requires integration with nonexperimental observation.

tools-to-theories heuristics of discovery

etiological and causal role aspects of papal function in Church

analogical vs a fortiori functions of parabolic discourse

All of physics is based on principles of cycles, boundaries, and causal actions.

We know the world not merely by thinking and inquiring about it, but also by enduring it.

An act of love, like a concept, is capable of uniting the mind that knows with what it knows with what it knows, as an intentional sign or instrument.

articulated networks of insights

The just person in misery seeks not commiseration but companionship. Christ did not rebuke the disciples for failing to suffer as He did; He rebuked them for falling asleep rather than waiting with Him.

the dignity of work as part of the dignity of the human person

Even justice cannot make a human society immortal.

To found moral lives on natural law one must have moral customs; the flowers do not grow directly form the root.

Few things are so good for culture as habits of accurate reasoning and enthusiasm for small things; the two together can build a golden age.

It is the customs of a people that are the first defense against corruption and usurpation; if we are ever to the point of being defended by statutory law alone, we are already on the verge of losing.

Faith in man requires a love of God, otherwise it has no ground.

That by which we come to believe and that by which we continue to believe overlap but are virtually never exactly the same.

We are all thieves on crosses.

exculpation creep: our tendency to treat more and more excuses as wholly exculpating

the impassibility of solidarity

management as the Gorgian rhetoric of the modern age

Plato's Gorgias opens with battle.

Human veracity is discovered almost incidentally in considering causes of testimony -- it is a relation (mode of relation?) between remote and proximate causes.

backforming a theory of reasoning from Hume's moral theory

Eucharist is the sacrament not only of the Body and blood but of both the separation (death) and sacramental unity of the Body and the Blood.

gravity-based fountain as the most basic kind of fluid engineering (after channel and dam, I suppose)
spurt as simple machine
dam: wall. But so is channel, a wrapped wall; and a pipe, of course, is wrapped completely
fluid wheel as simple machine

mereotopology on discrete grids
On a discrete grid, boundaries are well defined parts, not at a limit.

Sincerity is the heart of panache.

transposition as a method of argument analysis

Patience is one of the most basic responsibilities of a citizen in a democratic society.

confirmation and disconfirmation in interpretation of allusion

A society designed so as to need constant vigilance from citizens is a society doomed to fail. But all societies tend in this direction.

liturgy qua end: participation in heavenly union with God
liturgy qua means: that which serves to prepare and raise us to full heavenly union with God

divine omnipresence as a precondition of sacrament

the right of bodily integrity & stewardship of one's body

Jericho as a symbol of worldly desires (Damasus, D 144)

minor orders as diaconate ministries broadly considered

Remission of sins is repair of free will.

rejection of sacred Tradition as broader iconoclasm

(1) Some certainty, of a sort, can be had through natural appearances.
(2) One can sometimes conclude the existence or nonexistence of one thing from another.
(3) Certitude of evidence admits of degree.
(4) We have certitude of some material substance outside our minds.
(5) Certitude may be of things other than faith, first principles, and conclusions from first principles.
(6) We may clearly know natural efficient causes and effects.
(7) We may have demonstrations of the nobility of a thing.

If the principle of noncontradiction can be grasped with certainty, it follows that certain truths about the mind may be grasped with certainty, including the existence of the mind itself to grasp it and have the certainty, even though these do not follow from the principle of noncontradiction per se.

the intrinsic quietistic tendency of many universalist arguments