Friday, September 22, 2017

Dashed Off XX

A sustained assault on Kant's philosophy of religion in this batch of dashed off notes.

if A:B::C:D
(1) B:A::D:C (invertendo)
(2) A:C::B:D (alternando)
(3) A:A-B::C:C-D (dividendo)
(4) A+B:B::C+D:D (componendo)
- (3) & (4) seem to require that the analogy operate within a classification

"The Spirit is the teacher; Scripture is the doctrine which He teaches us." Turretin

the marks that the teaching of the Church is divine
(1) origin
(2) duration
(3) instruments and amanuenses
(4) adjuncts (martyrs)
--
(5) the sublimity of its mysteries, holiness of its doctrine, and excellence of its examples
(6) style and beauty
(7) internal coherence
(8) end
(9) effects (the gates of hell cannot stand against it)
These marks do not shine out equally in everything the Church does, but considered corporately as a whole.
- This, of course, is taking Turretin on Scripture and applying it to the Church; and lest anyone cry foul at that, note that Turretin quite clearly takes the tradition conversion of the world argument about the Church and applies it to Scripture, and that there are signs he does this in other ways.

the Mencian shoots taken to the cosmic limit

the Syriac 'Book of Women': Judith, Tobit, Esther, Ruth

the gaze of contemplative love between spouses

The almost inevitable flaw in almost every neopagan movement is treating gods as something in which one may dabble.

"Crime is an exacting, inflexible master, against which no one can be strong unless he rebels completely." Manzoni

Some become Catholic from a drive for solidary integrity, some from luring holiness that calls to them, some (like myself) from a mind or will tending to universality, some by intervention of providence or from a direct call.

Who cannot care of the things of the past cannot be trusted with the things of the future.

"Truth is essentially coexistent with the gods, as light is coexistent with the Sun." Iamblichus

The life of Christ is the plot of holy liturgy.

awe as an act of faith

Even in mere bathing we do not merely put water on ourselves: we throw off worry, care, trouble; we make a break in time; we start anew.

our body's physical response to the sublime
- note that this is where the old terror theories come closest to getting things right

conserved quantities & necessity ab alio
conserved quantities // necessary truths // necessary goods (Chastek)

poem as perfect sensible speech (Baumgarten)
poetry as tending toward ideas that are clear and confused (the clarity is a unity of variety)

Christ's Session // Mary's Intercession

beauty of measure, beauty of kind, beauty of tendency

The papacy is not an indelible character but an office with a function, and its authority depends in part on the fulfillment of that function.

Conceptual clarification is a kind of unification.

Hayek's knowledge argument and imperial government

Analects 12:11 -- "Jun jun, chen chen, fu fu, zi zi."

xin & rectification of names (xin combines the person radical and the character for speech)

Good politics is in great measure about rational classification.

Notations encapsulate methods.

Every indelible character gives the capacity to act in some way in the person of Christ, but only the presbyterate and the episcopacy do so in precisely the way Christ is Head of the Church.

our capacity to recognize the sublime in nature as a sign of the union of mind and body

the oscillation of good philosophy between solitary reflection and collaboration

experimentalist, populist, and classicalist axes in language change

the nation as analogized panhellenizing

the major legitimate ends of money-making: support of self and family, productive effects that are needed, self-discipline, and almsgiving

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." Chesterton

generalize, specialize, analogize, aporeticize

the Golden Rule and beautiful action

the importance of timeline-building in HoP
timeline + communication geography -> diffusion of ideas (contiguity and resemblance in tracing influences)

Kantian philosophy of religion is fundamentally anti-Incarnational.

By means of grace we become means of grace.

There is no way to advance from virtue to grace; there are ways to advance from grace to virtue.

Misperception of X is not a failure to perceive X. Likewise, miscommunication is not a failure to receive testimony.

truth-validating vs truth-suggesting cognitions

impressional, semiotic, and comparative aspects of perception

Faith comes by hearing because what is heard is analogous to what is believed.

"Mathematical truths, as soon as we realise them, are seen to be necessary, and we seem to have known them always." Pringle-Pattison

triputisamvit (Prabhakara Mimamsa): each cognition manifests subject, object, and itself

means of knowledge combining with things other than means of knowledge to function in new ways

signs as working like middle terms

Princess Elisabeth's famous set of objections is concerned more with the limits of Cartesian physics than with mind/body union.

(A) pervasion of sign and signified -- Box(s-o)
(B) presence of thing that is sign -- T(t-s)

We may practically employ the ideas of effects of grace by not erring in a certain way -- that is, it is not a matter of doing nothing but a matter of doing only what does not presuppose the adequacy of one's own power or independence of God. It is manifestly obvious that we may have practically employable negative rules of this sort. And we may cognize these effects theoretically by causation, remotion, and eminence, because it is illegitimate to restrict causal reasoning arbitrarily.

Every regulative principle implies constitutive principles.

One may simply adapt Kant's moral postulation of God's existence to a moral postulation of the occasional happening of miracles, i.e., one may argue that it is rational on basis of moral reason to hope that miracles will be done to make it possible to follow the moral law (either individually, or communally a la Cohen). It requires no more than recognizing that God has freedom as well as we, and that to postulate reconciliation of the moral and the physical, as Kant does, is as much to postulate that events can occur for moral reasons as well as physical. This suffices for at least a Babbage-style account of miracles.

The laws of virtue ground all juridical laws.

Kant's 'church' is literally a church without creeds, without hierarchy, without distinctiveness; it is a ghost of a church.

Fulfilling one's duties to oneself and others requires distinctive service to God, both to express symbolically the meaning of these duties and to communicate and even share this meaning with others.

As sons do not relate to their fathers in terms of pure moral duty, which is rather what one would expect of new servants, but instead do so on the basis of historical contingencies shared with their father, so a free, filial faith must be a historical faith.

If holy tradition is a 'leading-string', it is necessary yet; for compared to what we should be, we are not adults, but merely children, however quickly we have grown, and however much we preen ourselves on having grown.

Without shared profession and discipline, human beings inevitably begin to treat morality as purely subjective.

The phenomenon participates the noumenon.

the logic of sweepings clauses & analogy vs available classification

frozen accidents and spandrels in the history of philosophy

By 'information' people often mean nothing more than 'specification of effect'.

apostolic succession
(1) sacramental (of person)
(2) jurisdictional (of see)

similarity as indistinguishability at some level of precision

Chatterjees ordering of priority among the pramanas: perception, memory, nonperception, inference, comparison, testimony, postulation

Social justice means nothing unless it is justice with others.

that exemplar causation in the wide sense implies the existence of exemplar cuases in the strict sense (i.e. productive ideas)

Even for natural reason, standing in the stead of another in matters of virtue is a common thing; for instance, it is common in both good parenting and good marriage. It does, to be sure, require conditions, for parents do not answer for children or spouses for each other in every case; but it does occur.

Confucian five relations as cases of vicariousness

Need is sometimes insight, or the beginning of it, in the same sense that attention is.

Reason must always go further in understanding, or it betrays itself.

To do one's duty properly requires cultivation of an admiration for virtuous actions, especially when they go beyond duty.

miracles as models of artistic creation

artistic inspiration as intuitive schema for grace
the sense of something working through one in one's free act

Timaeus as an account of artisanship

A humanity pleasing to God must be an artistic, or at least productive, as well as ethical humanity.

the principles of mediation and vicariousness in artistic creation

All artistic creation is a surplus over merit.

Salvation cannot be merely moral; it must be sublime, exalting those who receive it.

The Election of Israel is a precondition for understanding the marks of the Church.

Modern Biblical scholarship has, through its history, been an investigation of hypotheses. Some of these have not been unreasonable; but the problem is that there are always more hypotheses.

the Shema as making a claim on moral disposition

(1) the nobility of many hermits, monks, and consecrated virgins
(2) the freedoms granted by celibacy, if given the right context
(3) the miracles of the saints as pedagogical
(4) the ecclesiastical hierarchy as a limit on despots
(5) the often political nature of schism
(6) the quasi-hieratic nature of the Byzantine empire and the ways this aspect helped to preserve it
(7) the constant attempt of secular powers to manipulate the Church for their own ends, e.g., the Avignon papacy
(8) the role of the papacy in negotiations of peace
(9) the benefits arising from the Church even despite the sins of its members

faith giving rise to productive, and not merely practical, works
faith-informed genius and taste

"Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual." Schiller

the subtle truths in the twilight of obscure ideas

festivity as an appropriate manifestation of hope

church buildings as mirrors of the whole circumambient world

"Once there is religion, it must necessarily also be social." Schleiermacher

'Spirituality without religion' is for disembodied spirits; the ghost of a religion, suitable for ghosts.

ritual as mediating intuition and conception

religion exponentiated
the divine image exponentiated

Intellectual consistency requires a purity of discipline academia does not easily accommodate.

One often finds that a single perhaps is implausible whereas a system of perhapses, at least given the right connection to some evidence, is quite plausible. A story often makes more sense to us than a fragment.

communicating the value of virtue without mere virtue-signaling (i.e., without trying to convince people that one has the virtue by a peacockish display)

Purely formal sciences are heavily dependent on analogical reasoning (for extension, consilience, etc.).

measurement as a method for classifying, where tehre are preestablished mathematical relationships within the scheme of classification
- measurements leading to classifications seem to work by specifying more general relations already in play