(1) There is a world that is continuing, independent, and external.
(2) It is changing, where change is the act of the potential insofar as it is potential.
(3) It can be measured temporally by units of change.
(4) It is composite, where composition is the potential of the actual insofar as it is actual.
(5) It can be measured spatially by units of division with respect to a boundary.
Everything in the category of quality concerns ordering in some way.
belief in external world is?
(1) natural/innate
---- (a) brute instinct
---- (b) rational principle
(2) acquired
---- (a) from practice
---- (b) from reasoning
inventive in idea, rigorous in execution, rich in appeal
"Introspection of our intellectual operations is not the best means for preserving us from intellectual hesitations." Newman
playing it straight as a pacing technique in comedy (Margaret Dumont)
"It is not absurd that the actualization of one thing should be in another. Teaching is the activity of a person who can teach, yet the operation is performed in something -- is not cut adrift from a subject, but is of one thing in another." Aristotle
"There is nothing to prevent two things from having one and the same actualization (not in the same being, but related as the potential to the actual)."
Intellectual discovery has something of the character of a gift.
"The most precious goods should not be sought but waited-for." Simone Weil
Doctrine is the framework of devotion, and devotion expresses itself according to its framework in good works.
In the Beatific Vision, understanding includes love and love includes understanding.
When love moves toward something and grasps it, it does not begin inside a mental inner sphere; it is such that it is already working out toward what is loved.
Every virtue covers the whole world from a certain point of view.
acceptance-based group belief vs. commitment-based group belief
Much of what is valuable in 19th-century Anglican theology is its passionate devotion to the Incarnation.
Arguments that redemption is not the primary purpose of the Incarnation tend to make certain mistakes:
(1) conflating 'the Incarnation' with 'an Incarnation'
(2) conflating the Incarnation with a more abstract purpose
(3) assuming that if Adam had not sinned mere glorification would have been the end of creation, whereas we really do not know the range of options available to omnipotence
(4) conflating the Word being the end of creation with the Word as Incarnate being the end of creation
Absolute non velle is not possible for us, only relative non velle.
"Inscape is species or individually distinctive beauty of style." Hopkins
"all things are upheld by instress, and are meaningless without it"
"design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry"
not yet judging vs suspension of judgment (the former expresses intellectual freedom, the latter volitional freedom)
Spatial location enters into the discussion of parts only insofar as 'part' has a functional aspect, and that function also has in a given case a dependence on spatial location.
We can say a cancerous tumor is part of the body and also say it is not a part of the body.
The discipline of mereology cannot slect out literal usages of 'part' without studying figurative usages as well.
Every theory of necessity has a corresponding theory of parthood.
Many short stories in modern style are really character sketches with story elements.
trinitarian traces in being, in knowing, in making, in saying
A scenario: I am putting together a table and you pick up the table leg on the other side of the room, asking, "What is this?" And I say: "It is part of this table."
Both justice and injustice are committed in the name of justice.
All analysis is against a backdrop.
A pen-cap is part of its pen even when off for the moment.
the danger of conflating being-in with being-a-part-of
act of the actual insofar as it is actual: existence or operation/action, act as such
act of the potential insofar as it is potential: change
act of the potential insofar as it is actual: state of change
act of the actual insofar it is potential: disposition?
potential of the actual insofar as it is actual: composition
potential of the potential insofar as it is potential: prime matter, potential as such
potential of the potential insofar as it is actual: passion?
potential of the actual insofar as it is potential: matter
By grace, law is made a sign of grace.
the indissolubility of marriage and marriage as an end in itself (Meyendorff)
"For indeed the family is a little church." Chrysostom
Nothing constituted by what people believe, want, decide or intend is wholly constituted by these things, for all these things look outside themselves.
cognitivist accounts of law
-- laws qua laws never express truths: illusionism (e.g., laws are dressup for coercive impositions
-- laws qua laws express truths
-- -- about human opinions (laws are regularized public opinion)
-- -- about more than human opinions
-- -- -- laws as cooperative artifacts
-- -- -- natural facts
-- -- -- -- law as a special natural fact about human populations
-- -- -- -- reducible to more basic natural facts
-- -- -- -- -- law as a synthetic description of connections
-- -- -- -- -- law as an analytic description of connections
Believing does not having an additive structure; to assign numbers to strength of belief is simply to identify an order.
A word gets a stable meaning because many fibers of meaning are twisted together, as in spinning, vast numbers of partial redundancies.
fuzzy parthood and poorly integrated parts
Treatments of the devil as merely a symbol inevitably confuse the devil with the flesh or the world.
fuzzy objects as getting their identities from anchoring features
-- these are often related to the classifiers we use (allowing for idiomatic quirks): a stick of cotton candy, a tuft of hair, a glob of honey, etc. -- in each case, the classifier facilitates our finding the anchoring feature.
volatility fuzziness vs permeability fuzziness
"If we look upon the world as appearance, it demonstrates the existence of something that is not appearance." Kant, Opus Postumum
Life adapts so as to appear in a world that actively appears.
To say that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, while a crude statement of a sophisticated relation, is not a denigration of philosophy but an assertion that it has a value higher than human utility, one that makes it worthy to serve what springs from the primal font of truth itself.
"there is no sentence of Heraclitus that is not taken up in my logic." Heraclitus
Friendship arising from charity begins in Christ, is preserved according to the Spirit of Christ, and tends toward Christ as its completion. (Aelred)
"The best medicine in life is a friend." Aelred
Sacra doctrina uses philosophy because human teaching and learning is intrinsically philosophical.
the cherry-orange sunset blooming in the field
Philosophy by its nature circles back on itself.
By prayer we are prepared for what we need to do. But the value of prayer lies in itself.
Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology in much the same sense that man is the servant of God. But as Christianity introduces a new aspect into the latter, so it does into the former: philosophy becomes the adopted daughter of theology.
