the 'sense of existence' as a mode of the sensus communis
-- the sense of integral salience, of salience to the whole of our sensory experiences
Monarchies in practice (and sometimes despite intention) tend to be complex power-sharing systems.
having both the Body and the Blood in the Eucharist as a symbol of the superabundance of grace
taking the Five Classics "not only as written texts but also as broadly conceived humanistic visions" (Tu Wei-Ming)
"Confucius never claimed any positive knowledge of spiritual matters and yet he implied that he had acquired a tacit understanding with heaven."
Building and maintaining a family is participation in the governance of society.
We are social by affection and civilizational by reason.
It is an error to think of habituation as circumscribing free will rather than modulating it.
"If God is love, charity should have no end, for divinity can be closed off by no boundary." Leo the Great
two key ostensions of the Christian faith: "This is my beloved Son" and "This is my body"
Our assessment of evidence always depends on how we classify it.
We do not naturally think only of natural things.
The problem with the credit theory of money is that to cover everything adequately, it needs to presuppose something to be credited.
Money is made by exchanges; it is the exchanges that are socially constructed, and money is a role in them. One of the key features of money is that it easily crosses the real (as in 'real estate') vs. ledger boundary; real assets are represented in ledgers but do not exist in them, financial assets are both represented and wholly existent in ledgers, but money is both real and ledgerly.
presential knowledge of intention
knowledge of intention by extrapolation of deliberation
knowledge of intention by causal inference from action
"Normative concepts exist because human beings have normative problems. And we have normative problems because we are self-conscious rational animals, capable of reflection about what we ought to believe and to do." Korsgaard
"Every theory of 'projection', either empiricist or intellectualist, assumes what it wants to explain, since we could not project our feelings into the visible behaviour of an animal if soemthing in its behaviour did not itself suggest the inference to us." Merleau-Ponty
the causes of the Church (Lawrence of Brindisi)
(1) principal efficient: God
(2) instrumental efficient: apostles and ministers
(3) material cause: human multitude
(4) formal cause: true faith
(5) final cause: glory of God and salvation of souls
-- Thus the causal definition of the Church is the human confidelity formed by God through the apostles and other ministers for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
-- possibly --> one : principal efficient :: holy : final :: catholic :: material :: apostolic : instrumental efficient :: Church (ecclesia) : formal
Isaiah 2:2-3 & Mic 4:1-2 on the visible Church; cf. Mt 5:14
Both the true preaching of the gospel and the right administration of the sacraments are those that exhibit the Notes of the Church.
To have faith is not bare belief but to believe in a way that is perfected by belonging.
ways of clarifying the true Church
(1) via notarum
(2) via empirica
(3) via historica
(4) via primatus
the integrated multiplicity of the Church's testimony to Christ as a sign of its credibility
sacramental character as having moral causality (cp. Bellarmine)
Errors diversify inquiry and sins diversify goods.
oneiric entities, ludic entities
theatre as an externalization of dream (cp. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, which uses this as a conceit)
Bottles and jars and tubes are fascinating in being portable holes; they are an example of the almost magical character of human ingenuity.
Privacy is an inherently hierarchical notion.
Some innocence is default, but some innocence is acquired.
answers that are not solutions and solutions that are not answers
Evidence has at least three major functions in inquiry: it points to something, it interacts with other evidence, and it suggests.
(1) the apostolic churches
(2) the Christian tribal obediences (national churches)
(3) the Christian subtribal communities
(4) the Chrisitan-associated religious movements
Money's ability to measure the value of other things depends on its not being itself a primary target of acquisition.
the privity conception of a trust: confidence reposed in another, annexed in privity to the estate or land and to the person touching the land
--> this led to the notion that corporate entities could not be trustees, not being natural persons in whom confidence could be reposed
--> this slowly shifted from focus on the conscience of the person to focus on the equitable rights attached to the estate; this ultimately allows for the possibility of corporate trustees
--> privity shifted from being taken very strictly to being taken loosely
idea as agentive object, faculty as objectual agent
Many things must be tried for some things to be discovered.
Christians as a spiritually armigerous people
"Man is tricked only by the simplest ideas." Barbey D'Auberville
Sure hope is always founded upon victory.
What people call their identity is often the investment of their person in what is beneath them.
revivescence of skill after disruption
the overflow of reason into the world
(1) skill
(2) design
(3) prudential organization
(4) social deeming
Prudence and skill, as being practical, have animal analogues.
use of sign vs. instrumentalization of sign
instrumentalizations of sign-systems as like vestment
'X counts as Y in C' and satisficing
American hegemony is resilient because it is many different systems, allowing other states to be tightly or loosely enmeshed as they find appropriate for themselves.
particles as interaction-points characterized by probabilities
In inquiry, every problem is a hint.
"The junzi dwells in ren by means of yi, and only then is it ren. He carries out yi by means of li, and only then is it yi." Xunzi
rites as providing a source of moral vocabulary
Xunzi on rites // Plotinus on prayers
perlocutionary force
(1) persuasions
(2) provocations / response incitements
(3) norm enforcements
(4) instructions
(5) obfuscations
Money is not primarily an objective-cause kind but an instrumental-cause kind.
Jesus relates individually to His disciples, but He also, and more often (as far as we see in the Gospels), relates to them as groups.
Money is a 'store of value' specifically for exchange.
extrinsic dispositions
Money is not reducible to physical properties because it is an abstract feature of mediated exchanges insofar as they are commensurable.
To every virtue corresponds values of the world as seen in light of that virtue.
The line between individual and collective intentionality is not always clear.
faculties as usable layers of self
the seven captial vices as each a corruption of an importants aspect of the human person, and therefore as a sort of negative sketch of what it is to be a human person
(0) pride: likeness to God
(1) vainglory: appearance to others
(2) envy: participation in others
(3) wrath: self-dominion
(4) sloth: internality
(5) greed: expression into physical world
(6) gluttony: physical organism
(7) lust: species-being
fictions as fragments of impossible worlds
Institutions can facilitate coordination and cooperation, but they can also limit overcoordination and disvalued cooperations.
"A prudent man would not criticize every ignorance, nor would he consider every knowledge worthy of praise." Palamas
light as manifesting manifested & manifested manifester
"In the absence of any purposes, goals, and forms in nature, there is no principle for dividing the organism into working parts." Craver
The foremost thing we do with words is being present by means of them.
Gregory the Great, Moralia 8.54 & divine sublimity
It takes a lot of ordinary to build a little magical.
One of the major differences between favors & money is that the value of favors is always negotiable, and is re-negotiated in ways concerned with particular exchanges, getting its actual value within a given particular exchange.
commitment, covenant, consecration
The value of money is specifically a value for mediating exchanges.
Catholic Social Teaching is not a political philosophy or program but a framework adaptable to many different social situations and structures.
Rites are cooperative means by which we greatly expand our flexibility for handling different situations.
'the grand traditions of good talk'
The Lord's hard sayings establish that it is not enough to be decent.
In designing and reforming social arrangements, one must recognize that most features of social arrangement, are undesigned.
When people land belief, they often are attributing to belief what pertains to truth, which we sometimes belief.
All sex that is not rape is a ritual.
Observation and experiment can only tell us of what does happen if they also tell us, at least indirectly and in a limited way, what might happen, because what does happen happens as something that might happen in various ways.
Entropy is an inherently modal feature of systems, and requires a modal analysis (like Gibbs's ensembles).
Every physical change involves the generation and corruption of physical states.
providential societies vs artistic societies
--> prudential societies can include both as subsocieties
Why is there something rather than nothing?
1. regress
2. state
-- -- 2a. immediate
-- -- -- -- 2a1. brute-factism
-- -- -- -- 2a2. necessitarianism
-- -- 2b. ultimate
-- -- -- -- 2b1. necessary being(s)
-- -- -- -- 2b2. necessary principle/law
Simplicity and elegance are really explanatory only in contexts involving mental causes.
pure allegory vs. mythic re-representation / re-contextualization
Almost all of human life is lived in an abnormal normality, like citizens of an occupied country going about their business as their occupiers buy their wares, collect taxes, and occasionally make them disappear.
'X counts as Y in Z' and estimatio/cogitatio
commens, universe of discourse, definition
Most countercultures are imaginary self-representations.
Social media shows that there is not merely a 'hustle culture' but a kind of culture one might call 'hustled culture', people whose hobby is finding people to hustle them. We are insulated in everyday life from the phenomenon of people enjoying being the sold-to and even the swindled, the people who find it exciting to be conned and scammed.
engineering as concerned with internal functions of artifacts that are open systems (Maxim Raginsky)
Melanchthon takes the Second Table to be concerned with civil justice.
"...'to participate' is in some way the same as 'to take part', so that it imports a double relation -- both of part to whole and of taker to taken." Scotus Ord 1.8.2
--> he notes that the first is a real relation and the second a relation of reason (although in genus-species, the second is real)
States do not engage in 'remedy and reparation' unless forced. When a state or government offers up what it claims to be reparation or remedy freely, it is actually engaging in bargaining, using its past wrongs as leverage. Past wrongs are cases in which people can often be convinced to exchange a substantive good for a purely symbolic one, in order to feel vindicated.
Public schooling is an instrument for bureaucratizing a population.
stock: any entity that accumulates or depletes over time (level variable)
flow: rate of change in stock
If quantity of stock at time t is Q(t), then derivative dQ(t)/d(t) is flow; stock at t is the integral of flow from 0 to t.
All life is a mosaic of hope and glory.
