This begins the notebook that was begun in September 2023.
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You should never discard the teachings of your forebears, although you may find new context that sheds a different light on them and in learning from them you may develop them in different and unexpected directions.
John 8:25 Vulgate: "Dicebant ergo et tu quis es dixit eis Iesus principium quia et loquor vobis."
-- "They therefore said to him, Who are you? Jesus said to them, The beginning, who also speak to you."
"To be at ease is to be unsafe." Newman
Serious dialogue presupposes either extensive experience or study; this is often forgotten in calls for 'dialogue'.
All in the Church are called to holiness and many in the Church will often be corrupt.
"The infinite of the human mind is its dominion over the totality of abstractible quantity, i.e., whatever quantity is abstractible, is abstractible by mind. This dominion of the human mind is itself embraced in a large, divine intellectual order in which it participates." Chastek
A fact is a feat; establishing a fact involves accomplishing a feat.
facts as things that show truths (sometimes defeasibly or erroneously)
'fact' as rhetorically presupposing a kind of trust
shared facts as elements of common ground of discourse
facts as truths relative to an agent's framing of them by means reliable for discovering truth
To live your authentic self you must first have an authentic self, a self that is genuinely capable of an authenticity appropriate to living.
Ethos is a more powerful persuader than logos.
"Everything that changes does so in some respect, and by something, and into something, and out of something." Aristotle
"Only a being who lvoes man and desires his happiness is an objecto f human worship, of religion." Feuerbach --- This is certainly false as an anthropological claim.
In the long run, art is always dirven by sex, aggression, or contemplation.
the alchemical laboratory of argument
Much of the work of love consists in mending.
"An eristic argument is a deduction from premises which seem to be endoxa, but are not really, as well as merely apparent deduction from real and apparent endoxa." Aristotle
-- Alexander takes this seeming-but-not endoxa to be an indication of a premise that is in some sense not thought through -- stopping to think about them easily shows them false, whereas real endoxa are not easily rejected even when false.
endoxa as playing a key role in the cooperative nature of reason
The parts of a system are somethings with habitudes or modes of being appropriate to systemic composition, namely, information and materialization.
Counterfactual conditionals as statemetns about systems of causes.
Knowledge is power in teh sense that lack of knowledge undermines power.
Aurvandilsta
-- Aurvandil in the Prose Edda was carried by Thor in a basket out of the north, the sign of which is that one of Aurvandil's toes, sticking out of the basket, froze and was thrown by Thor into the sky.
-- in OE there is a gloss associating earendel with Latin 'jubar' = radiance, heavenly beam
-- one of the few cases in which a star definitely has a mythic role in Norse myth (as opposed to incidental mentions)
Propaganda is more effective with people suspicious of everything, not less.
One point at which aesthetics and ethics converge is the badness of desecration.
Graveness, primarily and simply speaking, depends primarily on intended object, whereas secondary graveness depends primarily on harm; but are to be considered in asssessing sins and their gravity. Both blasphemy and murder are grave, both need punishment, but blasphemy is more grave in itself, and murder causes more actual harm.
the imitation of saints as a form of the imitation of Christ (1 Cor 11:1-2)
The world thinks it is being magnanimous in letting Christians act according to their principles as long as doing so is consistent with the world's principles.
When there is a trade-off, it does not always follow that the trade-off is one-for-one.
"All knowledge of real being is an interpretation of action." W. Norris Clarke
"The world recognizes God only in order to be able to kill him -- and God renders the world even this ultimate service." Marion
"Hell imprisons the soul in itself."
A flaw is in many theories of knowledge is that they do not plausibly capture the notino of coming to know something better.
Every profession has active, contemplative, and mixed modes.
"The advantages which are derived from machinery and manufactures seem to arise principally from three sources: *The addition which they make to human power.--The economy they produce of human time.--The conversion of substances apparently common and worthless into valuable products.*" Babbage
"Nothing is more remarkable, and yet less uenxpected, than the perfect identity of things manufactured by the same tool."
In certain matters, like sex and worship, people often have difficulty distinguishing aesthetics and ethics.
language as an instrument for making intelligible
Every kind of apprehension is an apprehension of being.
"Freedom renders possible all that is possible as the horizon of possibilization." Marion
"Only love, 'which bears all' (1 Corinthians 13:7), can bear with its gaze Love's excess."
The purpose of apologetics is not persuasion but provision of argued defense for those who demand an account.
Natural love by its nature yearns for divine love.
All genuine lived experience is of something not itself.
The development of a human person always presupposes other people.
intentionality as the possibility of love
We first learn about others through experiencing them as needed and as necessitating.
the Church as a divine society within which a human society forms
object tracking --> subitizing --> groupings of up to four elements --> sliding counting
object tracking + numerosity estimation --> (by adduction) basic arithmetic
currency : money :: grammar : language :: state : civil society
Free societies cannot be imposed from above; they must be grown and inherited.
person as universal vantage point
the divine image participating in the divine society within the divine providence
communication as the intelligibility of active power
If it's not worth having more like it, more inspired by it, it is not great art.
"Action, by the very fact that we do not originate or control it, but receive it to some degree passively, 'suffer' its influence, and are controlled or determined by it willy-nilly, is the natural sign of the real presence of another-than-self. It then at the same time, because it is structured action, reveals to us the essence or nature of the agent precisely as *this kind of actor on me* (and subsequently on others, as our observation widens)." W. Norris Clarke
"To be is to self-communicate; to know is to pick up within oneself the self-communication of being."
Phenomena can only be conceived as phenomena by being conceived as manifesting something more fundamental.
The key question whenever anyone talks about "loving, committed relationship" is "committed to what?" In general, one should never stop at "commitment"; in the specifics, people too often are committed to very different things.
the desert adorns the cactus with charm
The legal system participates the real world, receiving reality in a partial manner, one that does not capture every aspect of the real but that involves aspects of the real.
The common ground on which legal system meets legal system is reason itself.
Baptism presupposes the charity of Christ and the Church in such a way that through baptism we participate that charity.
In argument as in chess, when you see a good move, look for a better one.
Fatherhood and motherhood are not constituted deontically, although they have deontic implications for us, and are rooted more deeply than the obligations associated with them. Likewise, parental love is not adequately or even primarily characterized by any parental obligations being more fundamental in importance than they are.
Human beings are remarkable in that we are always figthing ourselves.
personation (significance) of another (object) to another (interpretant)
-- personation as a specialized form of sign-relation
-- agency as instrumental (ministerial) causation presupposing personation
-- personation is a case of symbolic delomic legisign
"The true body of Christ, and those things that are done in it, are figures of the mystical body of Christ, and of the things that are done in that." Aquinas (QQ 7.6.2 ad 5)
"The chance occurrence is remarkable, when it appears to happen by design." Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
a tree is a river-country flowing up to the sky
Every word is in a way all of language.
"Genuine mediation is the character of a Sign." Peirce
"Every triadic relationship involves three dyadic relationship and three monadic characters; just as every dyadic action involves two monadic characters."
Corruption of the best being the worst, rule of law corrupts into something very nasty.
