The Old Thorns Shall Grow Out of the Old Stem

 One Certainty
by Christina Rossetti 

 Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,
All things are vanity. The eye and ear
Cannot be filled with what they see and hear:
Like early dew, or like the sudden breath
Of wind, or like the grass that withereth,
Is man, tossed to and for by hope and fear:
So little joy hath he, so little cheer,
Till all things end in the long dust of death.
Today is the sill the same as yesterday,
Tomorrow also even as one of them;
And there is nothing new under the sun:
Until the ancient race of Time be run,
The old thorns shall grow out of the old stem,
And morning shall be cold and twilight grey.

Dashed Off XXII

 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 capital 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.

One Main Office of a Liberal Education

 All exact knowledge supposes the mind to be able to apply, steadily and clearly, not only the processes of reasoning, but also certain fundamental ideas; and it is one main office of a liberal education to fix and develope these ideas. The ideas of Space and of Number are the subject matter of Geometry, of Arithmetic, and of Algebra in its character of Universal Arithmetic: and since all our knowledge, relative to the external world, must be subject to the conditions of space and number, the elementary portions of mathematics just mentioned are, rightly and necessarily, made the basis of all intellectual education. If we advance further in mathematical study, with the view of its thus serving as an intellectual discipline, what other ideas do we thus bring to activity and use? I reply, that the main general ideas which we have next to introduce, and which consequently should be the governing principles of the second stage of a liberal education, are the following:--the mechanical ideas of Force and Body, with their various modifications; the idea of the Symmetry of symbolical expressions;--the idea of the Universal Interpretation of symbols, including as an important branch of this, the Application of Algebra to Geometry;--and the idea of a Limit.

William Whewell, The Doctrine of Limits, page viii. Whewell was a major advocate for a conception of liberal arts that was significantly informed by the basic elements of the sciences of his day, as well as one of the major figures in the development of calculus education in Britain, so there is perhaps an implicit argument here that has more extensive aims than are immediately stated.

Links of Note

 * Colin Marshall, Do All Roads Lead to Philosophy on Wikipedia? They Do About 97.3% of the Time, at "Open Culture". As noted in the article, Wikipedia is a constantly varying thing, so paths change, but here is the Wikipedia road from 'atmosphere of earth' to 'philosophy of language':

atmosphere of Earth -- gas -- states of matter -- physics -- natural science -- branches of science -- science -- scientific method -- empirical -- evidence -- proposition -- philosophy of language

* Jane Psmith reviews Dennis Rasmussen's Fears of a Setting Sun at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf"

* Fabio Lampert, Freedom, Omniscience, and the Contingent A Priori (PDF)

* ArchaeoEd, a podcast about ancient civilizations of the Americas

* Matthew David Segall, 'No Thinker Thinks Twice': On the Attempt to Catch Whitehead in the Act of Philosophizing, at "Footnotes2Plato"

* Andrej Čaja, John Henry Newman's Idea of a University as Critique of Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarian Conception of Education (PDF)

* Carlo DaVia, The Role of Aristotle in Gadamer's Work (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, The Basics: Deference Politics

* Matthew Minerd, From Unity to Distinction to Unity: A Recovery of the Vocabulary of Various Mental Distinctions, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Monte Ransom Johnson, The Medical Background and Inductive Basis of Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean (PDF)

* Frederick Bauerschmidt, The Body of Christ Is Made from Bread: Transubstantiation and the Grammar of Creation, at "Church Life Journal"

* Jeff McMahan, Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War, at "Blog of the APA". A much better discussion than most discussions of just war theory I have seen. I particularly like the recognition, essential to any accurate account of just war theory, that war, the situation, is not the same thing as war, the action, and it is the latter, not the former, that just war theory directly considers; it is astounding how many people equivocate between the two, including people who should know better. I also think that, while it needs some work, his account of the proportionality requirement is much better than you usually find. It's also good to see someone using the distinction between responsibility and culpability, which is quite important in this kind of context. The particular 'revisionist' version of just war theory that McMahan advocates, though, is not strictly tenable on human rights grounds, I think; soldiers have a basic right to self-defense because everyone does -- the basic form of the right does not depend on one's character. Granted, I think you can argue that respect for rights morally has to take a somewhat different form depending on whether things are being done justly or unjustly, and that there are particular rights, some of which may be related to more basic rights, that come from just action specifically and cannot be appealed to by people acting unjustly, but these are different matters and not relevant to things like basic self-defense. McMahan is also hampered on this particular point, I think, by not considering the full spectrum of reasons why a soldier might be fighting, and forgetting, on this point, at least, that part of just war theory is the recognition that warring is only just as a means to just peace, and that how one understands the moral obligations in war is affected by what leaves open the possibility for bringing about just peace. This is historically one of the secondary reasons why people have accepted the 'moral equality of combatants', for instance; if you don't, then you can get into some nastily vicious cycles of war. But, that said, it is again one of the better discussions I have seen.

Life and Illness

 Matti Hayry at the JME Blog:

Illness, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “an unhealthy condition of body or mind”. Health, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.” Life, according to any realistic account, is not characterised by complete physical, mental and social well-being. It is, in other words, an unhealthy condition of body and mind. It is an illness.

This is as fallacious an inference as it sounds, although in some subtle ways. It involves a formal fallacy; 'healthy' and 'health' are not synonymous because one is said with reference to the other. -- as we might put it in lexicography-speak, 'healthy' is not 'health' but 'pertaining to health'. 'Unhealthy' is even more indirectly related to 'health', because the negation ('un-') can interact in odd ways with the 'pertaining' part. But the inference is also problematic materially. From the fact that life is not characterized by complete physical, mental, and social well-being, one cannot infer that it is the condition that itself involves the privation of complete, physical, mental, and social well-being, which is what you would have to assume in order to get the conclusion that life is an unhealthy condition of body and mind. We can see this another way by asking of the WHO definition, "Well-being of what"? And the plausible answer is that it is of living organisms insofar as they are alive. Likewise, you can ask of the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition, "Of body and mind in what respect?" And again the plausible answer is that it is something like "insofar as they are alive". An inanimate or dead body cannot be ill. But illness is cumulative or quasi-cumulative. The more ill you get, the closer to dead you get; if you get too ill, you die. Thus life may not be characterized by 'complete physical, mental, and social well-being', but illness is in the privation, not in the life. Illness is, so to speak, the empty gap between 'being alive' and 'being alive in complete physical, mental, and social well-being'; it makes no  sense to say that life is the empty gap between being alive and being alive in complete well-being. 

We can see all of this in yet another way, by asking if 'healthy life' is a contradiction in terms, which it would have to be if life itself were an illness. It is very clearly not. If we intended to claim that, although life in itself is not illness, life happens to be illness in the cases we know, then we would have to ask if 'healthy life of the sort we know' is a contradiction in terms; it very clearly is not. What this suggests is that when we are talking about 'life' and 'illness' we are talking about distinguishable things, even in cases where we find them both.

He continues:

Since being born means entering an existence of illness, the rationality and morality of creating new lives should perhaps be reconsidered. If illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated when possible, prevention would be the most effective way of achieving this. No new lives, no new future illness.

'Illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated when possible' is ambiguous between two senses: 'In all possible circumstances, illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated' and 'Illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated to the extent it is possible to do so'; these are modally distinct, one involving a propositional modality and the other involving a predicate modality. The inference made here requires, I think, that we take it in the (much stronger) propositional modality sense; but medical ethics only requires the predicate modality sense, as is clear from when Hayry talks about the WHO definition. Eliminating and mitigating illness is not an absolute value, for all possible circumstances, but an instrumental one. Instrumental to what? Well, the plausible answers are 'living' or 'living better' or 'living as well as possible', depending on context. Why else would people want less illness?

In any case, another example for the 'irrational anti-natalist arguments' file. This is an interesting one, though, because of all of the parallel arguments you could create. Vice is an unvirtuous condition, virtue is a state of complete mental excellence, human life is not a state of complete mental excellence, therefore human life is a vice. Ugliness is an unbeautiful condition, beauty is a state of fullness of excellence for pleasing on contemplation, human life is not such a state, therefore human life is a species of ugliness; of course your mama is ugly, because she is alive. The possibilities are endless.

Fortnightly Book, September 22

 Charles Dickens began publishing fiction in late 1833 with short sketches of characters and scenes; originally they were published without byline, but in 1834, he started using the pen-name, Boz. (The 'o' is long; it derives from 'Moses' pronounced through the nose as 'Boses'.) The sketches were published in a number of different magazines until 1836, when Dickens a published, in two 'series',  Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People. It did fairly well, although it was very quickly overshadowed by The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first novel. Ever since that first novel, Sketches by Boz has tended to be overlooked; but no longer here, as it is the next fortnightly book. It's a long work, so it might be a three- or even four-week 'fortnight', depending on my schedule.

Most versions of Sketches use the 1868 edition, but I am reading the Penguin Classics edition edited by Dennis Walder, which deliberately uses the 1839 edition, the first edition to have all of the sketches, on the grounds that (a) this is the edition for which Dickens's own direct involvement was most extensive and is best understood; and (b) many of the revisions to later editions are obviously concessions, perhaps not all directly authorized by Dickens, to a Victorian audience, toning down some of the vividness of the original sketches, and were, besides, occasionally sloppy. Whether this is the case or not, it is the version I have. It also has the original illustrations by George Cruikshank.