As always, dashed-off notes, to be taken with a grain of salt; this continues the notebook begun September 2024.
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Knowing regularities is not enough; one needs to know regularities of regularities.
Shared truth has a different feel from truth received individually.
"I can remember a memory, expect an expectation, fantasize a fantasy." Edith Stein
"...the living body is consittuted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly perceived physical body of the outer world. And in this doubled givenness it is experienced as the same."
"To fantasize my body forsaken by my 'I' means to fantasize my living body no longer, but a completely parallel physical body, to fantasize my corpse."
the symbolizability of experience
Our subjectivity is intrinsically reflective of intersubjectivity. We experience our own aptness of accommodating and accounting for a perspective other than our own; we often reach for such a perspective.
We experience emotions as factors of intelligibility, as things that make sense of other things.
The Beatific Vision is how God by grace specifies our orientation toward the intelligible.
the sex principia as categories of interrelationality
Human imaginativeness and fantasy allow us to shift our environmental niche.
spiritual and corporeal works of mercy as symbolic imitations of Christ
The drum fill plays more of a role in the success of rock music than usually seems appreciated; it does a lot to maintain interest through variety and to add musical layers.
When we make a chair, we do not make it merely to be sat on but to be a chair such that it can be sat on; we do not empose bare function but form for function.
Artifact-making is organism-imitation. (This is a reason why many of Plato's & Aristotle's artifact analogies work.)
the human act of evention
"As we must not doubt our participation in his glory, so we must not doubt his participation in our nature." Leo
"Since you have discovered the grace of God in yourselves, respond by loving your own nature in him."
"The inexperienced are like those who observe from far away." Aristotle (SE 1.164b)
"A refutation (elenchos) is the contradictory of one and the same item, not merely of the name (onnomatos) but of the fact (pragmatos), using not a co-name but the same name, which results from premises by necessity (ex anankes) and doe snot include as premise what was to be proved, and by the same, in respect of the same, in teh same way, and at the same time. (SE 5.167a)
method as "procedure according to principles" (Kant)
-- Ramus uses the Homeric chain of gold to describe his method
rhetoric as the study of argument in light of the full person
inutition as like reading a word without having to spell it out (Miss Marple)
authority: the quality by which persons or institutions are the principles or sources of the actions of other persons or insitutions
Free will is the causal capability for acting that is not determined to only one possibility in such a way that prudential selection of possibilities is possible.
Prudent action is that to which free will has its natural orientation.
On some forms of compatibilism, like classical compatibilism or Strawsonian compatibilism, there is no ground to deny that institutions can have free will.
Democratic governance requires a peculiar sort of faith in people, one that is impossible to sustain without a faith in providence or at least an objective moral order in which being human lets us participate.
It seems in many cases that the point of trial by ordeal was to raise the cost of serious accusations and in others that the point was to give the authorities a safer (and face-saving) way to make rulings that could cause social or political problems.
agency, consultation, and assurance forms of mediation
the juridical presence of Christ in the sacrament of matrimony
'real' as a value term
Every measurement involves values (accuracy, precision, etc.) as an intrinsic part of the measurement.
"What was to be seen of our Redeemer has passed over into the sacraments." Leo
philosophy where faith is the interpretant (see Sadler's criticism of Deely)
each of the seven sacraments as representing one aspect of the Christian stance in prayer
Gradually one comes to sudden enlightenment.
three general forms of development of doctrine
(1) what is implicit is made more explicit
(2) what is obscure is made more clear
(3) what is vague is made more distinct
-- Garrigou-Lagrange takes (1) to be the case before Christ & (3) to be the case after; he has no (2) but would perhaps divide it between (1) and (3).
Mary as Zion (a common epithet for her in Ethiopian theology)
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption." Raymond Chandler
It is part of how we understand preferences that some may be nobler and others baser. Some may be more stable and others less, some may be more shareable and others less. What is more, it is also part of how we understand preferences that they can be first-hand or second-hand, for ourselves or for others.
"It started and took flight, circled, and afterward perched. He said: On mountain ridge, the hen pheasant. Time! Time! Zilu saluted. Three offerings and it flew." Analects 10.27
-- 'three offerings' is literally 'three smellings'; but in Xunzi the phrase is used for a sacrifice with three oficiants who do not eat during the sacrifice.
-- King Wu of Zhou in the Classic of Documents (Great Vow) uses an expression somewhat like Confucius's to mean 'seize the moment' with respect to rejuvenating the world.
timeliness and appropriate beahvior at appropriate time as the theme of Analects 10
-- Letter 72 of Cyril of Alexandria to Proclus, on why he does not directly condemn Theodore of Mopsuestia
Omnipotence is the power commensurate with all of contingent being as an effect.
the authority to swear in
Note & think about Vermigli's argument that baptism is a greater sacrament than eucharist.
gesture as way to bring the world within our circles of meaning
Whe there is a crisis, there is never only one crisis.
In a ready-made, what we sculpt is not the work but its social situation.
When Jane Austen first wrote 'Emma Woodhouse', she was not pretending to refer to Emma, but referring to Emma, a character in her story.
Languages obviously do not meet the conditions for being sets, whatever one might take them to be sets of; they are ever-shifting and their 'elements' flow into and overlap each other in complicated way.
Free verse is like apples: very good when good but often not good.
non-arbitrary fictions: center of gravity, equator, national borders, historical characters in historical fictions
-- this should be distinguished from fictions selected out of non-arbitrary elements, e.g., talking animals, where the fiction has to draw in part from the real behavior of animals but only freely and as useful for the story's characterization and plot.
Every virtue is a kind of love of being.
free will as originary alternate possibility
The success of the Church always comes thorugh many apparent failures.
"If indeed the Son is the Only-Begotten from teh Father, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son, he is not like any created being which belongs to the Father and the Son, but is with each, living and powerful, and subsisting eternally from that which is the Father and the Son." Leo (Sermon 75)
"Whatever the divine governance does in managing all things, it comes from the providence of the whole Trinity."
"Eloquence may be suitable for exhortation, reason may be effective in presuasion, but examples are more forceful than words, and it is better to teach by deeds than by words."
"The fullest remission of sins is obtained when there is one prayer and one confession of the whole Church."
"Devotion is then more efficacious and more holy when, in the works of mercy, the soul and the understanding of the whole Church is one. Public devotion must be put before one's own, and a special kind of value must be recognized where the common care watches over us."
the growth of Christianity as a punishment for the devil (Leo, Sermon 87)
If you never pronounce words incorrectly, it can only be because you have a small vocabulary.
Attribution is a selection from alternate possibilities.
"each of the gods is nothing else than the One in its participated aspect" Proclus
When we speak of the real presence, we could just as easily speak of our presence in the heavenly liturgy.
Languages are not strictly separate except pedagogically; there is a fractured thing, langugage, and languages are fragments, none wholly separate or separable, of the fractured surface.
-- religions could be organized according to mutual intelligibility in the way that is often done with languages
Truthmaker theory is not a general theory of truth but a theory of truthbearers.
We should likely not think in terms of 'truth-makers' but in terms of being as truly seen/judged/described: truths do not so much depend on being but are being in a particular mental light.
A truth-bearer is a sign, real or posited, of a truth. Truthbearers can be false, truths cannot.
What is true of a creature is a cooperative venture of Creator and creature.
Truthmaker theorists often err by starting with truthbearers and not with being.
A recurring problem in politicis is that even when relevant information changes on a dime, people's moral judgments cannot.
The eucharist is the only sacrament that in itself shows God's power as extending to created being as such.
In transubstantiation the bread and wine are changed both in their capacity for being and their way of being (this is the 'substance' part, which contrasts it with conversion = tranformation, where only the way of being is changed).
"Faith is not contrary to the senses, but concerns things to which sense does not reach." Aquinas
