Everything is sublime insofar as it suggests either the cosmos or God.
Times cannot be distinguished except by means requiring causal inference.
Schellenberg: S is inculpably in doubt about the truth of G if (1) S believes that epistemic parity obtains between G and not-G, and (2) S has not knowingly (self-deceptively or non-self-deceptively) neglected to submit this belief to adequate investigation.
-- One problem with this is that it's unclear that actual epistemic parity (as opposed to simple uncertainty) ever occurs for anything.
-- Schellenberg massively underestimates the issues raised by the possibility of self-deception -- conduct in other contexts is not adequate for rejecting self-deception as a diagnosis in a given context, and reluctance is also not a sign of non-self-deception except under very peculiar conditions.
-- (1) essentially shows that using 'doubt' in Schellenberg's argument presupposes an already existing isosthenia argument.
-- In other contexts, 'adequate investigation' generally means 'investigation adequate to discover the truth'.
-- Schellenberg's argument seems to confuse self-deception with unusual negligence.
"Without the Naam, cursed is the body, which shall be taken back by Death." SGGS 192
Proof is inherently normative.
Civil society is simultaneously political, economic, and cultural.
Every human soul has both austere-seeming deserts and riotous swamps.
The world of the Fall is a world of starvation. In every age one finds humanity starving of something -- of meaning, of order, of social connection, of reason, of daring, of many other things in ever-varying proportions. Sometimes this is through bare lack. Sometimes it is because it is, by some structure of incentives, hoarded and rationed. Sometimes it is because people have developed a habit of gorging themselves on some non-nutritious substitute. But everywhere there is starvation, in every age.
?: Is there a relation between universal application of excluded middle and the thesis that being is univocal?
excluded middle as applying in matters of being with respect to a given genus or order of being
'What is must be explained by nature or by cause' as PSR
natural change is when natural things
(1) change
(2) according to a principle inherent in themselves (nature)
(3) to determinate end
(4) that is the same for things with that kind of nature, when not interefered with.
-- (2) rules out extrinsic motion, (3) rules out chance, (4) rules out violent motion
divine discipline and satispassion
the capacity of modalities to serve as symbols of other modalities (e.g., 'always' for 'necessary')
identity: definition :: noncontradiction : proof :: excluded middle : division :: sufficient reason : explanation
"The One who created the thing, understands it; He has fashioned all of this. / Says Nanak, the Lord and Master is Infinite; He alone understands the value of His Creation." SGGS 206
"I cannot describe Your Manifestations, O Treasure of Excellence, O Giver of peace. / God is Inaccessible, Incomprehensible, and Imperishable; He is known through the Perfect Guru." SGGS 207
"All evil springs -- it is a good old saying -- from enjoying what we ought to use (wealth and material comforts) and using what we ought to enjoy (intelligence, love, beauty, religion); in other words, from reversing the true relation of means and ends." Bosanquet
"The reformatory theory, in its purity, *is* arbitrary and cruel. Revenge may be exhausted by a term in prison; it is the work of reformation to the duration of which no sane man can profess to set a limit."
"The true place of deterrence and reformation in punishment is simply to determine the method and degree of details which no estimate of moral guilt can supply."
"But the very work of love in punishment is to stamp and brand the evil, by exhibiting it in its true light."
"Every judgment exhibits a whole in its parts, and parts as contributory to a whole."
To name is to relate to a classification.
the poets as the collective font of honor for the human race
Despite the name, a critic is not a judge of values but a discoverer of them in the work; where judgment enters is in that doing this requires finding promise of values and fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of that promise.
the experience of elementary benevolence (the suitability of the natural world to life and joy, as a sort of companion)
The legal system is more fundamental than the state; the latter is a child of the former.
Sometimes one must learn how to begin to be belonging.
Have and habere are not etymologically related.
All doing presupposes a possibility of doing; this possibility must be either due to some other doing or necessary. There cannot be an infinite regress in possibility of doing that is due to another doing; therefore there must be some possibility of doing that is necessary. But all genuine possibility resides in some actuality. Therefore there is a necessary actuality.
necessisimilitude
The possibility of believing that God exists (or does not) presupposes the existence of God.
"To know is primarily and principally to seize a non-self which in its turn is capable of seizing and embracing the self: it is to live with the life of another." Rousselot
"Intelligence is a form of life, and of living things it is the most perfect." Aquinas
"If, then, intelligence is perfect and supreme life, it is because it can reflect upon itself and because at one and the same time it can know reality and know itself." Rousselot, closely following SCG 4.11
If Kantianism about the categories were true, every mind would be a god.
"Now the more intense is the life of an intellectual being, the less limited is it to the narrow circle of itself." Rousselot
"By definitinon it is necessary to know oneself to know truth as such."
"The human soul is intelligent because it has a 'passive capacity' for all being; God is intelligent because He is the active Source of all being."
"Just as science is demonstrative reason's substitute for the pure idea, so system is a substitute on the part of intellectual imagination for science."
"Symbol lies at the very limit of systematic construction. There is no change of method, and all symbolic philosophies conceal a dialectic enthymeme. The major premise is furnished by the principle current in the Middle Ages that the world of sense somehow represents the world of spirit; in the minor some sensible thing is taken for its power to represent in a particular way the reality of the spiritual object in mind."
The joy that is an act of charity is not a forced smiling.
Genuine understanding opens up to the doing of good and the contemplating of beauty.
No one loves his neighbor who does not love the Church.
truth as being insofar as it can be in another; truth as being insofar as it is not merely present but can be re-presented
"The truth is the first of the mercies that Jesus offers to the sinner." Robert Cardinal Sarah
It takes worlds of a thousand kinds to lay bare the human heart.
"Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on." J.R.R. Tolkien
Unus homo sustinet plures personas.
active and passive sovereignty
The liberty that is most relevant to civil society is a jural status, which comes with a norm, recognized by society, of being an originary social principle and not merely instrumental to another. It is in this sense that even an infant may be a free citizen.
three orientations of a person in society: the good, the right, the holy
The compulsion exercized by a state is in fact the incentivized voluntary cooperation of persons.
household - neighbor-society - civil society
neighbor-societies: proximal, tribal, contractual
-- we can then have 'neighbor-societies of civil societies', i.e., leagues and realms
"An institution may have grown up without special ordinance, or may have been called into existence by an act of public will. But it has always the character of being recognised *as if* it had been 'instituted' or established to fulfil some public or quasi-public purpose." Bosanquet
All kinds of sameness reflect in different ways the divine unity.
The divine sameness is that which both absolute and relative sameness, both real sameness and rational sameness, both symmetric sameness and asymmetric sameness, reflect.
It is easy to forget that stock phrases become stock beacuse people like using them.
Martyrdom is merely crucifragium; we are all in a dying way.
The universe and all in it has God as end. Normally things of the world reflect this finality by being, order, and intelligible and sensible beauty, but at times they do so in a more specific way, and tehse are signs and wonders.
Beliefs are ways we shape ourselves and therefore the world.
Joseph : active life :: Mary : contemplative life
All poetry is a kind of xenoglossy.
Society arises out of an ordered cooperation to which one can be loyal or treacherous, and this is what social contract theorists were crudely trying to depict.
People often have a weirdly spiritualized view of metaphor, as if it were an airy meaning that had to be made earthy; but the reverse is true -- metaphor is just the stony turned breathy.
If determinism is dependent on the way things are at time t, whether or not an actual system is deterministic can depend on the clock, and presupposes, as prior, the measurement of time.
Fictions educate us in fiction, which all human beings need to know.
Civilization requires more of a creed than just faith in civilization.
