Morality is tiered and not flat. (We see this very obviously with treatment of children and with situations of heightened responsibility.)
One thing that can always be guaranteed with regard to family is that your plans will not turn out the way you think.
"I must in all cases recognize the free being outside me as free being, i.e., I must limit my freedom through the concept of the possibility of his freedom." Fichte
"The finite rational being cannot assume the existence of other finite rational beings outside it without positing itself as standing with those beings in a particular relation, called a relation of right."
Rights presuppose both moral law and freedom.
If there is no obligation to be rational, there is no obligation at all.
"To ask a religious man why he believes in God is like asking a happy man why he enjoys life." William Temple
"The great aim of all true religion is to transfer the centre of itnerest and concern from self to God."
"The appeal to authority is always a rational appeal in its own nature."
"The inner meaning of History is the conflict between the Lamb and the Wild Beast -- Love and Pride."
"The essential instrument of God is the community of persons, and the Book is the instrument of the community."
Iconoclasm tends to be associated historically with attempts to further state propaganda.
Christ fulfills both ceremonial law and moral law, making them symbols of a higher order, although they function differently as symbols.
representative vs vicarious functions of signs
Hooker on internal hierarchy (1.8.6)
on perpetual prayer (5.48.1)
Multitudes, when acting as multitudes, have difficulty distinguishing reality and appearance.
"When an individual's conduct consistently appears cruel, wicked, selfish, or ungenerous, the Akan would say of that individual that 'he is not a person' (onnye onipa)." Kwame Gyekye
"The judgment that a human being is 'not a person,' made on the basis of that individual's consistently morally reprehensible conduct, implies that the pursuit or practice of moral virtue is intrinsic to the conception of a person held in African thought."
Berger's signals of transcendence: order, play, hope, damnation (outrage), humour
(1) All physical things have efficient powers.
(2) We understand efficient powers in terms of final causes.
(3) The efficient powers of physical things are intelligible.
(4) Therefore all physical things have final causes insofar as they have efficient powers.
Physics leads all physical sicences only because it serves all physical sciences. Physics is not a despot; it does not dictate terms. It provides tools that aid the development of other sciences on their own terms. When physicists have tried to dictated terms to other sciences, they have often tended to be wrong, like Lord Kelvin lecutring biologists on evolutionary timescales. Nor is surprising that they would; the physical phenomena that other sciences study in detail have to be accommodated by physicists as much as any of the paradigmatic ones with which physicists usually start. If other scientists do a good job of identifying and studying a phenomenon, physicists are in no position to dismiss it.
Complicated passions tend to resolve into simpler passions, and ulimtately into the principal passions, which have the simplest orientation to their objects.
"God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God." Berdyaev
Death affects us so deeply because we are in a sense immortal in all the wrong ways.
We are immortal enough to see something beyond any death, but not immortal enough to avoid death itself.
"The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content." Einstein
"One of the principal objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity." Gibbs
"A doubt which makes an impression on our mind cannot be removed by calling it metaphysical." Hertz
The unity of all science consists neither in its material nor in its method, but in its end.
"The sound experimental criticism of a hypothesis is subordinated to certain moral conditions; in order to estimate correctly the agreement of a physical theory with the facts, it is not enough tob e a good mathematician and skillful experimenter; one must also be an impartial and faithful judge." Claude Bernard
No k nowledge is complete until it is returned to divine principles, but one must also not try to short-circuit the route.
"Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion." Bacon
The measure of a good explanans is not whether the explanans is clear but whether the explanandum is made more clear by it.
The soil in which the state grows is one of disposition, sentiment, and representation; power in a state is always veiled by signs and feelings, sometimes reaching the point of kitsch.
A political constitution cannot be wholly imposed because it is a shared way of thinking.
Only by interpreting aspects of a theory as causal can we relate the theory to experiment.
Even were there no heaven, one could not get a proper conception of human dignity without conceiving the possibility of heaven for human persons. The human person is that for which one can conceive the possibility of heaven.
adminicular/adminiculary
adminiculum: literally, 'at-hand tool'
-- English adminicle: something that aids/supports, an auxiliary, background ornament on a coin or medal, [in Scots law] corrobrative proof
"...the remarkable manner in which Divine Providence makes use of error itself as a preparation of truth; that is, employing the lighter forms of it in sweeping away those of a more offensive nature." Newman
jobs as social entities
-- offshoots of contracts, and while individual jobs can be created, 'job' as a category has grown organically under pragmatic and ethical pressures
co-communication (coordiation among communicators making them to act as a unified communicator, cf. co-authorship)
Progress must be grown.
One can go far in philosophy with many small and humble techniques.
Human cognition is not merely subject-object; our understanding of the subject-object relation is mediated and facilitated by co-subjects (who are also co-objects).
Every civil society must recognize natural, moral, legal, and spiritual titles and claims.
Every human being is more powerful, more wise, and more good with others than they are alone. Even the worse corruptions we can perform together are worse because they are corruptions of much greater goods, as our mass follies are misdirections of much greater wisdom.
The category of relation is the category of oriented transitives, i.e., the having of (directedness to) an other-term (object) that is properly other.
respicit ad aliquid (respectus) vs se habere ad aliquid (habitudo)
As the sex principia all presuppose relatio, they are capable of inheriting relativity to what only exists in reason.
It is not the same to wear a hat and to wear a crown, not the same to sit on a chair and to sit on a throne, not the same to hold a stick and to hold a scepter.
dominium: right whereby a things is ours
dom. plenum: ownership + usufruct
dom. minus plenum: ownership where usufruct is vested in another
It is immensely naive to think that clergy without temporal power will not be subject to temporal temptations.
A king is not a temporal vicar of God; he is a minister with a limited jurisdiction.
Legal positivism holds that legislation, however it is conceived, works ex opere operato, and not ex opere operantis (whether of legislator or minister or judge or society).
Mathematical systems have to be 'loosened up' by pragmatic and heuristic elements to be of genuine use in most physical and philosophical contexts; they need to be made fit to apply to things that are not purely formal aspects of pure quantities.
Logical systems related to Boolean Algebra tend to be appropriate to situations of combination and elimiantion, its logical operators being appropriate for describing various kinds of filtering of possibilities (as we see with truth tables).
Many of our responsibilities are only had by luck.
'lore' (e.g., 'magic systems') as narrative quasi-art (it's effetively a conceptual art, i.e., a formal quasi-art)
found fantasy (obviously dreams are a significant source, but there is also Chestertonian found fantasy)
le péch´ de l'angèlisme
Every empiricism, by its nature, has fringes it cannot handle well.
"The end, sought for by morality, is above it and is super-moral." F. H. Bradley
artificial teleology -> unconscious teleology -> natural teleology // artificial selection -> unconscious selection -> natural selection
"The inward reality in the Chrisitan religion is to be found by means of externals." Trethowan
All knowledge aspires to be a stepping stone to the Beatific Vision.
Eucharist & Exodus 24:4-11
Mascall on the Eucharist seems to confuse sacrifice with consecration.
Sacraments are essentially signs of grace, but as efficacious, their causality of grace, not merely of sign.
Christ's death is not a sacrifice merely by death but by being offered by Christ, which he does both morally and sacerdotally in body and spirit on the Cross, in Session, and in the Eucharist, thereby offering in the most perfect way.
The people who best know how to play victims are always the people who make them.
An economy consists not merely in exchanges but also in a context that gives the exchanges meaning.
All beliefs are arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained in that experience alone.
Liberty of conscience is required by the common interest in public order and security; it is not limited by it, although there is a point beyond which that common interest itself, considered by itself, doe snot *require* further protection for liberty of conscience. This limitation of requirement for the liberty is not the same as limitation of the liberty itself.
PSR: 'If something exists, it is intelligible that it exists, either per se or per alium.'
Gerson's Ur-Platonism
(1) antimaterialism (Some things are neither bodies nor properties of bodies.)
(2) antimechanism (Some necessary explanations are not available to a materialist.)
(3) antinominalims (Some things are not situated individuals.)
(4) antirelativism (Some things are not purely relative to individual or collective cognition.)
(5) antiskepticism (Some knowledge is possible.)
yang : providential causation :: yin : providential permission
It is natural to human nature to be united to the divine nature, but in the Hypostatic Union it is so united beyond any human capacity.
Annales Cambriae puts Badon at 518 and Camlann at 549.
The normative does not in any meaningful way supervene on the natural, not because there are no domains where that supervenience occurs, but because the reverse supervenience and approximate correlation are also both sometimes possible. There is not and has never been any reason to think that every normative difference corresponds to some natural difference; almost everyone treats both as relating more loosely than that. It does not follow from this that there is no connection between the two; supervenience is a very specific and strict relation, and the point is that there is no obvious reason, and has never been an obvious reason, always to privilege it above other relations here, including above other broadly supervenience-like relations.
If I say, "That is cruel," everyone takes this as being a moral claim, but Mackie seems committed to saying that this moral claim describes a 'natural fact' (one he distinguishes from the 'moral fact' of 'That is wrong'.)
No matter how one divides 'natural fact' from 'normative fact', it seems that either the two must have some overlap or the account of one or the other has surprising and unexpected implications.
On chill and starlit winter night,
the tournaments of men afar
in sound and tumult making noise,
a churchyard still with snow is fair ---
History has always been more closely related to poetry than to philosophy.
One of the responsibilities of parents is to train their children from the dignity of dominion.
pratityasamutpada (dependent origination / dependent arising) as characterizing the realm of objects of cognition
-- all objects of cognition, considered only as such, exhibit duhkha (dukkha) (= unease / unsteadiness / standing instability) & anitya (impermanence) & anatman (lack of self-being)
-- dependent arising implies that things cannot be viewed properly if seen only in isolation; those who do not penetrate the principle are mired in overfocus on particular things
The begetting and raising of a child is the generating of an equal.
Peter takes Ps 69:25 to be prophetic of Judas Iscariot; but read as such, it goes on (vv. 27-28) to deny all salvation to Judas.
logical efficacy (Collingwood): the causing of a question to arise
Much of dialectic consists of removing hypotheses from the board.
What is usually called 'event causation' is really dependency between co-effects. The event of swinging the bat and the event of hitting a homerun are co-effects in which the latter is dependent on the former.
infant baptism a sign of the genuinely gratuitous nature of grace
In faith we all become like little children in the receiving of grace.
