This ends the notebook that was completed toward the end of July 2024.
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The Creed is not a menu; the parts inter-relate.
According to legend, St Endelienta (daughter of King Brychan & sister of St. Nectan & St. Dilas) was King Arthur's goddaughter; while a hermit in Trentinney, she lived on the milk of a cow, which was killed by the Lord of Trentinney when the cow stryed onto his land. King Arthur, learning of this, sent his men to kill Lord Trentinney, but Endelienta restored him back to life.
Catholic doctrine gives new light even to self-evident truths.
"Equality, liberty, and fraternity are principles which mutually suppose each other, and are resolved one in the other, as the human, the political, and the domestic solidarities are dogmas which are resolved in and mutually suppose each other." Donoso Cortes
resemblance, contiguity, and causation as elements in precedent
Philosophical skepticisms are rarely as necessary as skeptics like to pretend.
the sense of soical order as a moral endowment
We only tie sets of actions to traffic lights because they are already conceptualized as traffic lights. Nobody stops on a red light that is not already recognized as the red of a traffic light.
No punishment can be ascribed to an action without a classification that makes the action discernible in a way relevant to the punishment.
The actions associated with institutional facts are not stable and predefined. We are sometimes incentivized to stop at borders and sometimes not, sometimes incentivized to use currency as legal tender and sometimes not, etc., through all the possible actions in myriad complicated ways.
What is defined as 'naturalistic' is often due more to cultural conventions in interpretations of natural things than to what is natural.
No human being is intelligent enough always to outsmart stupidity; stupidity is more constant than human intelligence can ever be.
The sacrament of reconciliation can vary in the ways that confession and satisfaction can.
"We cannot so abstract from Christianity its specific character, as to leave the general idea of religion behind." Nevin
Love is more perfect than duty.
We are none of us writers of our own story, which depends in great measure on an entire universe other than ourselves.
identity of indiscernibles as a principle of classification
Every human being is a germinal philosopher and every Christian a germinal theologian.
Revelation reverberates.
the categories as ways things can contribute to composition and mutability
The possibility of the Incarnation is implicit in the divine idea of humanity.
Sullivan (The Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia)
The Arian Syllogism:
(1) The Word is the subject of the human operations and passions of Christ.
(2) What is predicated of the Word must be predicated of him in his divine nature (kata physin).
Therefore (C) The human operations and passions of Christ are predicated of the divine nature (kata physin).
-- According to Sullivan, Athanasius and the Alexandrines rejected the minor (2); the Antiochenes rejected the major (1).
Phil 2:13: For God is the agent (energon) in you, both the willing and the acting (energein) according to purpose.
Acting for a reason is definitely distinguishable from doing what would make sense.
Every deontic logic can be given a design interpretation.
the intellect as agent intelligibility
Rational good is not unitary but a hierarchy.
Reason itself requires that we choose reason not only for reason's sake but for truth, goodness, beauty, etc.
General principles of classification
(1) contrastive identity: Everything is what it is and is not some other thing.
(2) indiscernibility of identicals: What is the same in what it is, is to that extent classifiable as the same.
(3) identity of indiscernibles: What is classifiable as the same is to that extent the same in what it is.
(4) sufficient reason: What is classifiable as the same or different is classifiable as such for a reason.
Citizenship implies powers of voluntary association.
Factional politics is a dangerous drug.
Conflict is part of how human beings organize.
The reality of the world cannot be bracketed off from the world itself without changing the phenomenon of the world. (Conrad-Martius)
Phenomenology can only get results relative to a reduction.
Wormelow Tump -- burial place according to legend of Arthur's son Amr.
Laws of nature explain as final causes.
Whether or not you can patch together different parts of possible worlds depends on teh possible worlds and the patches.
--> Lewis's argument form recombination is entirely in terms of objects; but possible worlds are not bare collections of objects but propositionally constructed. It is consistency of propositions, not objects of terms, that fundamentally matters.
Every civil society incorporates residues of previous societies.
Commentarial traditions are always a slow process of abstraction. Positions are analogized and then generalized, arguments put into a more general structure of objection and reply, ideas detached and used in new ways, distinctions made so that terms may be defined more precisely and in ways going beyond that which receives comment.
being as contrasted with
(a) not being
(b) being other
(c) appearing to be
(d) failing to be
(e) being like
Every fine art draws out aspects of every other fine art.
energy as mass & momentum with respect to field of effect
Memorialism tends to attribute to the Eucharist the effects of Gospel-reading and preaching.
We do not start with a distinction between natural and supernatural and find revelation appropriate to each; we start with revelation and find a distinction we crudely characterize by 'natural' vs 'supernatural'.
Imitating Christ is not being nice but giving one's body and pouring out one's blood.
Lawmaking is natural to human beings in much teh same way group-forming is.
Doubting does have some of the structure of Cartesianism; but other cognitive acts have other structures.
Creation is a foundational act in ontic, moral, jural, and sacral orders.
Civil society regulates the modalities of rights by customary law, by civil etiquette, by delegation, by negotiation, and by cooperative sanction.
incorporation of rights under due process vs under privileges or immunities (nnote that due process applies to persons and privilieges & immunities to citizens)
The Ninth Amendment direclty implies that there are rights of the people not dependent on the Constitution.
Gabriel as icon of the Incarnation
Christ's human intellect always had the light of glory, and in certain events -- Baptism, Transfiguration, Ascension -- the disciples were granted a foretaste, a slight glimpse, of what Christ always knew and what we shall always know in the order to come.
"But in a being that is absolutely without any plurality, there cannot be excellence, for there can be no such thing as consent or agreement." Jonathan Edwards
Reason inevitably asks how the doctrine of the Trinity can be true, but only fools think reason asks questions in order to avoid seeking answers.
Creation is a discursive space for glory.
Human practice by its very nature produces sufficient kinds or enough-kinds, e.g., straight enough, sufficiently like an animal, etc. What is more, this applies to scientific practice, as well -- frictionless enough, etc.
problems may be ill-posed
(a) as lacking what is required for any solution to be identified (indeterminacy)
(b) as having a surfeit of solutions
(c) as having a surplus of solutions
In popular sovereignty, the juridical person of the People is by legal fiction both lord and subject.
'Business is business', 'Rules are rules', etc., are classificatory statements, not bare identities, and their pragmatic implicatures arise from this classificatory aspect.
Bullying does not create dominance hierarchies; the former is a disruption of social order, the latter a structure of social order.
"The road to norms begins with pride (or with discontent, if something has gone wrong) in craftsmanship; caring about your work, perhaps partly for instrumental reasons, but importantly for intrinsic reasons as well." Sterelny
Hume's account of personal identity is in effect a juridical account of personal identity, and he explicitly puts aspects of it in juridical terms.
No autonomy rights can be inalienable because no one can guarantee taht they will never be in a situation in which they will need others to make decissinos for them -- as children, as elderly, as ill, in an emergency, etc.
Inference to the best explanation has the structure of defeasible disjunctive syllogism; the 'best' indicates that it has to be comparative, eliminating other explanations as (relatively) defective compared to what is concluded to be the best.
People do not lose their value just because they are dead.
Moral law requires a view of persons such that they can be of boundless worth (dignity) --> postulates of freedom, immortality, and God
Virtues determine by reason appropriate choices so as to avoid extremes arisign from the unpleasant and the pleasant.
qualia as residue of classification
rites as artificial habitudes
explanations of occurrences, existences, and endurances
What Goodman's Paradox shows is that every enumerative induction presupposes a classification, not merely incidentally, but in a load-bearing way.
Israel as corporate prophet of God (cp Torrance on mediation)
technobabble as magic (wizard-stuff for science fiction)
In salvation, participation is the ground of imputation.
"Christianity as the absolute religion, *must* in the nature of the case, take up into itself, and exhibit in a perfect form, the fragments and rudiments of truth contained in all relative religions. It is not a doctrine but a divine *fact*, into which all previous religious tendencies and developments are ultimately gathered as their proper end." Nevin
The fullness of justice requires a society adequate to it.
Shannon entropy & spread of probability distribution
Discreteness in QM is behavior like a harmonic oscillator.
A term is an organization of a field of meaning.
In moral matters, human beings have a temptation to dewll on fantasies rather than realities; prudence is necessary to prevent this from corrupting everything else.
Much of human creativity is founded on our ability to see ourselves and others as persons, or in light of persons.
The feeling of obligation is often an offshoot of the feeling of caring.
The amount of boredom in seems sometimes to expand to match the amount of entertainment.
"Social scientists follow their creator, because social science was created by capitalist society." George Grant
"When leisure is open to all, then education must be opened to all."
the five administrative offices of a lord: seneschal, chamberlain, butler, marshal, cupbearer
Consequences are not unified and simple things, but have many facets; the consequences of an action look different from the perspective of our sympathy and sense of compassion than they do from the perspective of our sense of responsibility to others, or our sense of honor and shame, or our sense of humor.
We can talk about finding our meaning in life because life as we know it is essentially probationary.
Four things drive toward civil governance: defect of lordship; religion; trade; discord among powerful families. (These all seem to do so by introducing or strengthening balanced division of powers.)
Arguments from evil are generally arguments from obscurity.
Because positive law is an artifact, it is essentially a part of a broader deontic framework just like every other artifact.
What Hart treats as 'contingent connnection' between law and morality is often merely the contingency of the particular laws themselves, not of their relation to morality as such.
Law is intrinsically a means and therefore ordered to fundamental ends; however, law cannot by its nature be ordered to just any arbitrary end.
Positive law is an externalization of rational principles into contingent circumstances.
All positive legislation has an active and a passive component, the active being contributed by lawmakers and the passive being those to whom it applies (officials, subjects, citizens); all positive legislation is thus a sort of co-legislation. The people are, so to speak, a silent partner.
All laws are put forward as reasons.
"Thus, then, we have three senses in which the expression 'This *is*' might be employed. First, it may imply identity secondly, it may imply that kind of representation which derives its force merely from the effect produced upon the spectator or receiver; thirdly, it may imply that kind of representation which is dependent only upon the intention of the author or giver." R. Wilberforce
All laws of nature have an implicit reference to totality of consistently interacting things.
Deontic seriality is the principle that no possible world is a deontic 'dead end' (Melissa Fusco) -- for any possible world, there is a deontically ideal world for it (which may be itself); no matter how non-ideal the world, a deontic world can be seen from it. (Shift reflexivity is that every deontically ideal world is deontically ideal for itself.)
People deny that there is a human nature in order to avoid responsibility for it.
The key issue in any simulation is relevant simplification, how to ignore things yet still have something relevant.
Presence is a kind of loose unity of being.
update as shifting reference state to another possible world
modus ponens as a product of classification relations (genus, species)
possibilities internal to a history (e.g., even in a deterministic history, if a light switch is sometimes on or sometimes off, both are possibilities for that switch in the history) & possibilities external to a history (if it takes more than one possible history to describe the light switch)
-- note that this is a generalization of diachronic vs synchronic
We often tame the unruliness of figurative language communally, by commonly using figurative expressions in particular ways that then serve as common reference points.
Faced with contradictions, we resolve the matter by rejection of one and acceptance of teh other so that the resolution is:
(a) wholly resolved, wholly secure: by proof
(b) wholly resolved, partly secure: by probable inference
(c) partly resolved, partly secure: by rhetorical persuasion
(d) partly resolved, insecure: by plausible representation.
history of philosophy -> strongly recurrent things -> 'perennial questions'
"There are two general ways of beginning the study of philosophy. One is by chance and the other is by following someone's advice." Ralph McInerny
Philosophical reasoning regularly draws on the testimony of the skilled.
Contradictions cannot be done, simpliciter -- they are not agibile. But God can do things we might think are contradictory because we did not see beforehand a subtle distinction.
