This begins the notebook started in January 2024.
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It is in the sacrament of marriage that we most clearly see the transfiguration of the earthly and mundane (water) into the heavenly and spiritual (wine).
levels of pedagogy
(1) nominal (classification scheme)
(2) verbal definition (how classifications are used)
(3) representational (experiential familiarity)
(4) knowledge (logical ordering)
(5) understanding
"Consciousness is a being outside being within being." Novalis (tracing out an idea in Fichte)
"Science [Wissenschaft] is the projection, grapsed in signs of the essence and qualities of A Whole."
"Almost every person is already an artist to a limited extent."
"The ground of all perversity in attitude and opinion is -- mistaking the means for the end."
"Marriage is to politics what the lever is to mechanics. The state does not consist of individual people, but of pairs and societies. The condition of marriage is the condition of the state -- wife and husband."
"The art of estranging in a pleasing way, of making an object strange and yet familiar and attractive -- that is romantic poetics."
"Where there are no gods, ghosts rule."
The citizen is not the servant of the state; the state is the servant of the citizenry as a whole.
Landmarks are used in navigation to orient forward/backward, to identify points of turn, to confirm correctness of path, and to provide warning of navigational error.
the importance of doing things the hard way for training one's skill and taste
"In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You, in each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner." Buber
The -le at the end of many English verbs seems to be a frequentative, indicating a repetitive or continuous action. (E.g., sparkle, repeatedly or continually giving sparks.)
the importance of a man finding his comfortable oddity
Revolutions are forest fires, and they are fools who set them lightly.
Dogma expresses itself into praxis.
free will, chance, rationality (providence), and original sin (broadly construed) as the key principles underlying good historical scholarship
No amount of emphasis on method can eliminate the need for good taste in historical scholarship.
All human beings fictionalize the world to some extent -- by anthropocentrism and personification, by allegory, by pedagogical illustration, by transference from story to nature, and more.
development of doctrine // philosophia as shared love of wisdom
Newman's Notes of Development as ways of learning doctrine
NB Conyers Middleton's argument (in Introductory Discourses) that essential seeds of 'Popery' were established by the fifth century at the latest: "the institution of Monkery; the worship of reliques, invocation of saints, prayers for the Dead; the superstitious use of Images, of the Sacraments, of the Sign of the Cross; and of consecrated oil." He takes these to be confirmed in the eyes of the Fathers by primitive miracles, so that "if we admit the Miracles, we must necessarily admit the rites, for the sake of which they were wrought; they both rest on the same bottom, and mutually establish each other." Thus he rejects the one by rejecting the other. It is not surprising, I think, that magisterial Protestant divines often saw this as an attack on them, not despite but because of Middleton's insistence that this line of thought was a necessary implication of Protestantism. (Note that on at least a few things, like the Eucharist, Middleton traces the line all the way to the second century; he holds that the assertion of miracles, although dying out with the Apostles, was revived about fifty years later.)
From scoffing premises it is hardly surprising that one derives scoffing conclusions.
An ideal can only be fully grasped in a person.
"As we cannot give a general definition of energy, the principle of the conservation of energy siply signifies that there is a *something* which remains constant." Poincare
"An affirmative hypothetical is not simply convertible, and in respect of distribution, its consequent practically corresponds to the undistributed predicate of an affirmative categorical in which the terms are general. On the other hand, a negative hypothetical *is* simply convertible and its consequent corresponds to the distributed predicate of a negative categorical." J. N . Keynes
NB Keynes' use of Euler circles to illustrate distribution of predicate
Words shift about in meaning depending on the sentences in which they are found.
Copulas are not identity functions.
"Who is a hero? He who subdues his inclination." Ben-Zoma, in M. Avot 4.1
You are not called to complete the great task but to continue it.
"Science is permeated with values, ethics in the search for truth and aesthetics in the conceptual judgment of hypotheses." Eccles
Sensory impressions mostly affect us by jostling with other sensory impressions.
Critique is dialectical and tehrefore interpretable only in light of an end.
The existence of the Other extends my freedom.
History is woven of many histories.
Freedom cooperating with freedom is much more than two freedoms.
Always look skeptically at the self-assertion of the University; the politics may change but the nastiness of it does not.
Grace is the only revolution that ultimately matters.
the atmosphere of truth, goodness, and beauty
"Science is a continuous human struggle with what is as yet unintelligible, and this struggle is its very life. The petrified science of an inferior text-book is not science at all." J. S. Haldane
If consciousness is epiphenomenal, scientific inquiry is also epiphenomenal; if the universe is deterministic, scientific inquiry is also deterministic; if everything in the universe is a physical process, scientific inquiry is also a physical process.
"We discover natural law not because Nature is obviously an orderly system but because we labor and struggle to extract order from the chaos of experience. Natural law is a result obtained when man works for an end." E. W. Barnes
"Revolutions have never found it easy to give power to the people when revolution is accomplished. Liberals were not always democrats. The power of the people is not invariably exercise to make men more free." Owen Chadwick
"Religion is a commoner interest of most of the human race than is Physics or Biology. The great public was far more interested in Science-versus-Religion than in Science."
evolutionary selection by recurring development of habits of behavior (Lamarck takes this to be far too direct and singular)
Part of the problem with Veatch's attack on 'Hippocratic ethics' is seen in the discussion of confidentiality, in which he attributes to the Hippocratic ethics exactly the opposite of what the Hippocratic Oath says. The Oath makes it a matter of sacred oath not to disclse the secrets of the patient, and Veatch repeatedly claims that the "standard Hippocratic position" requires disclosures for benefit. This is tied to his (incorrect) reading of the Hippocratic tradition as consequentialist.
Veatch seems not to grasp that his deployment of diversity against professional codes actually works against his own common morality approach, as well, with very little modification. Nothing in Veatch's account of secular ways of knowing norms is consistent with Barth, proving the falseness of the 'common'. (And it's worth noting in connection with this that Veatch completely bungles the discussion of Catholic medical ethics.)
the Poirot conundrum -- when we know what *must* have happened, but not *that* it happened (Death on the Nile)
social functions as arising from intentions + incentives + constraints
What we identify as our interests is based on what we take to belong to us, including what belongs to us by right.
Canonical texts are, as canonical, an expression of the effectiveness of pedagogy.
Autonomy is a matter of the universality, the unboundedness, of reason.
types of cheese; fresh, soft-ripened, semi-soft, semi-firm, firm, blue
"The Categorical Imperative, in all its versions, including the Formula of Autonomy, articulates this double modal structure fo the supreme principle of reason for the domain of action: we *must* act on principles others *can* follow." O'Neill
"If blanket scepticism is not a feasible basis for life we must place trust selectively and with discrimination even when we lack any guarantee that agents or institutions of any specific sort are unfailingly trustworthy."
"The first step in a pursuit of greater trustworthiness is to ask how and how far structures are in place to ensure that institutions and individuals generally act in trustworthy ways."
"Trust will be restored only if the public have ways of judging matters *for themselves*."
Trustworthiness can be built. Trust must be grown.
faith as an organizer of our sense of loyalty and our sense of adventure
"We have made alive everything through water." Sura 21:30
"Free will is the endeavor to thank God for His beneficence." Rumi
category theory & demonstrative regress in the order of formal causes
A formal model is a logical structure (set of relations associated with set of objects) consistent with a set of admissible expressions.
the actuality operator as a what-if-actual operator
Liberty of conscience is required in some form for the community actually to be common, and thus a community, not merely an imposed association.
Human nature posits an ideal commensurate with its own potential.
"An institution is a pattern or framework of personal relationships within which a number of people cooperate, over a period of time and subject to certain rules, to satisfy a need, fulfil a purpose, or realise a value." Macbeath
Only God and the Devil actually have the patience to be utilitarians, and neither is one.
In scholarship you do not merely learn about the thing, you participate in it, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly and in more complex ways, sometimes even by a sort of opposition.
the liturgical system: the Church Triumphant reflected in the Church Militant
the penitential system: the Church Patient reflected in the Church Militant
the habitudo between subject and predicate arising from their locations in a common classification
Every person is a sign of God's holy work.
The unity of the Church is not based on ambiguity.
Understanding the spiritual aspects of sex requires extraordinary ascetic discipline; it is purification, not sexual experience, that creates the insight.
kinds of murder mystery
time-shifted murder
time-shifted alibi
person-shifted alibi (decoy)
time-delay (prepared) murder (trap)
remote-initiated murder (mediated)
-- the alibi must apply to the relevant person at the right time, in such a way as to prevent the murder being able to prevent the murder being able to be perpetrated by that person (are there stories that disrup this latter that aren't traps? Right person at right time, but in fact the alibi only apparently shows that they couldn't do it. [place-shifted alibis! mediated murder])
-- decoy can be intentional or accidental/opportunistic
possibility-exclusion scenes, possibility-discovery scenes
whodunit, howdunit, whydunit, howcatchem
Mos Def's characterization of pop music: "compatible with shopping"
Locked Room solutions
(1) Locked Room is after murder (time-shifted).
(2) Locked Room has non-obvious access.
(3) Murderer was nonobviously in the Locked Room.
Jane Kalmes:
The victim was (1) alone (or alone with patsy) in a (2) locked room in which (3) he died.
-- eliminate (1): murderer was in the room
-- eliminate (2): there was actually access
-- eliminate (3): the death was at a different time
-- any form of apparently impenetrable security or apparently unsurmounted loneliness can be the structure of a 'locked room'
The human body is always already juridical.
Hegelian philosophy can be seen as a gesture toward the hypercivilizational tier of philosophy, but is too crude to be successful at that level.
