Dashed Off XVI

 Neoplatonism is a philosophy of intelligible experience.

Human beings overflow their experiences through story, art, and social connection.

Everything Denethor sees and infers is correct at a certain level, but he has lost his ability to contextualize it properly. Insight without proper understanding therefore becomes the seed of despair, all because pride removes the safeguards against loss of understanding.

The cosmos is evangelical, a good manifestation of divine goodness.

If we were to accept the idea that the laws of nature evolve, this would require a vast space of possibilities through which evolution occurred, which would require something actual as its sufficient reason.

"Now that is properly credible which is not apparent of itself, nor certainly to be collected, either antecedently by its cause, or reversely by its effect, and yet, though by none of these ways, hath the attestation of truth." John Pearson (he contrasts attestation and manifestation)
"Whatsoever is, must of necessity either have been made or not made; and something there must needs be which was never made, because all things cannot be made. For whatsoever is made, is made by another, neither can any thing produce itself; otherwise it would follow, that the same thing is and is not at the same instant in the same respect; it is, because a producer; it is not, because to be produced: it is therefore in being, and is not in being, which is a manifest contradiction. If then all things which are made were made by some other, that other which produced them either was itself produced or was not; and if not, then have we already an independent being; if it were, we must at last come to something which was never made, or else admit either a circle of productions, in which the effect shall make its own cause, or an infinite succession in causalities, by which nothing will be made; both which are equally impossible." (he takes this only to imply a supreme maker when considering these not singly but in their order and connection)

Paley's watch argument is perhaps derived from Pearson's Exposition.

"Grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace presented to each is such as to bring him to heaven; but it is sufficient for a beginning." Newman

the solipsism of the world

law : form :: right : matter
(law as aliqualis ratio juris)

common good at moral, jural, and sacral levels

The Beast of the sea has ten crowns because it claims authority that is usurped, a surplus of authority beyond what it can have a right to.

Every human action is filled with more meaning than any external observer could ever infer from bare observation alone.

We communicate not with bare signs but as participants in a shared system, the human system, constituted by reason and common feeling and overlapping experience-types.

We are not purely external observers to each other; our views overlaps the views of otehrs, and we observe as partly in the know.

The First Amendment protects the means by which the People form customary law and decide representation.

origin, order, overflow

Part of our appreciation in hearing singing arises from our ability to sing ourselves.

Narrators are posited in reading; authors can take advantage of this.

Make-believe is a way of socializing the world.

"Le joujou est la premièr initiation de l'enfant a l'art, ou plutôt c'en est pour lui la première réalisation...." Baudelaire

"The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of our first years." Robert Louis Stevenson

We ourselves are the primary props for make-believe. In using others, we extend them a courtesy of equality; if we can be a pirate, a stick can be sword.

music // ornamental decoration

Where Walton says 'imagination', one can often just substitute 'appearance', and his account of imagining seems even more obscure than the notions of seeing-as that he criticizes.

Adults do something definitely make-believe, and these cases are *palpably different* from even acting on a stage.

Sometimes when we say 'I imagine', we mean 'I posit myself to imagine'.

It is odd to talk of fictional and nonfictional *statements*; these adjectives more properly apply to works, stories, descriptions, etc. Merely looking at a statement is inadequate to tell whether it is fictional or not.

'Uttering fiction' is like 'uttering refutation'; it is at least partly perlocutionary, which is why it sounds odd.

degrees of fictionality

the actual world makes true the statement, 'There is a hole in the ground', vs. The author makes true the statement 'There is a hole in the ground'

There is no imaginative state that is make-believe; make-believe is a doing.

We can extrapolate from the real world: A B therefore complete for D. We can extrapolate from the real world even when we know the real world deviates: A B D so consider A B C.

accepting something for the sake of argument & accepting something for the sake of story

Imaginings, just like believings, may be corect or incorrect, and in fact in imagining we are often aiming at the true.

We don't imagine propositions as such but referents.

Gricean maxims as supplementation rules for fictions (they arguably do better as such than Walton's own rule).

Dreams are not fictions but are more like entertainments of possibilities or like loose proposals for drafts that could become fictional tales and descriptions.

Fictional worlds are the actual world, fictionalized.

the germinality of a prop for a fictional world

To exist in a society is to be the object of at least minimal indirect friendly action for that society.

It is clearly a function of biographies, text-books, and newspaper articles to serve as props for imagination, pace Walton, because that is how they inform, and why they each have a style; they are aids to imagining what happened, or what happens, or what is happening. Thisi s why they often tell us explicitly to imagine or propose little stories and fictional descriptions, or elaborate hypothetical situations. Where they difer from fiction in the usual sense is that this function is secondary.

The opposite of fiction is not reality but something more like reception.

All societies are structured by allegiances and alliances.

Waht signifying and signified and interpretant share might be called the vicus -- the signifying being that which is carrying on in the place (vice gerens) of the signified, and it seems that the two share vicus because of the interpretant.

A significant part of education is familiarizing yourself with what you are learning, and familiarization is not always dignified.

Isaiah 28:15 and the idea of demonic pacts

Each sacrament is a picture of the Church.

Machiavell, Discourses 2.2: "the purpose of a republic is to enfeeble and weaken, in order to increase its own body, all other bodies"

The fiction/nonfiction distinction is not a fundamental feature of language but a classification of language uses in terms of what they can be useful for.

etiological, physiological, and intentional functions of elements in stories

Telling a story does not commit one to implicational closure, which has to be added by the ends for which one tells the tale; nor does it always allow contradiction explosion, because available possibilities may switch and shift during the telling.

No consequentialist whose consequentialism appeals to an overall state can run an argument from evil.

the privation theory of badness of argument

Reasoning about implied fictional truths is always defeasible, involving defaults and presumptions, and ambivalent often leaving things indeterminate.

homage < hominaticum (pertaining to the man)
fealty < fidelitas

To be an animal is to live within a system of natural rewards and punishments

alethiology
(1) the concept of truth and its primary determinations
--- --- (a) truth proper and ontological truth
--- --- (b) formal truth and instrumental truth
--- --- (c) natural truth and artificial truth
--- --- (d) primary truth and secondary truth
--- --- (e) approximate truth
--- --- (f) true and false
(2) truthmaking and verification
--- --- (a) truthbearers
--- --- (b) truthmakers
--- --- (c) use and assessment of truthbearers ('theories of truth')
--- --- (d) truth values in a model
--- --- (e) the potentially true and the actually true
(3) manifestation and exemplation
--- --- (a) manifestation
--- --- (b) objective causation
--- --- (c) exemplar causation
(4) unity of truth
--- --- (a) unity by correspondence
--- --- (b) unity by coherence
--- --- (c) pragmatic unity
--- --- (d) infinite intelligible
(5) truth as good
--- --- (a) intellectual disposition to and aptitude for the truth
--- --- (b) mode, species, and order
--- --- (c) inquiry-relative values of truth
(6) splendor of truth
--- --- (a) experience of truth
--- --- (b) clarity and proportion in integrity
--- --- (c) intellectual beauty as a mark of truth
--- --- (d) truth as an objective cause of love
(7) falsehood
--- --- (a) privation of truth
--- --- (b) false by privation of mode
--- --- (c) false by privation of species
--- --- (d) false by privation of order
--- --- (e) the sophistical and merely apparent truth

Whitehead's prehension gives too little role to anticipation.

Degrading or breaking safeguards often leads to short-term benefits.

Our capacity to relate to others is increased and deepend by overcoming both internal resistance and external impediment.

In participation, the participated functions as if it were a kind of genus of participating.

(1) We ought to strive to promote the highest good.
(2) Therefore the highest good must be possible.
(3) Thereore there must be something actual such that the highest good is possible.

As we better understand a field, we often find that the explananda become harder to explain; our explanations work for what we originally saw in need of explanation, but the explaining shows there to be more to be explained.

interactive design in biological systems (one biological population shaping another biological population, like ants termites, or toxoplasma ants)

Many of the things we experience, we experience through experiencing them with others; the sympathetic experience is part of how we experience them.

The patient is first physician (although sometimes others have this role, e.g., parents for children, or immediate caregivers for those who cannot care for themselves).

hierarchy ; subsidiarity :: collegiality : solidarity :: conciliarity : common good

Orders are in a sense both sacraments and sacramentalia. (This is most obvious with the diaconate.)

One reason for freedom fo speech is that people need to be able to defend themselves against public-opinion punishments.

Bayesianism as an account of verisimilitude

Vashti as type of sin (Chastek)

Torah as sign and expression of divine goodness (Ps 25:8-10)

safeguards and fallbacks as purdential instruments of trust

The Products of Productive Skill

 Richard Dawkins recently got some attention due to having spent a weekend with Claude (which he renamed Claudia) and deciding that it must be conscious. Plenty of people have been making fun of him for it, but it's worth thinking about a bit more seriously.

The fundamental obstacle that has always been in the way of 'artificial intelligence' or 'artificial consciousness' is that computers do not directly imitate intelligence or consciousness at all. This goes back to the beginning. Computers were developed by using machinery to imitate not human thinking but logical systems, an abstract tool that human minds produce and construct in order to facilitate specific aspects of thinking. Computers do not imitate the human mind; they imitate products of the human mind. And of course, the imitations can be made arbitrarily good. Machinery imitating a logical system can act according to the operations of the logical system in ways far better than we can -- precisely because our thinking is not a logical system but something far more obscure that can build logical systems. They can do better acting according to logical system because they are logical systems. We are not, and so we do not do it as well.

This is not any less true of generative transformers or LLMs. They do not imitate human thinking. They imitate products of human thinking. Human beings do not think in text; they think and communicate their thinking, and can make texts of various kinds to facilitate various aspects of thinking and communicating. Generative algorithms statistically compress a vast collection of mathematically described texts in such a way that, given an input text, they can extrapolate a related output text. Given a sufficiently large body of a certain kind of text, they can easily construct an analogous text that is mathematically related in the entire space of mathematically described texts.

Thus there is a sense in which Dawkins is right. Faced with the output of these programs, you are in fact interacting with consciousness. Everything it produces is the sort of thing produced by consciousness. Where he goes wrong is in assuming that this is a sign of the program being conscious. The program is not directly imitating consciousness. It is imitating a tool that conscious human beings produce and construct for their use. It is an imitation of one kind of product of consciousness, based on a mathematical description of a vast number of such products. 

We have to be careful here. It is entirely possible that in imitating the products of human thought we might sometimes indirectly imitate something about the processes of thinking itself. But it is important to grasp that this is entirely incidental to what we are actually doing with computers; when it happens, it is for some other reason than anything we are doing in computing and programming. What we are doing with computers is imitating, in a machine, the products, the constructs, the results of the human mind. We are never directly imitating the human mind. This should be quite obvious, even if for no other reason than that common views of how the human mind work have massively changed multiple times in ways that are simply not replicated by the history of computing. (The limited parallels have generally gone the other way, with people speculating that some aspect of what we do in computing has parallel in human thinking. Most of these analogies have failed, although some, again, may have something to them.)

We can thus expect to be here again. Human intelligence produces many products today of which there were no traces at all two thousand years ago. Two thousand years from now, human intelligence will produce, in massive quantities, products of which we have no inkling. And people will eventually make machines to imitate, and to produce imitations of, those products of the human mind, as well. No doubt people will also then gasp, and say, "This shows intelligence!" And, of course, so far they will be right. It shows our intelligence.

It is a peculiarity of human art or productive skill (ars, techne) that the ability to make something can be shifted to make imitations of that something. The miracle of machinery is that you can use human productive skill to create structured processes and abstract designs that can themselves be imitated by physical objects in structured organizations, and the miracle of modern robotics and computing is that some of these structured processes and abstract designs can be processes and designs facilitating the making of structured processes and abstract designs. We can make tools to facilitate making tools, and make physical systems that imitate those tools. There is no intrinsic limit to how far we can go with this. No doubt centuries from now we'll be making tools that make systems of tools for designing entirely new systems of tools for all sorts of arbitrary ends, and so on and so forth.

But in all of it, we will be imitating the products of art, skill, intelligence, consciousness, mind. If it gets us any closer to understanding art, skill, intelligence, consciousness, mind, it will be by accident, because none of these things are what we are directly imitating when we are doing anything with computing.

By Oak and Ash and Thorn

 A Tree Song
by Rudyard Kipling

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good Sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn)!
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,
Or ever Æneas began;
Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,
When Brut was an outlaw man;
Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town
(From which was London born);
Witness hereby the ancientry
Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard mould,
He breedeth a mighty bow;
Alder for shoes do wise men choose,
And beech for cups also.
But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,
And your shoes are clean outworn,
Back ye must speed for all that ye need,
To Oak and Ash and Thorn! 

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth
Till every gust be laid,
To drop a limb on the head of him
That anyway trusts her shade:
But whether a lad be sober or sad,
Or mellow with ale from the horn,
He will take no wrong when he lieth along
'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But---we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth---
Good news for cattle and corn---
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good Sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn)!
England shall bide till Judgement Tide,
By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

Plenipotentiary

...Our Immanuel, our Brother and Friend, reigns in heaven; human nature is crowned in him, adored in him, revered in him. In this Plenipotentiary, in this Firstling, God welcomes our entire race as well as the recovery of his righteousness and the revelation of his love for our race. He has glorified himself in us; in the story of our fall and our redemption he has publicized the supreme majesty of his being and his will to the world, to angels, and to people. The greatest sinner who repents and believes in him gives God greater glory than the sky with its stars is able to declare his fame.

[Johann Georg Hamann, "Thoughts on Church Hymns", The Complete London Writings, John W. Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025) p. 400.]

Links of Note

 * Jordan Poss, Lying and Counting the Explicable

* William Morgan, What Fictionalists Get Wrong about the Value of Winning (PDF)

* Claudio Calosi, Samuele Iaquinto, & Roberto Loss, Fragmentalism: Putting All the Pieces Together (PDF)

* There Exists an X, The medieval animal scandal

* Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche, at "Open Culture"

* Katherine Dee, Why ChatGPT Is Obsessed with Goblins: The Weirdest Possible Explanation, at "Pirate Wires"

* Alex Spieldenner, A Personalist Theory of Moral Values, at "Aquinas and Beyond"

* Ben Landau-Taylor, The Lifecycle of an Apocalypse, at "Palladium"

* David Liebesman, Types and Tokens, at the SEP

* Patrick McKenzie, Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud, on the recent discovery that the Southern Poverty Law Center was engaging in bank fraud, at "Bits about Money"

* It's from 2017, but this discussion of the structure of the Choose Your Own Adventure books is very interesting.

* Edward Feser, The transmission theory of authority

Fortnightly Book, May 3

 Charles Pierre Péguy was born in 1873 in Orléans. He attended the  École normale supérieure, which gave him a lifelong distaste for French intellectuals; he left without formally graduating. Instead he threw himself into practical socialism. He was a vehement Dreyfusard. When he married in 1897, he started a small publishing house. This didn't quite work the way he hoped, but it did eventually lead to his founding of a literary magazine, La Cahiers de la Quinziane, in 1900. The magazine played a role in pushing Péguy away from socialism; it gave him an independence and critical distance from the major players in French socialist that grew over time. Maintaining it kept him in continual financial difficulties, but it also gave him a venue for publishing his works, and was helped out by his literary friends occasionally giving him their own works to publish in it. All of this came to an end with the First World War; he became a lieutenant in the French Army and died from a shot in the head on September 5, 1914 on the first day of the First Battle of the Marne, before his company had even reached the battle, perhaps having been ambushed by the Germans.

Péguy spent much of his life as an agnostic with loosely Catholic aesthetic interests, mostly tied to his French patriotism, then the last part of his life he 're-became' (in his words) a Catholic, although he was usually non-practicing. (At the time there were lots of French Catholics who were firmly Catholic as to belief but only very occasionally attended church and whose Catholic practices were sporadic and unsystematic at best. Many of these cultural Catholics -- more than merely nominal, devout after a fashion with a devotion that mingled with French patriotism, but not very active at all in the actual liturgical life of the Church -- would wake to play a significant role in the post-War religious revival in France, but Péguy, of course, did not survive to see it.) As is sometimes the case with French Catholics, he became massively more critical of the Church after his explicit turn to Catholicism. He started writing poetry about the time he 're-became' Catholic; he had up to that point been mostly an essayist.

The fortnightly book is a selection of his poetry, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, translated by Pansy Pakenham.

Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From the beginning account, Basil II:

The circumstances in which the Emperor John Tzimisces met his death have already been described [in the history of Leo Diaconus]. Basil and Constantine, the sons of Romanus, were now the legitimate heirs to an Empire which through the efforts of their predecessor had won many triumphs and greatly increased its power. (p. 27)

Summary: Michael Psellus's Chronographia is a jaunty and opinionated look at fourteen(-ish) Roman Emperors in the Byzantine period. They are:

(1) Basil II (976-1025). His father was Romanos II, but when his father died, he and his brother Constantine were too young to take the throne. The throne was held instead first by Nicephoros Phocas and then by John Tzimisces; then his mother and great-uncle managed to make sure that it would pass to Basil. Michael Psellus sees his work as a sort of sequel to a historical work by Leo Diacanus, which ended at the death of John Tzimisces. Michael Psellus mostly focuses on the revolt of Sclerus, however; Sclerus was a major general and a sort of leftover problem from the days of Nicephoros Phocas, who had been his rival. The revolt would be of some significance for Basil's approach as Emperor; he became very motivated to prevent further revolts, and shifted a number of policies with this end in view. (This is one of the things that led to the epoch-defining alliance between the Empire and Kievan Rus.) Ascetic in tastes, contemptuous of scholars, and immensely practical in attitude, Basil did a great deal to strengthen the treasuries and the military defenses of the Empire.

(2) Constantine VIII (1025-1028). He inherited from his brother Basil, to whom he had been junior co-emperor. In fact, since technically he had been co-emperor since the death of his father, he had the longest Imperial reign up to this point, after Augustus himself. Not that he ever did the Empire much good. As lazy and self-indulgent as his brother was practical and industrious, he poured money out of the treasuries for pointless projects and arbitrary gifts for favorites, neglected the military, and fostered an atmosphere of corruption at court. (Indeed, while Michael Psellus is not in a position to make this assessment, later historians generally regard Constantine's reign as the beginning of a long decline in the Empire, because he created problems that were never really solved.)

(3) Romanos III (1028-1034). A good-looking, bookish man, Romanos was married to Zoe, Constantine's daughter. Michael Psellus tells us that this was the first of the Emperors he discusses whom he met, although it was only once and when he was quite young. He does not have a high opinion of Romanos, though; he regards him as a pseudo-intellectual fool, indulging his mediocre literary talents as if he were going to live forever, despite the fact that he and his wife were both getting on in years. He was incompetent in  military matters -- sure enough of his intelligence to think that he knew what he was doing but in fact lacking all competence in that area. During his reign, Zoe began to have a scandalous semi-public relationship with a handsome young man named Michaell a former moneychanger; Michael Psellus seems to waver a bit over whether he was a completely unaware and therefore a complete idiot or whether he suspected but turned a blind eye. He died in quite ill health, but inevitably there were rumors that Zoe and Michael killed him. Michael Psellus is neutral about this, but he does think that the two acted in ways that accelerated his end.

(4) Michael IV (1034-1041). Zoe essentially made her paramour Romanos's successor by marrying him, against the advice of everyone. She quickly learned, however, that Michael was not quite the man she thought he was; put into the most powerful office in the realm and no longer required to act a part, he mostly acted ungratefully to Zoe. As Emperor, Michael Psellus thinks Michael had a number of redeeming qualities, but his power-grabbing family was a constant source of trouble at the court, and Michael was also an epileptic, which, as time went on, increasingly interfered with his duties.

(5) Michael V (1041-1042). Michael IV was succeeded by his nephew, also called Michael, in part because Zoe was convinced to go along with it. Unlike his uncle, the nephew was a rascal and mostly unfit to hold the throne; he was obsessed with being sole ruler, so he exiled Zoe on accusations of trying to poison him. This turned out to be an error on his part; Zoe was, if not exactly popular, a very known quantity to the populace and to the elites, and his apparent ingratitude to her sparked anger in all classes of Byzantine society. The City literally revolted in her favor, a mob revolution, but unlike most mob revolutions it actually had an effect because the Emperor was caught completely by surprise. Zoe, in exile, was not at hand, but her younger sister Theodora was (ironically because she had been shoved into a nunery in the reign of Romanos to get her out of the way), and became, willy-nilly, a symbol for the mob, and was declared Empress by them. Michael fled, but was arrested and blinded (thus making him ineligible for the throne).

(6) Zoe (with Theodora) (1042). The two sisters neither liked nor trusted each other, but were stuck. Theodora had to bring her sister home, under the circumstances. Zoe wanted to kick Theodora out, but under the circumstances she couldn't practically do so. So Zoe became senior Empress and Theodora junior Empress. After the bad experience with the two Michaels, they tried their hands at ruling on their own. Michael Psellus was certainly not impressed by their effort, and seems quite down on Empresses in general, but it's true that none of the Empresses in his lifetime were at all a good fit for the practical administration of an entire Empire. Ultimately, the alliance between Zoe and Theodora was not sustainable. Zoe, having been married twice, was allowed once more under Orthodox marriage laws, so to get Theodora out, she tried again. After considering a few options, she picked one of her former lovers.

(8) Constantine IX (1042-1055). I have to confess, the account of Constantine IX was the one place in the work that I bogged down a bit; it is by far the most confusingly written portion of the book. But Psellus perhaps cannot be blamed for that, because Constantine's reign is the most baffling in the period. Constantine was extraordinarily active as an Emperor, but his activity was good or bad for the Empire almost at random. He massively depleted the treasuries. He debased the coinage. He made an active attempt to reform corruption in the aristocracy and mostly failed. Some of his projects, military or civil or religious, worked out; others failed disastrously; many betrayed a stranged sense of priorities. Michael Psellus, who was in his twenties and in the beginning of a his full courtly career, is clear that he liked Constantine personally; he is also clear that he did not have a high opinion of much of what Constantine did, but seems to have had the view that overall Constantine's reign was mostly good.

(9) Theodora (1055-1056). Zoe having died, Theodora became sole ruler after Constantine's death. Theodora decided that she would rule the whole thing herself, and even Psellus does admit that given her experience, she had some reason to think that entrusting the throne to a man would not end well. If you make a man an Emperor, you cannot count on him being grateful. Michael Psellus does, however, regard her as somewhat foolish and unfit for the throne; she was also in her seventies at this point. Nonetheless, he can't find much to say in criticism of her; the Empire mostly did well, and while she was a bit harsh, she mostly handled the aristocracy well. Her primary failure was one of finding competent administrators. (However, Sewter, the editor, thinks Michael Psellus was perhaps biased against some of her choices for political reasons.)

When Theodora, the last of the Macedonian Dynasty of the Roman Empire, was ill, she refused to marry or even at first appoint an heir. The nobles at her bedside picked one of their number to succeed her, and, according to Psellus, she agreed to it. (Other sources are apparently not so sure that her consent was not a fiction pushed by the nobles choosing her successor.)

(10) Michael VI (1056-1057). Psellus says that the new Emperor, Michael VI, was probably the best candidate on hand, but he is also clear that this wasn't saying much, and it is clear that Michael did not really understand how to balance power. His sidelining of the military and addiction to bestowing honors on the court created a crack between essential Imperial institutions that would continue to plague the Empire beyond his own reign. And, unsurprisingly, it is dangerous for an Empire to treat its military badly. Discontent began to brew, and Michael was not at all the man to handle it. The discontent soon gathered around a general, Isaac Comnenus, and after some early failure of negotiation, it broke out into revolt. Psellus was in the thick of this; he was sent by Michael in a diplomatic embassy to negotiate the matter before it gathered too much momentum to stop. At least according to himself, he was key in salvaging the situation. Isaac was promised co-emperor status, putting him in line for the throne. However, the attempt to make peace did not hold; a pro-Isaac revolt broke out in the City, and the Patriarch convinced Michael to abdicate.

(11) Isaac Comnenus (1057-1059). With Isaac, the Empire suddenly found itself again under the control of a shrewd and practical man. Recognizing the fragility of the situation, Isaac immediately, before the day of his coronation was even done, set about diffusing the military situation by giving his troops leave to go home. Then he set out to patch the holes in the ever-leaking Imperial treasuries. Psellus's primary criticism of him is that he tried to do too much too quickly; if he had begun a gradual progress, Psellus thinks he might have done the Empire immense good, but he was trying to ram things through in ways that did not always work. In Psellus's metaphor, instead of treating the illness he tried to solve the problem by radical surgery. Mostly ascetic in tastes, the Emperor nonetheless had a passion for hunting, which eventually led to his death.

(12) Constantine X (1059-1067). On his deathbed, Isaac named his most loyal supporter, Constantine Ducas. Michael Psellus is highly laudatory of Constantine; the editor, Sewter, remarks that Constantine was "a mediocre person" (p. 331), and, if anything, that seems to be more generous than most historians will grant. In truth, it becomes difficult at this point to see how much of Psellus's commentary is history and how much of it is politicking, and how much of the praise for Constantine is due to his actual skill as opposed to Constantine's obvious support for Michael Psellus's own career. In Constantine's reign, the Empire lost much of the West to the Normans and much of the East to the Turks; Psellus's entire comment on this situation is, "In war he achieved several successes, without undue effort, and wore the garlands of victory" (p. 332)! Constantine was brought low by sickness.

(13, sort of) Eudocia (1067). Constantine's wife Eudocia found herself practically in charge of the Empire; Constantine's sons were too young. She has an odd position, in that no one has been able to decide whether she should be regarded as a reigning Empress or as a Regent who was informally treated as ruling Empress. Despite the fact that she throws off the count, Psellus seems inclined to treat her mostly as Empress in her own right; indeed, she is the only Empress of whom Psellus has a somewhat-favorable opinion. He regards her as a clever woman with a good sense of how to wield authority. However, he thinks she was much wiser before she became Empress. Although she was supposed to reserve the throne for her son, Michael, she seems to have had no great opinion of him, so she married and shoved her new husband on the throne. Other sources note that very few people protested, because the crisis with Seljuk Turks in the East, begun in Constantine's reign, was become acute; the Turks had made it as far as Caesarea. This gets barely a passing mention from Psellus.

(13) Romanos IV (1068-1071). Romanos is another Empreror whom Michael Psellus liked personally but thought not very good as an administrator; in particular, Psellus faults Romanos for failing to follow good advice (Psellus's, naturally) on military matters. Romanos was unsuccessful at war, and this seems, paradoxically, to have made him more arrogant and sure of himself. The strong-willed Eudocia and the strong-willed Romanos began to clash with each other quite spectacularly, but then Romanos went out against the Turks again, to the Battle of Manzikert, a disaster for the Roman Empire, as the Turkish Sultan (Alp Arslan), who had been doing in everything in his power to avoid a war, which he expected to end badly for him, found to his complete surprise that he not only won the battle, he captured the Roman Emperor.

(14) Michael V (1071-1078). At Romanos's capture, the elites of the Empire seem to have assumed that that was the end of him, and turned to the question of who would be Emperor next. They were in the middle of finally settling on co-rule between Eudocia and her son Michael, when the worst possible news broke: Romanos was alive and coming home. Alp Arslan had treated him well, and having negotiated a ransom, returned him. Interestingly, Christian sources (including Psellus) are clear that Arslan did it out of kindness; Muslim sources seem to be clear that he did it out of contempt. Perhaps the real reason was somewhere in the middle -- having not wanted to be in the war in the first place, he may have thought that this was a way he could get a significant ransom and have some leverage for avoiding future military conflicts -- but, whatever the reason, if Arslan had wanted to throw the Empire into confusion, he could not have picked a better way. Nobody actually wanted Romanos back, and Michael Psellus himself is very clear that he argued that Romanos should not be allowed back as Emperor, but inevitably, Romanos had a different view of the situation, and there would be plenty of troops that would throw in with him. This seems to have decided Michael, Eudocia's son, to realize that he had to take control of the situation or be in very grave danger of being exiled or worse. He sent his mother to a monastery and then organized his defenses. There was battle, and Romanos was a much failure in this battle as in his others, and was eventually exiled. Unsurprisingly, Psellus's account of Michael VII is extraordinarily laudatory. It would have to be, wouldn't it, to justify Psellus's betrayal of Romanos. However, here the Chronographia ends, a bit before the end of Michael VII's reign.

Except for a few parts in the Constantine X section, the whole history is fast-paced and interesting at every turn.

Favorite Passage: From the account of Constantine IX:

...Then, when I saw that he was becoming bored with these lectures, and that he wanted to change teh subject to something more to his own taste, I would turn to the Muse of Rhetoric and introduce him to another aspect of Excellence, delighting him with word-harmonies and rhythmic cadences, composition and figures of speech (which lend the art its peculiar force). The function of Rhetoric is not merely to deceive by persuasive argument, or to deck itself out with ambiguous sentiments: it is an exact science. On the one hand, it expresses philosophic ideas; on the other, by means of its flowery imagery, it beautifies them. The listener is equally charmed by both. Rhetoric teaches a man to think clearly, undisturbed by the associations of words; to classify, to analyse, to make one's meaning plain without undue fuss. Its peculiar excellence lies in its freedom from confusion, its clarity, the way it suits itself to time or to circumstance, even when a man uses simple diction, without recourse to periods or long sentences. By dwelling on all these points I inspired him to a love of the art.... (p. 257)

Recommendation: Recommended.

****

Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, E. R. A. Sewter, tr., Penguin Books (New York: 1966).

Father of Orthodoxy

 Today is the feast of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Doctor of the Church. From On the Incarnation (section 43):

Now, if they ask, Why then did He not appear by means of other and nobler parts of creation, and use some nobler instrument, as the sun, or moon, or stars, or fire, or air, instead of man merely? Let them know that the Lord came not to make a display, but to heal and teach those who were suffering. For the way for one aiming at display would be, just to appear, and to dazzle the beholders; but for one seeking to heal and teach the way is, not simply to sojourn here, but to give himself to the aid of those in want, and to appear as they who need him can bear it; that he may not, by exceeding the requirements of the sufferers, trouble the very persons that need him, rendering God's appearance useless to them. Now, nothing in creation had gone astray with regard to their notions of God, save man only. Why, neither sun, nor moon, nor heaven, nor the stars, nor water, nor air had swerved from their order; but knowing their Artificer and Sovereign, the Word, they remain as they were made. But men alone, having rejected what was good, then devised things of nought instead of the truth, and have ascribed the honour due to God, and their knowledge of Him, to demons and men in the shape of stones. With reason, then, since it were unworthy of the Divine Goodness to overlook so grave a matter, while yet men were not able to recognise Him as ordering and guiding the whole, He takes to Himself as an instrument a part of the whole, His human body, and unites Himself with that, in order that since men could not recognise Him in the whole, they should not fail to know Him in the part; and since they could not look up to His invisible power, might be able, at any rate, from what resembled themselves to reason to Him and to contemplate Him.

Habitude XXXIV

 To the fifth one proceeds thus. It seems that gifts are not connected. For the apostle says, I Cor. XII, To some is given through the Spirit, word of wisdom, to others word of knowledge according to the same Spirit. But wisdom and knowledge are enumerated among gifts of the Holy Spirit. Therefore gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to different ones, and are not connected with each other in the same one.

Further, Augustine says, in De Trin. XIV, that most of the faithful are not rich in knowledge, although they are rich with faith itself. But faith is accompanied by some of the gifts -- at least the gift of fear. Therefore it seems that gifts are not connected in one and the same.

Further, Gregory says, in Moral. I, that wisdom is less if it lacks intellection, and intellection is exceedinly useless if it does not subsist from wisdom. Counsel is base if it is missing the work of fortitude, and fortitude is destroyed unless supported by counsel. Knowledge is nothing if it does not have the usefulness of piety; piety is exceedingly useless if it lacks the judgment [discretione] of knowledge. Fear itself, as well, if it does not have these virtues, does not rise up for any work of good action. From which it seems that one gift can be had without having another. Therefore gifts of the Holy Spirit are not connected.

But contrariwise is what Gregory premises [praemittit], saying that in this banquet of sons, they in turn fed each other. Now by the sons of Job, of whom he speaks, are designated gifts of the Holy Spirit. Therefore gifts of the Holy Spirit are connected, in that they reinforce one another.

I reply that it must be said that the truth of this is easily able to be had from the premises [praemissis]. For it was said above that just as the striving impulses are disposed through moral virtues in relation to the governance of reason [regimen rationis], so all impulses of the soul are disposed through gifts in relation to the Holy Spirit changing them. But the Holy Spirit dwells in us through charity, according to Rom. V, The charity of God is diffused through our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who is given to us, just as our reason is completed through prudence. Wherefore, just as moral virtues are connected to each other in prudence, so gifts of the Holy Spirit are connected to each other in charity, so that whoever has charity has all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, none of which can be had without charity.

To the first therefore it must be said that wisdom and knowledge are able to be considered one way according as they are gratuitously given graces [gratiae gratis datae], to wit, insofar as someone abounds in cognition of divine and human things, so as to be able to instruct the faithful and confute adversaries. And so the apostle speaks there of wisdom and knowledge, whence mention is made expressly [signanter] of the word of wisdom and of knowledge. In another way they are able to be taken as they are gifts of the Holy Spirit. And thuswise wisdom and knowledge are nothing other than sorts of completions of the human mind according to which one is disposed toward following the instigation of the Holy Spirit in cognition of divine and human things. And thus it is obvious that gifts are in all those having charity.

To the second it must be said that Augustine speaks there of knowledge, expositing the aforesaid authority of the apostle, whence he speaks of knowledge taken in the aforesaid way, according as it is gratuitously given grace. This is obvious from what he adds, For it is one thing to know in such a way as a human being ought to believe in order to reach blessed, which is not other than eternal, life, but another to know in the sort of way to aid the pious and defend against the impious, which the apostle seems to name by word of knowledge.

To the third it must be said that, just as in one way the connection of cardinal virtues is from one's being completed somehow by another, as was said above, so Gregory in the same way wishes to prove the connection of the gifts, in that one is not able to be completed without another. Whence he premises [praemittit] by saying that each is exceedingly destitute if one virtue does not support [suffragetur] another. Therefore it is not given to be understand that one gift is able to be without another, but that intellection, if it were without wisdom, would not be gift, just as temperance, if it were without justice, would not be virtue.

[St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.68.5, my translation. The Dominican Fathers translation is here, the Latin is here.]

In article 4, which I didn't translate, the Gifts are enumerated: wisdom, intellection/understanding, knowledge, counsel, piety, fortitude, fear. Some significant points in this article, which gives us more information about how the Gifts work as habitudes, are:

(1) The analogy, given in the body and in the reply to objection 3, between the connexio, the connection or joining or meeting, of the cardinal virtues in prudence and the connexio of the Gifts in charity.

(2) The reason that the Gifts ultimately meet in charity rather than in one of the Gifts like (say) wisdom is that they are open specifically to the Holy Spirit working in us, and the Holy Spirit working in us is charity. Thus the Gifts arise from the Holy Spirit giving us the ability to respond and cooperate with the divine love that unifies us with God.

(3) The Gifts should not be confused with gifts of grace in the sense of 'gratuitously given graces'. While it's not entirely clear from the brief comments in the replies to the objection, elsewhere it is explained more fully that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are for us to be moved by the Holy Spirit, but gratuitously given graces are for us to aid others. Another way to put it is that the Gifts make us one with Christ (indeed, they are literally the Messianic graces, which Christ has properly and which he extends to us as part of our participation in Him); gratuitously given graces help lead others to Christ.

Dashed XV

 The modern age is an age of trying to replace the internal with the external.

A goal in writing a book is to say what should be said but in a way that seems, however long it may be, like it ends too soon.

the just city considered mythologically (Timaeus), legendarily (Critias), and actually (Hermocrates)

the enjoyment of things being legally and juridically square

the consolidation of poetic inferences by convergence (e.g., Samir is moon, therefore bright; Samir is star, therefore bright; Samir is intelligent, therefore bright; Samir is smiling, therefore bright; thus Samir is bright)

Part of what makes Golan Trevize irritating as a character is that he argues every little thing, but is this related to his intuition and 'knack for rightness'? i.e., his mind surveys many paths at once and filters by stability in argument.

The scientific honors system is possible and to some extent practically necessary because scientific communication and scientific reference archiving requires that so  many things be distinctly named.

Everything ontological can also be represented logologically.

The power of petition is a legislative power of the People.

Our remedies for corruption almost always assume that corruption is occasional, not institutional or systemic, even when people claim they are addressing institutional or systemic corruption.

worldbuilding as character support vs worldbuilding as spectacle

what is inferrable about a fictional character in a story vs what is inferrable about a fictional character from a story or set of stories vs what is positable about a fictional character from what is stated or inferrable

When we have stories about the same character that conflict, we posit the characters as being 'farther' from the storytelling, creating space for treating the stories as distinct 'traditional' or 'testimonial' lines to the character.

languages as supplementary reservoirs for languages (this is common with classical languages, like Latin and Greek for scientific terms in English, and dominant market languages, like English for business terms in other languages, but it happens sporadically in a spontaneous way with any two languages in close contact)

Convention is loose enough that it creates ghost-convention, things that aren't actually conventional but taken as such, and if taken as such enough, solidify into real conventions.

The saints become perpetual memorials of divine victory.

Necessities and preferabilities of necessary and preferable roles sometimes approximate rights.

Something seeming wise is a sign of exemplar causality.

Around every important truth one eventually finds deceptive imitations.

complex number amplitudes as representing actively accessible possibilities

We can make no sense of actions except in terms of primary beings relating them to other actions, passions, and dispositions.

"While every human being possesses the seed of metaphysics, not all possess the soil in which it can grow." Dewan

(1) God is at least ens rationis.
(2) God cannot be merely ens rationis.

That we have concepts we know by their presence; what they are must be discovered through reflection and inference.

What ought to be and what is are the same in the necessary.

ram-stam: impetuous, headstrong, or reckless
bellycheer: gluttonous feasting and self-indulgence in food

The more perfect the love, the fewer demands can be placed on it, because it is adequate in itself, and nothing beyond itself is needed. We place expectations on imperfect lvoes because there are standards beyond it that it must meet in order not to be defective.

The more perfect the love, the more it exceeds what consciousness can take in, and the more it appears a kind of being.

The Lord of the Rings is structured heavily by ironies: the least does the greatest deed, strength turns against itself, the unexpected brings about the inevitable, and so forth.

God as that on which self-evident principles converge

Love cannot be held to a consequentialist standard.

Most of virtue, like most of anything, can be imitated, even flawlessly, but that last little bit is a gap no mere imitation can ever overleap.

Kooks and loons play a definite role in the cognitive ecology, provoking arguments and reducing complacency, forcing retread of conclusions that can consolidate understanding and re-route inquiry around minor obstacles and push the repair of minor flaws. We see these things happen. A society of kooks and loons is obviously undesirable, but a society without them may well (1) be impossible for human beings and (2) have coutnerbalancing negative effects if it did turn out possible for us.

Repeition alone is always enough to persuade some people of some thing, which ones depending on personal backgrounds.

I think and I know with the shadow of light
that the beginning of day is found in the night.

Trauma itself is never drama.

A landscape is a traversable environment experienced as a unity by a person within a visual perspective.

In the universe as a whole, we find something that is almost, but only almost, a fit interlocutory for the human mind.

Make-believe is a possible response to fiction, but this is distinct from our response to the fiction as such. We often do not make-believe in response to fiction.

Bias is not merely systematic deviation from a standard of correctness, pace Thomas Kelly, unless you are just meaning a statistical tendency to one side; it involves a disproportionate inclination prior to the relevant judgments. It is the latter, merely pulling a bit to the side of a perfect bull's eye, that is relevant to belief and knowledge in a robust sense.

US Code Title 36 as a Congressional honors system

"Totalitarianism's idolatrous course can only be arrested by coming up against a genuinely spiritual way of life." Weil

the phenomeon of 'just going with it'

abstract type of the philosophical argument --ingression--> actual occasion of philosophical argument in mind
actual occasion --is prehended by (along with other aspects of the world related to it)--> actual occasion

objective theories, illusion theories, and pretense theories of landscape expressiveness

The plural of majesty for pronouns always implies a plurality in unity, e.g., the people represented in the king.

the cosmos as God's right

Plurals can indicate: count, extension, composition, intensity, abstraction, excellence/majesty.

baptism : illumination :: confirmation : communion of operation :: ordination : divine fire
baptism : supplication :: confirmation : intercession :: ordination : sacrifice

Christianic Romanity

Putnam's 'minimal principle of contradiction': Not every statement is both true and false.

the Son of God as the one through whom all history is made (Hb 1:2)

For every statemetn to which a truth value is assigned, there must be a reason why that truth value is assigned to it.

A significant reason why we believe there are other minds is that we need there to be other minds.

congruence of life and value

factual statements as value statements concerned with truth

Harsanyi's distinctions between personal and impersonal preferences and between actual and hypothetical preferences are sound, but he errs in thinking the distinctions are the same. In reality, we have both actual and hypothetical versions of both personal and impersonal preferences.

Interpersonal utiltiy comparisons are only possible under specific and narrow circumstances.

Pace Harsanyi, moral hypothetical imperatives are as likely to be demands as advices, and may be causal as well as constitutive or formal.

Whether it is rational to take a bet depends first and foremost on the trustworthiness of the betting system and prayers. Assuming that those who bet can and will pay is a good way to get scammed.

New evidence often requires reassessing all evidence.

Our prayers begin before we pray.

Prudence is necessary because venture is part of the moral life.

Scripture was first lived, then written, then proclaimed, then lived within. All of these have divine purpose.

Kant on exemplary necessity

That tools 'withdraw' on good use does not mean that they stop being experienced; they are always already there in the experience of using them.

Every being manifests being's anteriority to manifestation.

Academic scholarship creates many good things; it also creates a lot of pollution of inquiry in doing so.

Hartmann takes values to be Platonic ideas of a sort.

The human voice does not hit notes but encompasses them, dances with them, flows througha nd above or below them.

"First comes knowledge, then a view, then reasoning, and then belief." Newman

thysia: sacrifices to the Olympian gods
enagisma: sacrifices ot heroes and the dead
sphage: sacrifices before battle
-- only in thysia was sacrifice divided and then shared and consumed; thysia is for major public festivals, important family events
-- enagisma as term is mostly used in the Roman period

Some pleasures are associated with more of what happiness can be, some with less.

In the Garden Blind

The Mystery
by G. K. Chesterton 

If sunset clouds could grow on trees
It would but match the May in flower;
And skies be underneath the seas
No topsyturvier than a shower. 

If mountains rose on wings to wander
They were no wilder than a cloud;
Yet all my praise is mean as slander,
Mean as these mean words spoken aloud. 

And never more than now I know
That man's first heaven is far behind;
Unless the blazing seraph's blow
Has left him in the garden blind. 

Witness, O Sun that blinds our eyes,
Unthinkable and unthankable King,
That though all other wonder dies
I wonder at not wondering.

The Food of Angels

 Today is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church. From a letter to her niece, Sister Eugenia:

Dearest daughter in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to thee in His precious Blood, with desire to see thee taste the food of angels, since thou art made for no other end; and that thou mightest taste it, God bought thee with the Blood of His Only-Begotten Son. But reflect, dearest daughter, that this food is not taken upon earth, but on high, and therefore the Son of God chose to be lifted up upon the wood of the Most Holy Cross, in order that we might receive this food upon this table on high. But thou wilt say to me: What is this food of angels? I reply to thee: it is the desire of God, which draws to itself the desire that is in the depths of the soul, and they make one thing together.

 This is a food which while we are pilgrims in this life, draws to itself the fragrance of true and sincere virtues, which are prepared by the fire of divine charity, and received upon the table of the cross. That is, virtue is won by pain and weariness, casting down one's own fleshly nature;—the kingdom of one's soul which is called Heaven (cielo) because it hides (cela) God within it by patience, is seized with force and violence. This is the food that makes the soul angelic, and therefore it is called the food of angels; and also because the soul, separated from the body, tastes God in His essential Being. He satisfies the soul in such wise that she longs for no other thing nor can desire aught but what may help her more perfectly to keep and increase this food, so that she holds in hate what is contrary to it. Therefore, like a prudent person, she looks with the light of most holy faith, which is in the eye of the mind, and beholds what is harmful and what is useful to her. And as she has seen, so she loves and condemns—holding, I say, her own fleshly nature and all the vices which proceed from it, bound beneath the feet of her affections....

Misplaced Morality Rots in the Roots Unconscious

The Modern Manichee
by G. K. Chesterton

He sayeth there is no sin, and all his sin
Swells round him into a world made merciless;
The midnight of his universe of shame
Is the vast shadow of his shamelessness.
He blames all that begat him, gods or brutes,
And sires not sons he chides as with a rod.
The sins of the children visited on the fathers
Through all generations, back to a jealous God.

The fields that heal the humble, the happy forests
That sing to men confessed and men consoled,
To him are jungles only, greedy and groping,
Heartlessly new, unvenerably old.
Beyond the pride of his own cold compassion
Is only cruelty and imputed pain:
Matched with that mood, a boy's sport in the forest
Makes comrades of the slayer and the slain.

The innocent lust of the unfallen creatures
Moves him to hidden horror but no mirth;
Misplaced morality rots in the roots unconscious,
His stifled conscience stinks through the green earth.
The green things thrust like horrible huge snails,
Horns green and gross, each lifting a leering eye
He scarce can call a flower; it lolls obscene,
Its organs gaping to the sneering sky.

Dark with that dusk the old red god of gardens
Still pagan but not merry any more,
Stirs up the dull adulteries of the dust,
Blind, frustrate, hopeless, hollow at the core;
The plants are brutes tied with green rope and roaring
Their terrible dark loves from tree to tree:
He shrinks as from a shaft, if by him singing,
A gilded pimp and pandar, goes the bee.

He sayeth, 'I have no sin; I cast the stone',
And throws his little pebble at the shrine,
Casts sin and stone away against the house
Whose health has turned earth's waters into wine.
The venom of that repudiated guilt
Poisons the sea and every natural flood
As once a wavering tyrant washed his hands,
And touching, turned the water black with blood.

Links of Note

 * Ryan Miller, A Metaphysics of the Common Good (PDF)

* Tuomas Tahko, Natural Kind Fundamentalism (PDF)

* James Lennox & Mariska Leunissen, Aristotle's Biology, at the SEP

* Edward Feser, Does Just War Doctrine Require Moral Certainty? at "First Things"

* Flame & Light, Hume's Sign Argument and Attributed Character

* Robert McNamara, Aquinas vs Camus, at "Dumb Oxen"

Fields that Tingle with New Birth

April Night
by Archibald Lampman

How deep the April night is in its noon,
The hopeful, solemn, many-murmured night!
The earth lies hushed with expectation; bright
Above the world's dark border burns the moon,
Yellow and large; from forest floorways, strewn
With flowers, and fields that tingle with new birth,
The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth
Comes up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon,
Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet
The river with its stately sweep and wheel
Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, grey like steel.
From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam,
Aye with blown throats that make the long hours sweet,
The sleepless toads are murmuring in their dream.

Arche tou Euangeliou Iesou Christou Huiou Theou

 Beginning of the good news of Jesus Anointed, Son of God.

As it has been written in Isaiah the prophet: See, I send out my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, voice of the one shouting in the desolation, Ready Lord's Way, build levelly his highway.

John came, the one immersing in the desolation and declaring repentant immersion for pardon of failings. And all the territory of Judea and Jerusalem were pouring out to him and were being immersed by him in the Jordan river, acknowledging their failings. And John was clothed with camel pelt and belt of hide around his loins. And he is eating locusts and wild honey.

And he was heralding, saying, The mightier than I comes after me, for whom I am not fit, having stooped, to loose the strap of his sandals. I immersed you with water, but he will immerse you with Holy Spirit.

[Mark 1:1-8, my rough translation. This is deliberately very wooden, in a crude attempt to capture the rough vividness of the passage. I have done a slightly smoother (but equally experimental) translation here, where I also commented on the attribution to Isaiah.]

Today is the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist. 

Two Poem Drafts

 Tallasaia

The sea,
salt-sprayed,
drives on rocky shores,
birthing clouds of mist;
the breeze, newly bold,
mildly cool,
is not unfriendly;
it is more curious
than piercing,
a question-asking breeze.

And I
am wandering,
shells and rocks around me
on the shores of Tallasaia.

Black Tea

Black the mug and dark the tea
like inner depth of brew-dark sea,
with silence deeper than that in me,
I catch warm scent like honeyed leaves
as steam is caught and interweaves
the air and, weaving like graceful bee,
repairs the world inside of me.

Dashed Off XIV

 The hatred of the natural seems often to be a perverted pursuit of infinity.

When we reflect on human violence, we find it to be in some way both natural and alien to us.

We know the world because we border it;
inside and out we border it.

To say that a novelist is only pretending to assert is obvious nonsense; the illocutionary acts all follow the same rules as usual, unless you assume there is no sense of truth that allows being true in a novel. Iris murdoch writing about a character commits to the truth of what she says (except in cases lik deliberately unreliable narrator) for the novel -- although assertion itself does not in fact usually require 'commitment', being often a much weaker act. As novelist, she has the ultimate possession of evidence about the novel she is writing -- although the need for assertion to involve evidence is in any case domain-specific and a norm rather than a need. And Iris Murdoch herself would, I think, hold that there is a sincerity in novel-writing, and if so, rightly -- although sincerity is a felicity condition and not a strict requirement of assertions, anyway. Apparent assertions in a novel are not defective in any way as assertions. In fact, teh opposite is the case: apparent assertions in a novel are *even more properly* assertions, because they are assertions of semi-divine kind: assertions that make the truth, and the evidence, of what is asserted, and compared to which out-of-fiction assertions can only be regarded, at least as assertions, as imperfect (although this is a comparative imperfection and not an imperfection for their kind and context).

Assertions in a novel are often perlocutionarily distinct from similar assertions in similar contexts.

If I make up a babble-language and act as if I were saying things in it, I pretend to assert. If I am putting something on the board of discourse as true, even if only in a persona or a fictional case, I am truly asserting.

the illocutionary act of writing a novel vs the illocutionary act of writing a sentence in a novel

'inter-fictional carry-over'

Truth-in-fiction is truth, in fiction.

admiring Guy Morville vs imagining admiring Guy Morville, vs pretending to admire Guy Morville in make-believe

All our imagination of what we are slips away, and all that is left is what we are.

What is good both is and ought to be treated as good.

A common problem in skeptical arguments is key terms being understood entirely in terms of the skeptic's own imaginative associations with the word; this is easily remediable, and it is often possible to build a skeptical argument that does not err this way. Unfortunately, this error is exactly the kind of error that is invisible to those who commit it.

Characterization is not accumulation of scenes but the sketched and flowing line through them. Characterization is done only by suggesting it, but in different ways suggesting a unified thing.

Worldbuilding is what characters do.

In make-believe, we socialize the world a certain way.

All comedy is based on contingency.

the sense of novelty in inquiry and Descartes on surprise

Every particular story can also be a concrete universal, forming a possible genre-region (a set of imitations), with actual genres arising out of strong overlaps of genre-regions.

Particulars can become concrete universals because of final causation.

mereological fusion as unity that rules out no kind of composition

mereological self-fusion

the courtesy of being treated as punishable

The range of architectonic ends that a human being could possibly have is limited.

1. The probability of any arbitrarily given state going to war against any other arbitrarily given state is quite small. (Qatar is unlikely to go to war against Bolivia.)
2. Two states whose countries do mutually profitable trade are slower to go to war.
3. States that require more steps to go to war are slower to go to war.
4. Since WWII, the United States has enforced peace among its allies, thus increasing the incentive for negotiated conflict resolution.
5. States that are active members of defensive leauges are somewhat less likely to be involved in wars.
--- These five seem to explain all of the so-called 'democratic peace' effect.

Music makes us about things.

In business, the difficulty is often getting the basics right; the flash and fluff, in so many cases, eat up resources while the basics languish.

checklist as one-dimensional memory palace
standard memory palaces as ways of organizing multiple related checklists

Kant on moral progress as a postulate of practical reason // Cohen on messianic community as same

locomotion as change in light-accessibility to other changes (change in communicability by way of light)

Bishops should be very careful not to turn wine into water and bread into stones.

Charity vests other virtues, both acquired and infused, bringing out their inner beauty.

"The most sublime feeling of oneself is the feeling of the harmony between oneself and the rule of the world as a whole, and thereby the highest beauty." Herder

heuristics --> best explanation for why given heuristics are heuristic --> general principles

Even accidental groupings need to be explained in terms of how the accident is possible.

A theory may be valuable for discovery (1) by being strange enough to raise interesting questions, (2) by solving genuine problems, (3) by encouraging and inspiring inquisitive pursuit.

The world is intermingled with our wills; the facts belong both to the tasks and to the performances.

The ethical is borne not merely by the will but also by the reason, and of both we may often speak.

inquiry and the creation of notings-of-facts, or, indeed, facts qua constructs (i.e., truths taken as according to art, truths formed by a means or method into something cognitively useful)

-- For every Turing machine, there is a corresponding Diophantine equation. (Matiyasevuh, Ronbinson, Davis, & Putnam)

"We have come to think of the actual world as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one." Nelson Goodman

Leibniz often equates 'sufficient reason' with 'aggregate of all requisites'.

Everything presuppposes all of its requisites.
Everything that exists has some definition that is instantiated.

"...there is a surface to expressive behavior that may become detached. The child who pretends,t eh actor who portrays, the mime who imitates, and the hypocrite who feigns, all attempt, in different ways, to strip expressive behavior from the character it normally reveals." Alan Tormey

Music is expressive because we can easily express by way of it; indeed, because it is sophisticated and nuanced, it is the most perfectly adapted 'language' of expression.

The expression of others impresses on us.

"Our claims is that, because musical movement can be heard as making sense and because that sense is not determined solely by the composer's intentions, musical movement is sufficiently like the human behaviour which gives rise to emotion-characteristics in appearances that musical movement may give rise to emotion-characteristics in sound." Stephen Davies, "The Expression of Emotion in Music"
"Our point is this: Anything that can wear an expression or have a gait, carriage, or bearing in the way in which a person's behaviour may exhibit those things can present the aspect of an emotion-characteristic in its appearance. Few non-sentient things will be able to meet these requirements, but, amongs those few, music will find a place."

Music is not intrinsicially representational; this is different from saying that no forms of music are used to represent, which is false.

Time (1) defines an ordinal structure that allows description of changes in terms of sequential dependencies and (2) measures the communicability of information about one change to other changes.

Walton's df of props ("Metaphor, Fictionalism, Make-Believe"): 'real-word objects or states of affairs that make propositions true in the make-believe world, i.e., 'fictional'"
-- the fictionality seems an intrusion here; nothing prevents props making factual propositions true in a make-believe world; but perhaps one could say that things can be both factual and fictional

[Noun] was [Adjective], [Noun] [Adjective]
The way was long, the days short.
The moon was bright, the shadows long.
Her face was set, her lips tight.

How reliable a map is depends in part on how you use it.

Saying things badly often interferes with progress in inquiry.

People often say something is 'subjective' when they really mean it is imperfectly determinate, involves gray areas or fuzzy regions, or requires cultivated judgment.

formal institutional facts (cf. Searle's standing declarations) vs instrumental institutional facts

making something X by declaring it X vs making something to be X by declaring X to be

nature tourism and the pursuit of specific expressivities in nature

Utilitarianism errs in not recognizing that huamn happiness has a deontic structure.

People regularly borrow from religious language whenever they want to be very serious, regardless of their own religious views.

signs as the flora of thought in somethng like the way gut bacteria are the flora of digestion

Difficulties often hit us hardest when they ease.

Pr 17:6A and Bellarmine's Note of Temporal Prosperity

One of the greatest strengths of analytic philosophy is how much room it allows for, and how many of its methods facilitate, tinkering with arguments.

Syneidesis vs Sunteresis

 I previously noted the usual idea about how the word synderesis came about: that it was originally syneidesis, and that St. Jerome in his commentary on Ezekiel probably wrote it that way, particularly given that he seems to translate it fairly directly into Latin as conscientia. St. Thomas, however, for philosophical reasons distinguishes synderesis and conscientia, while recognizing that many people don't make a distinction.

However, Sarah Byers has an interesting argument for an alternative view. Her idea is that the original word was actually sunteresis, and synderesis is just an ordinary medieval Latin spelling variant for that. Sunteresis means something like 'safeguarding, protecting, taking care of'. It's not a common version of the Greek word, which is why it's usually not regarded, although the shorter teresis is not too difficult to find. Byers argues, however, that St. Jerome is probably influenced by Origen on this point; we don't have Origen's commentary on Ezekiel, but the fragments we have suggest that he might have made use of Stoic vocabulary, in which sunteresis and its variants are sometimes found. This is fairly tenuous -- although it seems possible -- but if this is the case, then it would mean that St. Thomas's distinction between synderesis and conscientia (syneidesis) might be a return to an older distinction that was lost in other texts. Very interesting, and worth at least considering: synderesis as the natural safeguard or caretaker for the human being and human conscience.

Habitude XXXIII

 To the third one proceeds thus. It seems that gifts of the Holy Spirit are not habitudes. For habitude is a quality remaining in the human being, for it is a difficult-to-change quality [qualitas difficile mobile], as is said in the Categories. But it belongs to Christ that the gifts of the Holy Spirit rest in Him, as is said in Isaiah XI. As is said in John I, On Him whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining on Him, He is who baptizes, of which Gregory, expositing, says, The Holy Spirit comes on all the faithful, but, uniquely, He dwells always in the Mediator.

Further, gifts of the Holy Spirit complete a man inasmuch as he is activated by the Spirit of God, as was said. But inasmuch as a human being is activated by the Spirit of God, he has himself [se habet] somewhat like an instrument with respect to Him. But it is appropriate to an instrument to be completed by not by habitude, but by the principal agent. Therefore the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not habitudes.

Further, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are from divine inspiration, as is the gift of prophecy. But prophecy is not habitude, for the spirit of prophecy is not always present to the prophet, as Gregory says, in Homily I on Ezekiel. Neither, therefore, are the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

But contrariwise is that the Lord said to the disciples, speaking of the Holy Spirit, John XIV, He shall remain with you and be in you. But the Holy Spirit is not in the human being without His gifts.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said, gifts are sorts of completions of the human being by which he is disposed to follow well the instigation of the Holy Spirit. But it is clear from what was said above that moral virtues complete striving impulse inasmuch as it participates in some way reason, to wit, inasmuch as it is born to to be changed through command of reason. In this way, therefore, gifts of the Holy Spirit have themselves [se habent] with respect to the human being in relation to the Holy Spirit, as moral virtues have themselves [se habent] with respect to the striving impulse in relation to reason. Now moral virtues are sorts of habitudes by which striving impulses are disposed to obeying reason promptly. Thus also gifts of the Holy Spirit are are sorts of habitudes by which a human being is completed to for promptly obeying the Holy Spirit.

To the first therefore it must be said that Gregory answers it there, saying that in those gifts without which one is not able to reach life, the Holy Spirit always remains in the chosen, but in others He does not remain. Now the seven gifts are necessary for salvation, as has been said. Thus, regarding them, the Holy Spirit always remains in the holy.

To the second it must be said that the reason proceeds from an instrument that is not for acting but only for being acted upon. But a human being is not such an instrument, but he is activated by the Holy Spirit, who also acts, inasmuch as he has free choice. Thus he needs habitude.

To the third it must be said that prophecy is among the gifts that are for the manifestation of the Spirit, but not for the necessity of salvation. Therefore it is not similar.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.68.3. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

I skipped article 2, on the necessity of the Gifts for salvation; it is useful for understanding why they are important, but less so for understanding how they work as habitudes, although, of course, it is relevant to the second and third objections here.

Links of Note

 * The children's books that shaped me, at "The Library Ladder"; a lot of overlap with what I read as a child, although I never come across any of the Hitchcock books.

* Giulia Schirripa, Social groups and classical extensional mereology (PDF)

* Owen Cyclops, Folk Religion and Alt-Christian Cosmology

* Austin Suggs, Augustine's Unusual Theodicy

* A. R. J. Fisher, Making Time: An Ontology of Temporal Fiat Objects (PDF)

* Virginia Karnstein, The Truth about Frankism, discussing the early modern Jewish messianic movement, at "Overlong Memories"

* Venanzio Raspa, Kant and the Debate on Aristotle's Categories in the Nineteenth Century (PDF)

* Matthew Minerd, Monastic Stories as a Method of Ascetical Casuistry, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Emmanuel Rutten, Atomism, Causalism, and the Existence of God (PDF)

* Mark K. Spencer, Taking Polytheism Seriously, reviews Travis Dumsday's Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual, at "Living with Lady Philosophy"

* Alexandre Declos, Toy stories: a metaphysics of playthings

* Daniel Weidner, Gershom Scholem, at the SEP

The Imaginative Charge of Words

 But even among the synonyms of our own tongue we cannot ignore the imaginative charge of words without being monstrous. You might, for example, be excused for declining an invitation to dinner when the menu that was offered was dead calf with fungus in heated dough, scorched ground tubers, and cabbage stalks, all swilled down with rotten German grape juice, and topped off with the dust of burnt berries in scalding water diluted with the oozings from the udders of a cow. You might well decline such a bill of fare, but you would miss an excellent meal of veal and mushroom pie, roast potatoes and spring greens, chased by a bottle of hock, and finished with a steaming cup of coffee and cream. What's in a name? Just about everything. 

[Paul Roche, "Translator's Preface," Euripides: Ten Plays (Signet, 1998) xvii.]

If I Blame, Be Assur'd I Am Tipsy

 The Modern Tippling Philosophers
by James Hay Beattie

Father Hodge had his pipe and his dram,
And at night, his cloy'd thirst to awaken,
He was served with a rasher of ham,
Which procured him the surname of Bacon.
He has shown that, though logical science
And dry theory oft prove unhandy,
Honest Truth will ne'er set at defiance
Experiment, aided by brandy. 

Des Cartes bore a musket, they tell us,
Ere he wished, or was able, to write,
And was noted among the brave fellows,
Who are bolder to tipple than fight.
Of his system the cause and design
We no more can be pos'd to explain:--
The materia subtilis was wine,
And the vortices whirl'd in his brain. 

Old Hobbes, as his name plainly shows,
At a hob-nob was frequently tried:
That all virtue from selfishness rose
He believ'd, and all laughter from pride.
The truth of his creed he would brag on,
Smoke his pipe, murder Homer, and quaff,
Then staring, as drunk as a dragon,
In the pride of his heart he would laugh. 

Sir Isaac discover'd, it seems,
The nature of colors and light,
In remarking the tremulous beams
That swom on his wandering sight.
Ever sapient, sober though seldom,
From experience attraction he found,
By observing, when no one upheld him,
That his wise head fell souse on the ground. 

As to Berkley's philosophy--he has
Left his poor pupils nought to inherit,
But a swarm of deceitful ideas
Kept like other monsters, in spirit.
Tar-drinkers can't think what's the matter,
That their health does not mend, but decline:
Why, they take but some wine to their water,
He took but some water to wine. 

One Mandeville once, or Man-devil,
(Either name you may give as you please)
By a brain ever brooding on evil,
Hatch'd a monster call'd Fable of Bees,
Vice, said he, aggrandizes a people;
By this light let my conduct be view'd;
I swagger, swear, guzzle, and tipple:
And d----- ye, 'tis all for your good. 

David Hume ate a swinging great dinner,
And grew every day fatter and fatter;
And yet the huge hulk of a sinner
Said there was neither spirit nor matter.
Now there's no sober man in the nation,
Who such nonsense could write, speak, or think:
It follows, by fair demonstration,
That he philosophiz'd in his drink. 

As a smuggler, even Priestley could sin;
Who, in hopes the poor gauger of frightening,
While he fill'd the case-bottles with gin,
Swore he fill'd them with thunder and lightning.
In his cups, (when Locke's laid on the shelf),
Could he speak, he would frankly confess t' ye,
That unable to manage himself,
He puts his whole trust in Necessity. 

If the young in rash folly engage,
How closely continues the evil!
Old Franklin retains, as a sage,
The thirst he acquired when a devil.
That charging drives fire from a phial,
It was natural for him to think,
After finding, from many a trial,
That drought may be kindled by drink. 

A certain high priest could explain,
How the soul is but nerve at the most;
And how Milton had glands in his brain,
That secreted the Paradise Lost.
And sure it is what they deserve,
Of such theories if I aver it,
They are not even dictates of nerve,
But mere muddy suggestions of claret. 

Our Holland Philosophers say,
Gin Is the true philosophical drink,
As it made Doctor Hartley imagine
That to shake is the same as to think.
For, while drunkenness throbb'd in his brain,
The sturdy materialist chose (O fye!)
To believe its vibrations not pain,
But wisdom, and downright philosophy. 

Ye sages, who shine in my verse,
On my labours with gratitude think,
Which condemn not the faults they rehearse,
But impute all your sin to your drink.
In drink, poets, philosophers, mob, err;
Then excuse if my satire e'er nips ye:
When I praise, think me prudent and sober,
If I blame, be assur'd I am tipsy.

James Hay Beattie was the son of the philosopher and poet James Beattie; he was something of an intellectual prodigy but died, around age 22, in 1790. Lots and lots going on here.

Roger Bacon, the Doctor Mirabilis, was a Franciscan (hence 'Father Hodge') who advocated the importance of experience (experimentum) as a form of a knowledge in itself, necessary for all other knowledge. Descartes was indeed a mercenary soldier, although he was probably used as an artillery calculator rather than in any direct fighting; he explained the motion of the body by a subtle fluid (the 'animal spirits', on which Beattie is indirectly punning) and the motion of the cosmos by vortices, little whirling circular motions. 

Hobbes held that laughter was 'sudden glory' arising from a sudden sense of superiority. He also translated Homer, and does indeed seem to have been a smoker. The stanza on Newton alludes both to his work on the refraction of white light into colored light and on gravity (alluding to the old story of the apple). 

Berkeley held that the only things that exist were ideas and minds (spirits), and has a couple of works, including the namesake of this blog, on the medicinal value of tar-water, which he advocated as a substitute for alcohol (and was quite popular for a while as such). Bernard Mandeville, in The Fable of the Bees, famously held that private vices were public benefits; in it, a hive of bees is thriving until they become virtuous, which drives them into poverty. 

David Hume was indeed quite fat (he once broke a sturdy chair just by sitting down too quickly); he doesn't quite say that there was neither spirit nor matter, but he does say that we cannot know the ultimate causes of our impressions; the latter part of his stanza is a parody of his view of induction as based on constant conjunction. Joseph Priestley is most famous today for his experiments in 'dephlogisticated air', i.e., oxygen, but in his own day his work on electricity and simple electrical batteries was often better known; he also held that there was no free will, and that everything was governed by necessary laws of causation.

Benjamin Franklin, the Sage of Philadelphia, well known for his Autobiography discussing his youthful attempts at self-improvement, was as famous then as now for his experiments with electricity; when he was in Britain, he also stayed with Hume and Priestley. David Hartley, a physician and philosopher, held that experience occurred due to vibrations of a subtle ether in the nerves; these vibrations left behind trace-vibrations, 'vibratiuncles', which allowed thinking and memory.

I have no idea who the "certain high priest" is, unfortunately; the description suggests a bishop, but it may, of course, be some kind of pun.

Dashed Off XIII

 The strangest things in the world are stranger the more they are known.

People who think they have reasons to think that A does not exist have ipso facto grounds of resistance to having a relationship with A.

Part of having a relationship is overcoming resistance to the relationship.

Sacrifice does not necessarily prevent self-righteousness, but self-righteousness without sacrifice is extraordinarily contagious.

Retroactive legislation is present causation; it modifies the present's uptake of the past.

memories as re-simulations within a modal tagging structure
memory as enduring self-testimony

While Walton takes pictures to have the function of being props in visual games of make-believe, his actual discussions only really require that they be accessible for such games to give them such use.

We normally distinguish cases of pretendings from (e.g.) watching movies or even acting in plays -- the actor may pretend as part of his approach to acting, and we may pretend in response to it, but these are different.

Few things make people as miserable as utilitarianism.

The rule of law is
(1) a state of law
(2) involving a politically and morally sustainable legal system
(3) in which the laws apply impartially, even to officials,
(4) and enforcement of the law is generally peaceable
(5) and maintained in broad cooperation with the general body of the citizens or subjects,
(6) who are protected from recognized abuses by safeguards.

People often think they are making themselves strong when theya re only making themselves brittle.

persons as principles of classification

"Every perfect thing is threefold." Mahabharata XIV.39.21

"The Father's Intellect said that all things be divided into three." Chaldean Oracles 22

"One who knows Brahman reaches the highest. Satya is Brahman, Jnana is Brahman, Ananta (infinity) is Brahman." Taittiriya Upanishad 21.1

The secular exists because of the sacred that shelters it.

(1) The totality of all contingents is either contingent or necessary.
(2) A given totality of all contingents depends materially on its contingent components.
(3) What depends materially for its existence on what is contingent is not necessary.
(4) As contingent, the totality of all contingents depend efficiently on a cause distinct from itself.
(5) The cause that makes the totality of all contingents a totality must be necessary.
-- All this requires the totality of contingents. Does it require that this be a consistent totality?

Spontaneously coming to exist and coming to exist uncaused are not the same; spontaneity means that the causes are internal in some way to the effect, not wholly external.

Xunzi's criticicisms of the School of Names are broadly teleological: the dialectical paradoxes arise by ignoring the purposes of names/roles/classifications.

Nobility ranks tend to have a kind of sameness the world over, partly by diffusion, but mostly due to the fact that they are historically constrained by the structures of governance, land ownership, and military support.

Christians often err by limiting the ways they can glorify God.

Ens rationis is intellectually needed because attribution is not strictly tied to being an actually or potentially existing thing. It is metaphysically needed for an account of such things because some such attributions are true.

"When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country." George Grant

'Reliability' is a term of diachronic assessment.

We conceive before we know we conceive, and believe before we know we believe.

We criticize people for being bad, but criticize them more harshly for being worse; we take it to be the case that people should at least make the effort to be reasonably decent by the standards of their age and land. Part of the difference in harshness, I think, is that we recognize that we ourselves are biased in several ways, and take ourselves to be at least trying to make a reasonable effort in light of what is available to us, and to be doing, with all our efforts, at least as good as people in our land and age can usually be. If we are reasonably honest, we recognize that criticizing people for not being vastly better than others of the time would make us look like hypocrites; it is safer to criticize people for not reaching a basic minimum.

Without the breath of fiction there is no civilization.

Scientific theorizing is filled with fictional makeshifts and crutches, because all inquiry into difficult matters is.

All words that express sensible ideas also express immaterial conceptions.

Everywhere in law that there is legal fiction is a point at which the law is recognizing something beyond itself, which requires that something be fit into the legal account.

The removal of legal fictions from law is often a process of legal solipsizing.

Hume T 3.2.3 as an indirect discussion of juridical personhood in terms of occupation, prescription, accession, and succession; see also 3.2.10. (A weakness of Hume's account of allegiance is that he fails to recognize that 'public interest' itself has to be explained -- what makes there to be a public at all, such that we can attribute the relevant things at all? Allegiance grows up with the development of public interest, not after it.)

It is easiest to motivate oneself by pleasure, but we have motivations not necessarily linked to the pleasant -- e.g., the depressed can motivate themselves for duty or doing good to others even when it is clear that pleasure is out of their reach.

Many philosophers suffer from the intellectual malnutrition of exposure to too few kinds of philosophy.

You should not reason as if you were randomly selected but as if you were caused under specific conditions in a particular context.

We think of infinite series not by successive adding but by sweeping over all possible successive addings of a kind.

A firm is first and foremost an accounting system for a specific purpose in exchange.

The meaning of myth expands outward by suggestion, association, and allegorization.

Pleasures are often different in such a way that pleasures exclude pleasures.

We are given not merely miracles and laws but providential coincidences; that is to say, providence has set up the world so as to provide coincidences and chance events that may provide both windfall and challenge, and remind us of the world and the possibilities beyond our expectation but within our reach.

For much of ethics we need not a template but a method of discovery.

People often feel themselves indebted for the world itself.

LLMs draw texts with rational order from relationships between rationally ordered texts.

the key as symbolic title and title as symbolic key

Every narrative suggests further narratives.

To understand explanations, we embed them in narratives of how they were reached and how they are applied.

We have a reason that draws from our passions. It is precisely this that occasionally leads to conflict.

Holy Scripture is a shared inheritance that must be received as such.

When we look at technological progress closely, it often is much slower than it seems at superficial glance; innovations have to be developed, refined, diffused, usually across many different people and markets. Part of the reason for the difference is that some technologies that are very obvious (e.g., for entertainment) spread more quickly than the rest.

We often have to learn how things resemble each other; that is, resemblances are often not obvious and we need to learn how to recognize them.

We legislate for hypotheticals.

Bayesianism models cognition like stimulus-response models actions; it crudely approximates it with highly restrictive assumptions under limited conditions.

"Our visual perceptions sometimes contradict our tactile perceptions, for example, in teh case of a rod immersed in water, but nobody in his right mind will conclude from this fact that the outer world does not exist." Godel

the hatred of the natural as a recurring pathology of modernity

All loneliness presupposes some form of non-loneliness; loneliness lies in the contrast.