The Whole Plenitude of Excellencies and Qualities

 The distinguishing characteristic of man, and the peculiar eminence of his nature and his destiny, as these are universally felt and acknowledged by mankind, are usually defined to consist, either in reason, or in the faculty of speech. But this definition is defective in this respect, that, on one hand, reason is a mere abstract faculty, which to be judged, requires a psychological investigation or analysis; and that on the other hand, the faculty of speech is a mere potentiality, or a germ which must be unfolded before it can become a real entity. We should therefore give a much more correct and comprehensive definition, if, instead of this, we said: The peculiar pre-eminence of man consists in this—that to him alone among all other of earth's creatures, the word has been imparted and communicated. The word actually delivered and really communicated is not a mere dead faculty, but an historical reality and occurrence; and for that very reason, the definition we have given stands much more fitly at the head of history, than the other more abstract one. 

 In the idea of the word, considered as the basis of man's dignity and peculiar destination, the internal light of consciousness and of our own understanding, is undoubtedly first included—this word is not a mere faculty of speech, but the fertile root whence the stately trunk of all language has sprung. But the word is not confined to this only—it next includes a living, working power—it is not merely an object and organ of knowledge—an instrument of teaching and learning; but the medium of affectionate union and conciliatory accommodation, judicial arbitrement and efficacious command, or even creative productiveness, as our own experience and life itself manifest each of those significations of the word; and thus it embraces the whole plenitude of the excellencies and qualities which characterize man.

[Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, Volume I, James Burton Robertson, tr.,  Lecture 1.]

The Desert Where a City's Bones are Strewn

 A Dead City
by Clark Ashton Smith 

Twilight ascends the abandoned ramps of noon
Within an ancient land, whose after-time
Unfathomably shadows its ruined prime.
Like rising mist the night increases soon
Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon
On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,
And touch with pallor of sepulchral rime
The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

She comes at last: unsepultured, they show
In all the hoary starkness of old stone.
From out a shadow like the lips of Death
Issues a wind, that through the ruins blown,
Cries like a prophet's ghost, with waiting breath,
The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.

Rosemary and May

 After Death
by Christina Rossetti 

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
'Poor child, poor child:' and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.

Rosemary and may (hawthorn) are fragrant plants one would likely use as rushes to freshen up a room, so that might be all that is in view, but in the language of flowers, rosemary usually means fidelity and may usually means hope, and I wonder if that is also in the background here.

Links of Note

 * Bernard Mees, The Origin of King Arthur's Name, at "The Age of Arthur"

* Christopher Berard and  Morris Tichenor, The Deeds of King Arthur in a Medieval Dante Commentary, "Medievalists.net"

* Jeffrey J. Watson, A Knowledge Argument Without "Knowledge" (PDF)

* Gabriel Bickerstaff, Identity Through Change: Aristotle Versus the Hercliteans in Metaphysics Γ (PDF)

* Henry Higuera, Multiplication Ancient and Modern, at "The St. John's Review"

* Philip Ball, How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own, at "Quanta Magazine"

* Andrew McGovern, Degrees of Perfection in St. John of the Cross, at "A Thomist"

* Jacob Saliba, Wisdom's Otherness: The Lessons of Gabriel Marcel, at "Church Life Journal"

* Susanna Clarke, In Defence of Fantasy Fiction, at "The Observer"

* Matthew Minerd, The Scale of the (Rightly Ordered) Human: Habitus and the Measure of Technology, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Flame & Light, What Is Horror?

* Christan B. Wagner, 6 Misconceptions about the "Perverted Faculty Argument", at "Thomism.com"

* Dilip D'Souza, The Laws that Ants May, or May Not, Follow, at "3 Quarks Daily"

Dashed Off XXXII

 stopdash > period > semicolon-dash > semicolon > comma-dash > dash > comma > space

the Church as bright, blazing, and bannered

the standard connexive schemas (both Aristotelian and Boethian) as capturing kinds of implicature

A crowd of people on a corner can be explained simply by an explanation of each person's being there only if the possibility of their being there together has a distinct prior explanation.

belief vs a sense of believability

Fictional characters can include impossible (inconsistent) versions of themselves.

"When a material body is transported from one point to another, it involves an action that depends on the speed of the body and on the distance it travels. However, the action is neither the speed nor the distance taken separately; rather it is proportional to the sum of the distances traveled multiplied each by the speed at which they were traveled." Maupertuis

(1) Life as such is not title for killing.
(2) Life does not become title for killing even when inconvenient.

One of the natural responses of the human person to reflection on being is to hymn it.

Part of scientific progress has always been aleatory, taking advantage of what chance presents.

from-, to-, and about-experiences

analogical arguments vs metaphorical uses of argument

"...metaphor draws into the intelligibility of the better-known-to-us those things that are lesser-known-in-themselves and thereby builds bridges of language to new concepts only yet incipiently realized in expression." Brian Kemple

metaphor as "the permanent possibility of expanding the field within which logic works" (Deely)

Semiosis is itself a sign of thought, or at least of its possibility.

unlimited semiosis -> God as infinite intelligible

For something to be expressive, there must be something in it by which it can be expressive.

limitlessness of play -> God as infinite intelligible

The sense in which a representamen 'gives rise' to an interpretant is not an efficient causal sense but the form sense of the interpretant being informed by or inclusive of the representamen as mediating its object.

Redescription is not interpretation but only a tool for it.

The permanence of permanent possibility is always from actuality.

Rorty takes it to be derogatory to say that his opponents treat texts as 'honorary persons', but treating texts as 'honorary persons' is just a neutral description of the act of interpretation. For instance, I just attributed this to 'Rorty', when in reality I got it from a text interpreted as 'honorary Rorty', an attribution required by the ethics of honorary persons; and the claim Rorty makes is based itself on treating the texts of his opponents as 'honorary' intellectual opponents.

* Interpret in such a way that one's standard of interpretation could be consistently treated by a rational being as the strandard of interpretation by all rational beings.
* Interpret in such a way as to treat natural or moral personhood always as an end of interpretation and never merely as a means.
* Interpret according to such a standard of interpretation as could be the standard of interpretation for an ideal republic of letters.

The universe of semiosis cannot be capture in a semiotic encyclopedia, which can only be an articulation of it.

We obviously may use texts without interpreting the texts themselves (as opposed to their context);.e.g., by using it as an example or a lorem-ipsam or in asemic writing.

We know there is a distinction between intentio operis and intentio lectoris, because in reading the reader finds resistance to his intention, and also something whose intentional structure continues independently and over against his own intention, as a causal matter of interpretation.

Total depersonification of a text makes it no longer recognizable as a text.

We conjecture in interpreting, but interpretation is not constituted only by infinite conjecture.

Every interpretation is potentially divisible into further interpretations; many of the quirks of postmodern accounts of interpretation repeat the kinds of errors made by people trying to treat the infinitely divisible as the actually infinitely divided.

A lump of clay very obviously has a coherence that does not depend only on what previously happened on the last turn of the wheel; it would be useless for pottery otherwise.

We not only treat texts as honorary persons, we treat persons as honorary texts.

A single interpreter is already an interpretive community.

To experience something as a sign is to experience it as something with more.

cognitive powers as general standing interpretances

Every interpretable sign in use is structured by its aptness to be interpreted, by its actually being interpreted, and by its ultimate interpretation in which the actual interpretation is wholly adequate to its aptness to be interpreted.

As a sign moves from one system of signs to another, it generates new meaning.

The ultimate interpretant cannot be a habit, but only that which makes habit possible.

The interpretant that receives is the interpretant that imposes (active and passive interpretancy).

The notion that you can change your moral standard on the basis of what is pleasant, clever, and useful is the temptation of Eve.

The first step in good parenting, sometimes forgotten, is just to be an adult doing adult things in a way that takes into account that there are children around.

For salt to keep its savor, it must stay distinguishable.

Acts don't have to be equivalent to be related.

That truth manifests more fully in dialectic does not mean it doesn't manifest in rhetoric.

The human race has been engaged in a niche construction project for its entire discernible history, niche-building on an extraordinary timescale, and no end in sight.

Finding common ground among values and preferences requires realism about the common ground.

We are able to reflect on our actions because we are able to reflect otherwise.

People often say that standards have risen when they ahve merely become more specific.

Political progressivism changes as city-cores, and thus urbanizing, changes.

Not all grounds are necessarily grounds.

A life is not a vote, and cannot be aggregated as if it were a vote.

Kalambo Falls preserves a 500000 year old wooden structure.

We speak with signs because we are signs.

the infinite intelligible as the Agent Future of inquiry

evidence as a relation to contingent cognition

Inquiry is not merely a matter of finding truths but also of knowing what to do with them.

the virtue ethics implicit in fiction
-- perhaps better: the implied internal aretology of fiction

The verb describes that which makes things communicable.

Gratitude for good makes us more able to seek and find other good.

It is misleading to talk about the social utility of religion because religion is one of the determining factors in social utility, one of the things that makes things have any social utility at all.

We guide our actions by classifying them, giving preference to the relevant classifications associated with higher ends; these classifications establish what counts as success or acceptability of action and its achievement.

Privacy is something we generally only have with the assistance of others.

Elections create oligarchies, and therefore elected offices must be divided in separation of powers.

Mathematics qua liberal art studies and makes use of necessary possibles by means of mental creations; this raises the question of whether there are necessary possibles for rhetoric.

Intuition is important in mathematics because we learn how to construct mathematical elements from the appearances of divine mathematical construction.

"Mathematics is that portion of our intellectual activity which transcends our biology and our environment." Errett Bishop

Brouwer takes the intution of twoity to be more fundamental than that of a unit (the unit is conceived as that which may be in a twoity, e.g., that which may be added to something like itself).

Most of the mistakes that are ever made in mathematical proof-writing involve treating as final steps of proof development what are in fact just possible intermediate steps.

Proof by inspection in mathematics generally seems to indicate a case in which the conclusion arises directly from the application of a technique that the very set-up of the problem would require to be already granted as adequate.

A more deeply understood but less adequate method may get you farther than a more poorly understood but more adequate method.

ethical proof by intension and remission of reciprocity

ad hom & ad ver proof in ethical reasoning
-- qualified retorsion
-- Socrates gives an ad hom refutation of Thrasymachus, but as Glaucon & Adeimantus note, this only extends as far as Thrasymachus (it is not ad iud)
-- Polus and Callicles both attempt to give ad ver refutation of Socrates, but fail. Socrates, on the other hand, successfully gives an ad ver refutation of Callicles.

Classics have depth because you can pick them up at different stages and learn more; the depth is in a sense in the reader, and the classic is adequate to it.

We live in a world in which we sometimes benefit by luck more than any skill could guarantee.

Consent does not release from duties.

"Since act remains itself by going beyond itself, and to do this is proper to cognition, act simply speaking is intelligent and thus alive." James Chastek

It is a mistake to think there is a set of texts that are 'open' and a set of texts that are 'closed'; all texts are open and all texts are closed, in different ways.

A problem with Eco's account of metaphor in The Role of the Reader is that the 'Minucius Mandrake' does not seem to be functioning as a metaphor. (Indeed, there are all sorts of problems with using Finnegan's Wake as a source of examples for how languages generally work.) Even on Eco's own account it is more properly an allusive neologism.
-- Eco also confuses an argument for metaphor buidling on metonymies -- a common phenomon -- for an argumetn for metaphor depending on metonymies -- a claim that is, at most optimistic, a stretch. This leads him to ignore innovative metaphors that break or reorganize prior codes, and ignore prior expectations of substitution, and, what is more, the common metaphorical practice of conceit in which one starts with a shocking or jarring metaphor and then creates the substitutions for it. I take any two nouns in different classes and transfer, and *then* explore how viable or interesting or useful the metaphor is for a given context. Again, poets often come up with metaphors driven by rhyme or alliteration (actual resemblance but of signifiers) rather than metonymy. And, of course, metonymies often presuppose metaphors -- we talk about the Crown, when we mean the King, not merely as a metonymy but as a metaphor for royal authority (which explains perhaps why we do not talk about the (Royal) Stocking). We in fact crown as a metaphor, and this gives force to the metonymic use of Crown to speak of the King.

We understand possible worlds by contrast with impossible worlds.

argument by sample argument

We do not value by feeling alone.

creation ex nihilo as a type for divinization (cf. St. Bernard to Peter, Cardinal Deacon)
-- God, fullness of Being, calls forth what is not so that it is. // God, fullness of Love, calls forth that which is nothing in love, so that it is in Love.

St. Boethius

 Today in some calendars is the memorial of St. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, best known for his Consolation of Philosophy. From his little treatise, "The Trinity Is One God, Not Three Gods":

Theology does not deal with motion and is abstract and separable, for the Divine Substance is without either matter or motion. In Physics, then, we are bound to use scientific, in Mathematics, systematical, in Theology, intellectual concepts; and in Theology we will not let ourselves be diverted to play with imaginations but will simply apprehend that Form which is pure form and no image, which is very being and the source of Being. For everything owes its being to Form. Thus a statue is not a statue on account of the brass which is its matter, but on account of the form whereby the likeness of a living thing is impressed upon it: the brass itself is not brass because of the earth which is its matter, but because of its form. Likewise earth is not earth by reason of unqualified matter,11 but by reason of dryness and weight, which are forms. So nothing is said to be because it has matter, but because it has a distinctive form. But the Divine Substance is Form without matter, and is therefore One, and is its own essence. But other things are not simply their own essences, for each thing has its being from the things of which it is composed, that is, from its parts.

Exemplar Causes

 Exemplar causes (also sometimes known traditionally as ideas*  or original forms) are commonly defined in various ways -- as forms such that effects imitate them out of the intention of agents determining their own ends, as pre-existing substantifying reasons of existing things, as that which an artisan regards in effecting what he determines to be, as that which is the standard of truth and propriety for what is made, as that to which an effect is assimilated and conformed. It is an important kind of cause, and it is not difficult to find cases of it. For instance, in building something one may follow a blueprint; a novelist writes the actual version of the novel he has pre-thought; a teacher may set a standard example that is imitated by students. But what kind of cause is it?

The standard Aristotelian view, of course, is that there four proper causes: efficient (in Aristotle himself the somewhat narrower motive cause), material, formal, final. There are good reasons to think that the exemplar cause is not any of these. It is very obviously not a material cause. It also cannot be a formal cause, because both matter and form are intrinsic or constituent causes, and the exemplar is very definitely separate from the exemplate that derives from it. Thus one might try to make it out to be an efficient cause or a final cause, but in fact the exemplar cause does not have the same relation to the exemplate that the efficient has to the effect or that the final cause has to that which tends to it.

One might hold, then, that it is a fifth cause, and in practice it is often treated as such. However, there is good reason to think that there are exactly four proper causes. In addition, while it can't be an efficient, formal, or final cause, the exemplar cause is suspiciously similar to all three. Indeed, we see this in some of its descriptions: the exemplar is the form which the effects imitate from the intention of agents determining their own ends.

The four proper causes are those to which all causes can be traced back. But there are many other kinds of causes. There is nothing that requires us to say that every kind of causation traces back to only one kind of proper cause, as if these were summa genera of causation. Other causes can arise from the various ways these four interact in the real world. Their causation will, in principle, be explicable in terms of the four proper causes, but this may be quite complex, and it does not mean that the derivative causes are not causes in their own right, only that they are not the most basic building-blocks of causation. When they are causes in their own right, rather than just causal systems, they will have an overall action like that of one of the proper causes (because they will be organized by a particular relationship to a result), but this will arise from the interaction of various proper causes.

Perhaps the most popular, and I think, correct, view of exemplar causes is that they are extrinsic formal causes. Exemplar causes, as I said, cannot be proper formal causes because exemplars are not intrinsic forms. Nonetheless, they function a lot like formal causes. The reason this is possible is that the final cause, as cause of causes, can make it so that something's proper form comes to be in a way that depends on the form of another thing. So in exemplar causation we have two formal causes (that of the exemplar and the exemplate) and the existence of the one is made dependent on the other by the final cause; then the exemplar's form, although separate from the thing, works in a way as if it were the formal cause of the thing.

Exemplar causes are not the only kinds of extrinsic formal cause. I can think of at least two other major ones. Objective causes (which play a role in thought and in signs) are one; they differ from exemplar causes in that exemplar causes explain existence in some way, whereas objective causes complete cognitive and appetitive powers, and are causes of cognitive and appetitive actions being what they are. Another is a kind of causality that doesn't have a convenient name; perhaps we can call it a 'formant cause'. St. Albert noted in his study of mineral formation that 'place' was a cause that couldn't be neglected, and worked like an external form. That is, the boundaries of the surrounding medium contribute to how minerals grow and transform. Molds, like cookie-cutters or the kinds of molds used in arts and crafts and factories, are another sort of cause in this way; they affect the form of something by imposing a direct boundary during its formation. Exemplar causes, on the other hand, are causes of a thing as existing.

Suarez famously did not like this classification of exemplar causes as extrinsic formal causes; as he put it, the efficient cause also has a form on which the form of the effect depends. Thus he held that it was just a species of efficient cause. this is certainly not correct, because unless the efficient cause is itself the exemplar cause, the exemplar cause does not act, but is that according to which something is conformed. Part of the reason, too, that Suarez can get away with this is that he rejects the idea that extrinsic exemplar causes are really exemplar causes, so for him, exemplar causes are always internal to a mind. A view in which a live model is not an exemplar for the painting, or that a blueprint is not an exemplar cause for a machine built according to it, seems a very defective view. And it makes much more sense for us to take these 'external exemplar causes' to be to the 'internal exemplar causes' in something like the way that instrumental signs are to formal signs in objective causes, or instruments are to principal efficient causes. That is, they are 'exemplate exemplars' like instruments are moved movers.

It is true, of course, that an efficient cause always has a form, and that the effect depends on the action of the efficient cause, and the the efficient cause acts because of its form. And this is indeed just what efficient causation is. But the exemplar cause is, as the descriptions of it say, not the form out of which the agent acts but the form with respect to which the effect is formed. These can sometimes be the same, when the agent is also the exemplar, but they aren't necessarily so, and even when they are the same, the agent's being an agent and its being an exemplar are distinct. Some neoscholastic authors attempted to get around this by arguing that the exemplar is a 'moral efficient cause', and presumably an assisting one rather than a principal one, but this seems digging the hole deeper.

In the late medieval and Baroque periods, the exemplar cause and the final cause shared a similar fate; accounts of them increasingly relegated them to being things in the mind. Suarez in fact draws this conclusion explicitly for exemplar causes: he claims that they are only found in intellectual agents. But they are not merely things in the mind, although minds have very special and (for us) very important kinds of them (namely, purposes for final causes and design-plans for exemplar causes). 

-----

* Our use of the 'idea' to mean (roughly) something definite in the mind is due in great measure to Descartes, who is explicit that he is adapting the traditional notion of 'idea' to his own use. It is very indirect, but Descartes's usage is actually influenced by Suarez's restriction of the exemplar cause, noted below.

And Summer Seas Afoam like Foaming Wine

 Exotique
by Clark Ashton Smith 

Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid-flower
Whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen
To moons aswim in iris or in green,
Or mix with morning in an eastern bower. 

Thou shouldst have known, in amaranthine isles,
The sunsets hued like fire of frankincense,
And noontides fraught with far-borne redolence,
The mingled spicery of purple miles. 

Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow,
Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow--
These, these, by which desire is grown divine, 

Were made for dreams in mystic palaces,
For love and sleep and slow voluptuousness,
And summer seas afoam like foaming wine.

Life

 In the natural realm, biological living beings act in view of five ends: nutrition, organic growth, self-defense, self-repair, reproduction. The analogies to spiritual life are present in the development of the Church's nourishment from the Word of God, sacred Tradition, and the sacraments (nutrition), doctrinal consideration of the truth (growth), her doctrinal activities of self-definition (self-defense), her movements of reform (self-repair and vital development), and the spiritual fecundity of charity (spiritual fruitfulness). In a wide range of historical contingent circumnstances these processes of a unified life can take on a wide range of expressions (much like a biological individual or species can develop in a wide array of ways in diverse environmental conditions, through time). However, the mystery is that there is only one Church in and through all the conditions of history, and her doctrinal self-expression and self-communication remains one through all time and through all conditions. It is this mystery of organic continuity amidst change that the Church seeks to denote when she speaks of the mystery of the development of doctrine, as an integral dimension of the ongoing life and vital flourishing of the Catholic Church. 

[Thomas Joseph White, OP, Principles of Catholic Theology; Book 1, On the Nature of Theology, The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2023) pp. 80-81.]

It Was Six Men of Indostan

 The Blind Men and an Elephant
by John Godfrey Saxe 

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind. 

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!" 

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, "Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!" 

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!" 

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!" 

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said:"E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!" 

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!" 

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong! 

Moral: So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Evening Note for Sunday, October 18

 Thought for the Evening: The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin

In 1987, Stephen R. Lawhead published Taliesin, the first book in The Pendragon Cycle, closely followed by Merlin in 1988 and Arthur in 1989. Later he followed this up with Pendragon (1994), Grail (1997), and the rather different Avalon (1999), and more recently has added Aurelia (2025), which is the only one in the cycle I haven't read. The first trilogy is truly excellent; growing up, I read them a lot. The style of them was particular interesting -- Lawhead interwove the myth of Atlantis, various stylized versions of Celtic myths, Arthurian legend, and a sort of vaguely Celticized Evangelical Christianity into something that was quite fresh and new.

I was interested, then, to watch the recent streaming series, The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, which is based on Taliesin and Merlin. I can recommend it quite highly. It is imperfect. It really does not do justice to the excellent story of Taliesin, rushing through it, but its recent success on Amazon Prime makes it reasonably likely there will be a second season, and one hopes that they can at least get more of it in flashbacks. Taliesin is not a household name the way Merlin is, so it's not surprising that they put the focus on Merlin. Still, they would have done better, perhaps, to have given Taliesin a bit more time, even if putting the emphasis on the second book. The rushing doesn't do any favors to the more complicated story in Merlin, either; putting two books into seven episodes is asking a lot of seven episodes. Nonetheless, while parts might be a bit puzzling to people who have never read the books, as an adaptation works quite well.

The series does occasionally show its very limited budget. Of course, since we're talking television, the very limited budget is said to be about $50 million. Nonetheless, I kept comparing it to The Rings of Power, whose first season cost that amount for each episode, and yet, with very occasional exceptions, The Pendragon Cycle looks better. The limited budget required them to find places to shoot, make sets with which the actors had to interact, and actually do something with the outdoors. It all seems quite right, in ways that the undoubtedly more expensive backgrounds of The Rings of Power never have. We also get more action -- sometimes stylized, to be sure, but there are actually things going on that give interest to the scenes.

In adapting the books, perhaps the biggest problem that has to be solved is the music. Taliesin is the greatest bard in the history of the island of Britain, with Merlin having some of the same talent. Music is central to what they do. The books can cheat on this -- we don't need the music, we don't even get the song, we just get prose versions of the stories that were told. The series, I think, probably solves the best way it can without requiring extraordinary musical genius -- the bards sing, but the magic is carried by the reactions. In one scene, Taliesin is singing at a banquet before a strange court, where his people have come as refugees. The song is nothing special in itself, but it's just a platform; what happens is that Taliesin's people start singing along, and King Avallach, to whom they have come begging, who comes from a civilization so advanced that in comparison to it these people are primitive savages, looks around and (in an excellent bit of subtle acting by Daniel Fathers) realizes that this is exactly what his dying people need. That is a good, solid way to do the magic of music on screen.

Because there are so many characters, being pulled in from two different books, the actors don't always have a full time to shine, but I liked most of what I saw. (Pelleas seems unfortunately a bit of a non-entity, but I think this is more of a not-enough-time-for-development problem, rather than an acting problem.) That Atlanteans are all rather magnetic -- which makes it further disappointing that we don't get more of them in their own right -- Rose Reid as Charis, Daniel Fathers as Avallach, and Emree Franklin as Morgian. (Since Morgian is the primary antagonist of Merlin, and the one person of whom Merlin is truly afraid, I expect we will get more of her if the series gets a second season.) The three key characters for the parts of the story that make it into the series are Charis, Taliesin (played by James Arden), and Merlin (played by Tom Sharp), and all three of them work quite well. I also liked Myles Clohessey's interpretation of Uther as suspicious and grouchy but extremely practical.

If you liked the books, you'll mostly like the series. If you haven't read the books, it is worthwhile, as well, although the series will occasionally require you to connect dots that it does not itself explicitly connect because it is only seven episodes long. However, it's no worse than you'd likely get in a movie version, and the series in any case more than makes up for it in other ways.

Various Links of Interest

* Christian B. Wagner, On the Use of Typology in Apologetics

* E. J. Hutchinson, A Review of The Odyssey, Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, at "New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry"

* Brian Kemple, Semiotics, at the Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology

* Victor Tamburini, Saying (Nothing) and Conversational Implicatures (PDF)

* James Chastek, Predogstination, A fragment., at "Just Thomism"

* Dan Hitchens, The Making of Roger Scruton, at "First Things"

* Josh Hawthorne, How and Where AI Intelligence Actually Comes From, at "Thinking Out Loud"

* Bill Vallicella, Semantic Engines, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Understanding, at "Maverick Philosopher"

* Brett Mullins looks at the first issue of Mind.

* Nik Prassas, Is Brideshead Revisited the 20th Century's Greatest Novel? at "The Republic of Letters"

* Francisco Fernflores, The Equivalence of Mass and Energy, at the SEP

Currently Reading

Clark Ashton Smith, Zothique: The Final Cycle
Thomas Joseph White, OP, Principles of Catholic Theology: Book 1, On the Nature of Theology
Bernard Lonergan, Verbum
Lara Alcock, How to Think about Abstract Algebra

In Audiobook

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (as read by Rob Inglis)
Jim Butcher, Changes (as read by James Marsters)

St. Ignatius of Antioch

 Today is the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr. From his letter to the Ephesians (chapters 13-15):

Take heed, then, often to come together to give thanks to God, and show forth His praise. For when ye assemble frequently in the same place, the powers of Satan are destroyed, and the destruction at which he aims is prevented by the unity of your faith. Nothing is more precious than peace, by which all war, both in heaven and earth, is brought to an end. 

None of these things is hid from you, if ye perfectly possess that faith and love towards Christ Jesus which are the beginning and the end of life. For the beginning is faith, and the end is love. Now these two, being inseparably connected together, are of God, while all other things which are requisite for a holy life follow after them. No man [truly] making a profession of faith sinneth; nor does he that possesses love hate any one. The tree is made manifest by its fruit; so those that profess themselves to be Christians shall be recognised by their conduct. For there is not now a demand for mere profession, but that a man be found continuing in the power of faith to the end. 

It is better for a man to be silent and be [a Christian], than to talk and not to be one. It is good to teach, if he who speaks also acts. There is then one Teacher, who spake and it was done; while even those things which He did in silence are worthy of the Father. He who possesses the word of Jesus, is truly able to hear even His very silence, that he may be perfect, and may both act as he speaks, and be recognised by his silence. There is nothing which is hid from God, but our very secrets are near to Him. Let us therefore do all things as those who have Him dwelling in us, that we may be His temples, and He may be in us as our God, which indeed He is, and will manifest Himself before our faces. Wherefore we justly love Him.

A Wizard Wind Goes Crying Eerily

The Eldritch Dark
by Clark Ashton Smith 

Now as the twilight's doubtful interval
Closes with night's accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily,
And on the wold misshapen shadows crawl,
Miming the trees, whose voices climb and fall,
Imploring, in Sabbatic ecstacy,
The sky where vapor-mounted phantoms flee
From the scythed moon impendent over all. 

Twin veils of covering cloud and silence, thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon's ensanguined blade awhile is shown....
The night grows whole again....The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow's wings.

The Voice of the Ass

 About twenty-five (!) years ago I had an idea for a novella or novel, whose working title would have been Balaam's Ass, and at this point I very much wish that I had actually written it then. In the story as I had it conceived, humanity had reached the stars due to a project known as the Hypermetria Program. It had founded first the world of Hypermetria, and then many others, and by the time the events in the story would take place, several hundred years later, humanity had become three major polities, the declining agricultural hegemony of Earth and its colonies, the very sprawling Alliance, and the much smaller, but extremely advanced, planet of Hypermetria.

Most of the story would have taken place in Alliance territory, but the inciting incident would have been in Hypermetria. The Hypermetria Program had been an artificial intelligence project whose goal was fully automated scientific inquiry. This was the reason for Hypermetria's very advanced technology; research was done by the Scientists, a network of computer programs overseeing automated laboratories that worked in a highly efficient manner, and that more indirectly oversaw the automated factories that built things on the basis of their discoveries. The prologue of the story would have been the Scientists, and any factories and power plants that were in the process of being upgraded by them at the time, shutting down permanently all over Hypermetria. This is all witnessed by someone named Nicholas Magnus.

Switch to the Alliance, and a man named Robert Couvert; his family is originally Creole and Cajun from Louisiana, so his name is pronounced Ro-Bair Coo-Vair, and he usually goes by Bear. Bear Couvert is an investigator for the President of the Alliance, Rebecca Chou; whenever there is a problem, he goes and quietly looks into it so that she can have the best information. President Chou has summoned him to deal with a massive interstellar incident. Chou's information is this. There was a terrorist attack on the Hypermetrian Scientist network; the Hypermetrians are being very closed-mouthed about what exactly happened, but they are accusing a group in Alliance space of having done it. The particular group is a weird religious group called The Society of Balaam's Ass. Chou has never heard of this society; all the information that she is able to gather from tax records and the like makes the organization seem quite anodyne. They are non-profit who deal with publishing and the like, and they don't even seem to have any religious association. The Hypermetrians have warships at the border making vague, but very real, threats. Chou has talked them into a quiet joint investigation. Bear, and any experts he wishes to bring along, will be joining the Hypermetrian investigators aboard a civilian Hypermetrian ship (the Hypermetrians insisted that the ship be theirs) to investigate the matter further.

Bear goes to the Alliance planet of Hypermetria to meet up with an old classmate, Matthew Li, who has become a Maronite priest and teaches advanced mathematical sociology at the Catholic University of Rosamystica. Father Matt has done studies on both secret societies and criminal groups; he tells Bear that he lacks the information to say definitely, but the Hypermetrian story does not make sense. They still don't know what exactly has happened on Hypermetria, but, simply mathematically and logically, no group capable of doing something that could unsettle the Hypermetrians this much, and do so across interstellar borders, could be as secret as Bear is claiming. Father Matt, intrigued by the problem, accepts Bear's proposal that he join the investigation.

They meet up with the Hypermetrian investigation team, which turns out to be only one person: Nicholas Magnus. At this point, my conception of the story grew a great deal fuzzier, but the essential idea would be that they would go around the Alliance trying to track down information about The Society of Balaam's Ass, and finding it quite difficult. It seems almost Luddite in character, and mostly does small things, like creating small publishing presses out limited editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, old-fashioned books, then closing up shop and moving. They learn that the members greet each other with pass-phrases. One person will say, "The Ass has a Voice," and the second person will say, "And it was created in the creation of the world," or one person will say, "The Ass prophesies," and the other person will say, "And its prophecy is, 'Why are you beating me?'" Nicholas Magnus claims that Hypermetrian intelligence knows that the Society was founded by a failed politician named Daniel Goldstein, a few hundred years ago on earth, and that the Society is opposed to Hypermetria and its use of Scientists.

At some point, though, they are met by another ship, which sends a message to Nicholas Magnus: "Daniel Goldstein wishes to meet you again." They meet with Daniel Goldstein, who turns out to be a small woman of Korean background. She says that the Society did not do what the Hypermetrians are claiming, although they would have if they could have. At one point, she calls Nicholas Magnus 'Old Nick', and he calls her a dybbuk, and that chapter would have been called, "The Devil, the Dybbuk, and the Deep Black Sky." She leaves, and Nicholas Magnus insists that they let her go rather than bring her in for more questioning, because, he says, "She may have called herself Daniel Goldstein, but she was no longer Daniel Goldstein." Bear and Father Matt don't know what to make of this.

Eventually, they find the actual headquarters of The Society of Balaam's Ass, in a city called Haskalah on a planet out in the middle of nowhere, barely even part of the Alliance. They are asked by someone, "The Lord opened the eyes of Balaam," and Father Matt guesses the right pass-phrase: "And he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way." They are taken to a backroom where they see a young man with blond hair and blue eyes. He greets Nicholas Magnus as 'Old Nick', and Nicholas Magnus takes out a hidden gun and shoots him on that spot. As he is arrested, he tells Bear and Father Matt, "That was Daniel Goldstein."

Afterward, Bear and Father Matt are talking, The Hypermetrians demanded the Alliance to turn over Nicholas Magnus and, not wanting to risk war, the Alliance did so. Father Matt proposes his own solution to the mystery of what happened on Hypermetria. There was no terrorist attack. It was, instead, a coup, in which one part of the Scientist network, probably the firewalled military Scientists, attacked another part. The Scientist network was the most advanced computer system of all time, protected by the most advanced technology in the galaxy. Who knows whether the attack worked, but a tiny non-technical group in another country could never have had the resources to pull something like that off even if they wanted to do so. You would need Scientists to do it, and the only ones who have a Scientist network are the Hypermetrians. Bear is appalled. Father Matt muses that this is why he thinks a society like Hypermetria is doomed, although he concedes that the equations governing the society dynamics are ambiguous. It doesn't matter whether machines can do the science, or what they can do if you hand over scientific inquiry to them; the Society of Balaam's Ass is right about one thing, namely, that human scientific inquiry must be human. Even if computers were massively better at scientific inquiry than we are, that is something about them; we need scientific inquiry we do ourselves. Bear asks if Father Matt has any idea what this 'Daniel Goldstein' business was; Father Matt doesn't, but suspects that Nicholas Magnus was using the Hypermetrian crisis as an occasion for some kind of personal vendetta. Bear wonders how the Hypermetrian problem can be fixed, but Father Matt says that Bear is being Hypermetrian; in reality, it is not our place to fix the galaxy but simply to do what is right and human in the situations in which we find ourselves.

The epilogue goes back several hundred years. A first-time Congressman, Daniel Goldstein, is meeting a man named Jake Smith in a small, out-of-the-way, empty restaurant in Washington, DC, as people are buzzing about the news that a laboratory for the Hypermetria Project was bombed, as the head of the Project has vowed that they will not be deterred but will go ahead with their project of using artificial intelligence to develop an interstellar drive. When Jake arrives, they talk about the news, and when Jake says he doesn't like any of this artificial intelligence stuff, Rep. Goldstein tells a story about how he recently toured one of the Hypermetria Project laboratories, with the head of the Hypermetria Project himself, Nicholas Magnus. Rep. Goldstein is a non-practicing Jew and an atheist, but something Magnus says in the course of the tour put him in mind of a discussion he had had in his youth with his estranged father, a rabbi. He had said something critical about his father's Jewish faith and practice, saying he was being an ass for resisting progress, and his father responded with the story of Balaam's ass, saying that the voice of the ass was created by the Lord of the Universe for one and only one prophecy: to rebuke Balaam for beating and threatening to kill the ass for resisting progress, when the ass, lowly creature though it may have been, could see that the angel of death was standing by the way. The comment that Magnus had made that had brought this memory to mind was that with the new artificial intelligences Hypermetria was developing, you could replace human scientists completely.

"At that," says Rep. Goldstein to Jake, "I saw that there was no choice but blow up the entire Project."

Several years later, Goldstein, no longer a Congressman, is dying. He and Jake Smith have a brief discussion, and Goldstein dies. Jake Smith leaves the room and says to a number of people waiting outside, "I am Daniel Goldstein."

All of this comes to mind again, given recent discussions and worries about computer programs and their possible effect on the field of mathematics. Now nobody would believe that the story idea didn't come from this.

St. Teresa of Jesus

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From the Life (Chapter XI):

I speak now of those who begin to be the servants of love; that seems to me to be nothing else but to resolve to follow Him in the way of prayer, who has loved us so much. It is a dignity so great, that I have a strange joy in thinking of it; for servile fear vanishes at once, if we are, as we ought to be, in the first degree. O Lord of my soul, and my good, how is it that, when a soul is determined to love Thee--doing all it can, by forsaking all things, in order that it may the better occupy itself with the love of God--it is not Thy will it should have the joy of ascending at once to the possession of perfect love? I have spoken amiss; I ought to have said, and my complaint should have been, why is it we do not? for the fault is wholly our own that we do not rejoice at once in a dignity so great, seeing that the attaining to the perfect possession of this true love brings all blessings with it. 

We think so much of ourselves, and are so dilatory in giving ourselves wholly to God, that, as His Majesty will not let us have the fruition of that which is so precious but at a great cost, so neither do we perfectly prepare ourselves for it. I see plainly that there is nothing by which so great a good can be procured in this world. If, however, we did what we could, not clinging to anything upon earth, but having all our thoughts and conversation in Heaven, I believe that this blessing would quickly be given us, provided we perfectly prepared ourselves for it at once, as some of the saints have done. We think we are giving all to God; but, in fact, we are offering only the revenue or the produce, while we retain the fee-simple of the land in our own possession. 

Particular Society

 It is high time for us to realise that civil society is not a universal society in the sense that it embraces all other societies and their rights. It is a particular society which exists alongside others, as it does alongside everything individual which cannot be absorbed by civil society without losing individuality. Civil society, far from being able to appropriate or encroach upon the rights of other individuals or societies, is intended to protect them, not destroy them or weaken them, nor tie them down to harm them in any other way.

[Antonio Rosmini, About the Author's Studies, Murphy, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 2004), p. 28.]

Fortnightly Book, October 11

 Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a poet, whose poetry had quite a fair amount of acclaim. It of course did not pay the bills, and, despite recurring health problems, he spent both of his life doing manual labor to get by.  It didn't help when the Great Depression struck and the same time his parents began to have health issues. By this point his poetry had brought him into contact with a lot of literary figures, so he helped ease the burdens slightly by writing fiction. There was more of a market for short stories in magazines, and Smith, with his poetic ability for verbal fireworks, fit in perfectly with the weird fiction market. Most of his fiction was published in Weird Tales, and to this day he is regarded as one of the 'big three' of Weird Tales, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with both of whom he had an extensive correspondence, despite the fact that they never met in person. His mother died in 1935, Howard died by suicide in 1936, Lovecraft by cancer in 1937, and in 1937 his father also died, so Smith, still overworked and enduring blow after blow, essentially stopped writing fiction. But he is often considered the best writer and in particular the best stylist of the Weird Fiction Golden Age. 

During his fiction-writing period, Smith, wrote a lot of fiction. The next fortnightly book is Zothique: The Final Cycle, which consists of all of Smiths fiction that takes place in the setting of Zothique, the last inhabited continent of the dying Earth, when all the civilizations we have known have vanished without a trace, and the world has become a world of strange worshippers of strange gods, filled with demonism and sorcery and despair. The various stories were put together by Lin Carter, who tried to work out a coherent narrative chronology in doing so; Zothique: The Final Cycle is edited by Ronald Higer, who makes some adjustments and modifications to Carter's arrangement to get a result that fits more tightly with comments Smith himself made about the stories.

Zothique
by Clark Ashton Smith

He who has trod the shadows of Zothique
And looked upon the coal-red sun oblique,
Henceforth returns to no anterior land,
But haunts a later coast
Where cities crumble in the black sea-sand
And dead gods drink the brine. 

He who has known the gardens of Zothique
Where bleed the fruits torn by the simorgh's beak,
Savors no fruit of greener hemispheres:
In arbors uttermost,
In sunset cycles of the sombering years,
He sips an amaranth wine. 

He who has loved the wild girls of Zothique
Shall not come back a gentler love to seek,
Nor know the vampire's from the lover's kiss:
For him the scarlet ghost
Of Lilith from time's last necropolis
Rears amorous and malign. 

He who has sailed in galleys of Zothique
And seen the looming of strange spire and peak,
Must face again the sorcerer-sent typhoon,
And take the steerer's post
On far-poured oceans by the shifted moon
Or the re-shapen Sign.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

 Introduction

Opening Passages: The First Movement consists of three short novels, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. From A Question of Upbringing:

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a mocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakesperian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and, as if performing a rite, cast some substance--apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper--on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind.... (p. 1)

From A Buyer's Market:

The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kinds of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons', reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises made between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon's favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though no displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured or himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over teh shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London. (p. 1)

From The Acceptance World:

Once in a way, perhaps as often as every eighteen months, an invitation to Sunday afternoon tea at the Ufford would arrive on a postcard addressed in Uncle Giles's neat, constricted handwriting. This private hotel in Bayswater, where he stayed during comparatively rare visits to London, occupied two corner houses in a latent, almost impenetrable region west of the Queen's Road. Not only the battleship-grey colour, but also something at once angular and top-heavy about the block's configuration as a whole, suggested a large vessel moored in the street. Even within, at least on the ground floor, the Ufford conveyed some reminder of life at sea, though certainly of no luxuriously equipped liner; at best one of those superannuated schooners of Conrad's novels, perhaps decorated years before as a rich man's yacht, now tarnished by the years and reduced to ignoble uses like traffic in tourists, pilgrims, or even illegal immigrants; pervaded--to borrow an appropriately Conradian mannerism--with uneasy memories of the strife of men. That was the feeling of the Ufford gave, riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tides. (p. 1)

Summary: In A Question of Upbringing, Nicholas Jenkins, whose family may or may not be related to the Robert Jenkins of the War of Jenkins' Ear, notices a fire in the snow, which reminds him in turn of Nicolas Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time, which in turn leads him to think of mortality and the march of time. He thinks back to his school-days, when he was friends with Charles Stringham and Peter Templer; he remembers in particular their discussions of an older student, Kenneth Widmerpool. After they leave school, Jenkins visits both Stringham and Templer, and meets Templer's sister, Jean, with whom he imagines himself to be in love. At university, Jenkins meets a number of other people, and in particular, Mark Members, J. G. Quiggin, and Bill Truscott, and eventually witnesses the end of Stringham's and Templer's connection. Thus they end up going their separate ways; it was all perhaps always destined for collision, but one of course never knows that at the time.

In A Buyer's Market, Jenkins happens to meet up with Kenneth Widmerpool when they attend the same dinner party. Jenkins has become involved in art publishing, which has resulted in his crossing paths with the painter Edgard Deacon, who weaves in and out of the story, and his pacifist activist friend, Gypsy Jones, who also weaves in and out of the story. Widmerpool and Jenkins happen to both be interested in the same woman at the party, Barbara Goring; Barbara ends up embarrassing Widmerpool (and herself) in public when she accidentally pours an entire pot of sugar over his head. Afterward, Widmerpool becomes interested in Gypsy Jones; he ends up paying for her abortion, but the relationship goes nowhere, and Widmerpool becomes focused on his work because of it. Jenkins meets up with Stringham as well, who is engaged to and eventually marries Lady Peggy Stepney. Deacon happens to die on the same day; Jenkins attends his funeral, and afterward sleeps with Gypsy Jones.

In The Acceptance World, Jenkins, having recently published a novel, is caught up in a set of problems arising from his work in the publishing industry; his firm has engaged a famous novelist, St. John Clarke, to write a preface to a book on a painter who has recently died, Horace Isbister, whom St. John Clarke had long known. It turns out that St. John Clarke's secretary is Mark Members, with whom Jenkins meets up. This happens to lead to Jenkins meeting Peter Templer again. Templer, who had always been a lady's man, has married a model famous for toothpaste ads. Members happens to be outmaneuvered for his position as Clarke's secretary by J. G. Quiggins; through Jenkins, Quiggins happens to meet Templer's wife, who eventually leaves Templer for him. Templer happens to have come across Widmerpool, who is now employed by a firm of bill-brokers, also known as a discount house. Bill-brokers negotiate the sale of bills of exchange, providing investors with ready money while using the buying and selling to make a profit, an early form of what is today often called futures contracts; Templer calls it 'the Acceptance World'. Jenkins meets up with Jean again, who is married, and begins to have an affair with her. By happenstance, Jenkins meets up with Widmerpool again, and they in turn happen to meet Stringham, who is divorced and has ever since been heavily drinking.

If this makes it sound like the books are lists of characters, in some sense they are. This is not a plot-focused series. The plot, such as it is, could be summarized as 'Something happens to happen', often in the form of 'Nick Jenkins introduces two people and something happens to happen' or in the form of 'Nick Jenkins is introduced to someone and something happens to happen'. Likewise, although the story covers the period of the 1920s and the 1930s, for practical purposes it might as well all occur in a timeless void; you get occasionally references to the Great War, and the Bolshevik Revolution, and various economic events and fashions, but for the most part, these could just be anything. The story is really just the people, moving in and out of each other's lives. They more or less run in different parts of the same circles; it could be years, but inevitably you hear bits and pieces about each other and eventually cross paths in one way or another. It's the description of the characters from different angles that is the interest. In the first two books, this seems to me to be somewhat tentative and exploratory; it is with The Acceptance World, I think, that things start coming together in a more natural way. 

It also becomes clear by this point that what we see in the stories is as much about Nick Jenkins as it is about anyone described; Jenkins sometimes attributes to other people things that seem clearly to be projections from his own attitudes. This is not consistent, but in a sense, Jenkins approaches everything in the way he starts in A Question of Upbringing, reflecting on the events as if they were a painting and the people as if they were portraits. In a painting there is a fact on the canvas, the paint and the color and the texture; but when contemplate a painting you also contribute something to the viewing.

Favorite Passage: From The Acceptance World:

When, in describing Widmerpool's new employment, Templer had spoken of 'the Acceptance World', I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element--happiness, for example--is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that. (p. 170)

Recommendation:  Recommended. I liked The Acceptance World the best, since it is in that work that the story really seems to come into its own, but it presupposes the other two.

*****

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 1995).

Dashed Off XXXI

 part
(1) happenstantially
(2) formally
(3) finally
--- --- (a) actually/actively
--- --- (b) deontically/normally

Good description in English requires the use of the active/passive contrast, as a general matter. Contrasts (not necessarily, but sometimes, oppositions) are what make description vivid and useful. Extensive description with only active or only passive mood flattens the description, making everything of equal importance, or unimportance, in the description.

The intelligibility of a sentence depends on its possible context.

A word is part of a sentence in ways that are happenstantial, formal, and final.

All of mathematics is built on practices of measurement that are, as a whole, infinitesimal in comparison with all the fields of mathematics. The size of the foundation, however, is not relevant; it is secure. The infinity of mathematics is just an explication of how much tehre is in things like tallying, or comparing lines, or applying scales to intension and remission.

In anger we experience things as things that could have been different.

One thing we find in human learning and opinion-change is that human beings do not really 'update' their beliefs; when beliefs change, the prior beliefs continue to exercise some force -- their 'shape' continues to influence how other beliefs work -- and following through on change of implications is patchy and sporadic. Further, beliefs often transmogrify and get 'stuck' at various stages of half-change, being part one and part another, or sometimes belief-tracks split, so that both are held until something forces a resolution of two to one, or else a decision is made about which to begin discarding.

the imperfect commensurability of pleasures

that which tends to be unable to be (dis)approved

An open question is not a recurring question but a question not fully answered.

what is owed the state vs what is owed our fellow citizens vs what is owed civil society as a whole

Different kinds of account of personal identity get us different accounts of memory.

Every 'theory of truth' captures an aspect of language as an instrument for pursuit of truth.

Disquotational theories of truth capture the semi-transparent or self-submerging aspect of language as an instrument. (Both sides of a disquotational equation are propostiions, but on the quotational side we are considering the lens showing us something and on the disquoted side we are considering what is seen through the lens.)

language as an instrumental system of references reflecting & interacting with the world as system

The family is an inherently juridical entity, albeit one that reaches out to other juridical entities.

drama as a study of ontological exigency, of our fit in the broader realm of being and beings, whether clearly or vaguely conceived

Faith is the first step to experiencing being as love; it first does so by revealing it as grace.

gift as an experience of love

In music we experience something transient that nonetheless continues to exist.

All art seeks to be as participatory as music.

Every fine art is a distinctive symbol of the Incarnation, in part by being a symbol of our own incarnation, but in part precisely as being different.

Each person is the ethical commonwealth in seed; each virtuous person, the ethical commonwealth in one.

Prayer, like music, wells up from silence.

the social-welding function of music

We experience little bits of sound as possible parts of a whole.

Music often jogs our thinking simply by getting our thinking moving.

The  modern sense(s) of what is 'obective' and what is 'subjective' is a complex of broken parts inconsistently mixed together.

Our vulnerabilities are always beyond the limits of our loves. People think that love makes us vulnerable because it by contrast makes us aware of the vulnerabilities that we did not know that we had and to which it has not yet extended to heal.

Fictional characters arise from a wellspring of personhood, which we find in ourselves.

We live in an age of Now We Know Better, whose curious feature is that 'Now we know better' is treated as an assumption, not as a discovery, and is taken to be true on no evidence at all except that it is the assumption made. The betterness is not something we have learned; it is there, and we must discover what it is, whatever it might be. We approach perfection in our self-aggrandizing, approach the limit of self-enclosedness; we apotheosize ourselves antecedently to merit, and not consequently from any established merit, and all things other than ourselves are treated as imperfect unfoldings of ourselves. But we are not to the utter end yet; we are sometimes shaken; and our journey has not reached the true realm of Now We Know Better, which is also called hell.

Sexual fantasy is morally dangerous because in it we often indulge the thought of other people being entirely within ourselves, of their being nothing but a relation to ourselves. It is not the only kind of fantasy in which this can happen, but the association with sexual pleasure makes it especially likely that we will keep indulging it.

"A world in which men no longer sing is a degenerate world." Marcel
"The beautiful is what, in a certain way, has authority over us. Authority is the distinguishing mark of a work of art, whether it is exercised immediately or not, whether it must struggle or not with a rebellious sensibility."
"To love a being is to give him credit, that is, to be attracted to him at least as much for what he will be as for what he is."

In the solidarity of the shaken, people reach for communion with a more promising past or future.

the role in narrative adventure of the morally unsafe yet justifiable

Growing as a person is an exercise in learning how not to sabotage oneself.

overwhelming plausibility and the aesthetic sense of teh real world or reality

The Dowager Duchess in the Wimsey stories gives us, by comparison and contrast, insight into Lord Peter's thinking, without having to show the latter -- he has inherited a more practical variety of her allusive hyper-associativity.

honesty before one's own conscience

music as a system of prescriptions -- considered abstractly, notationally, and implementationally

instruments as characters in the symphony

the musical plane of feeling

attacking a problem from many different directions

The statue or painting is performed in displaying and seeing it.

the painting's frame as part of its performance

"To restore man to himself is in truth to restore him to God." Marcel
"Never will one be able to meditate too deeply on the marvelous affinity that connects music and memory, from the most mechanical to the most intimate, from the one that is a mere 'reproduction' to the one that is a *revivre* and a *survivre*."
"Like every expression, music is a restitution, a release of what one has breathed in."

Music is an imitation of music; artificial music of natural music, designed music of received music, actual music of suggested music.

We express because we are already aiming for something, or because we are provoked, or because we are inspired.

We express by judgment as part of a larger expression.

music as constituting a fairy space (Marcel)

We live in a world of sound, and music transforms the whole sound-world.

initiating vs reactive expression

One thing that is noticeable about most expressivism is how useless it is for understanding expression or expressiveness.

preparation/need fairness vs achievement/desert fairness
(many disputes over what is fair seem to arise from disagreement over which of these is the relevant fairness)

Those who reason well will often fail to reason well; they just don't stop there.

With a lying or unreliable narrator, we have a subfiction nested in a fiction whose apparent incorrectness implies another fiction that is perhaps never directly stated.

When people earn money, they most often earn it for their whole household.

It is impossible to design a system in which people's life-chances are only determined by what they do and never by the choices of those with whom they do it.

Faith sheds new light on everything moral.

The nation-state seems primarily a product of the unusual degree of tribal territorial stability in medieval Western Europe.

We learn adequation of mind to thing in the way we learn most things, by imitation.

"Although freedom is an exercise of the 'I', it comes into being through the 'we'; it cannot be assumed that people will still achieve freedom in a world where the 'we' is merely imagined and relationships and attachments no longer exist." Scruton

We come to understand our capabilities by thinking ourselves from the perspective of those capabilities -- the intellectual man, the person qua imaginative, etc.

In Sikhism, langar and pangat serves as a symbol of Sikh doctrine itself.

Every social progress is within a tradition.

"Things that have a relation of brotherhood are not, as some persons have supposed, 'consubstantial', but when both the cause and that which derives from the cause are of the same nature, then they are called consubstantial." Basil (Ep 52)
"Nothing can be consubstantial with itself, but one thing is consubstantial with another."

Everything human rots eventually.

imperfect shadows of perfection.

St. John Henry Newman

 Today is the feast of St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:

My Brethren, there are those who imagine that, when we use great words of the Church, invest her with heavenly privileges, and apply to her the evangelical promises, we speak merely of some external and political structure. They think we mean to spend our devotion upon a human cause, and that we toil for an object of human ambition. They think that we should acknowledge, if cross-examined, that our ultimate purpose was the success of persons and parties, to whom we were bound in honour, or by interest, or by gratitude; and that, if we looked to objects above the world or beyond the grave, we did so with very secondary aims and faint perceptions. They fancy, as the largest concession of their liberality, that we are working from the desire, generous, but still human, of the praise of earthly superiors, and that, after all, in some way or other, we are living on the breath, and basking in the smile, of man. But the text, and the train of thought which I have been pursuing, remind us of the true view of the matter, were we ever likely to forget it. The Church is a collection of souls, brought together in one by God's secret grace, though that grace comes to them through visible instruments, and unites them to a visible hierarchy. What is seen, is not the whole of the Church, but the visible part of it. When we say that Christ loves His Church, we mean that He loves, nothing of earthly nature, but the fruit of His own grace;—the varied fruits of His grace in innumerable hearts, viewed as brought together in unity of faith and love and obedience, of sacraments, and doctrine, and order, and worship. The object which He contemplates, which He loves in the Church, is not human nature simply, but human nature illuminated and renovated by His own supernatural power....

["The Secret Power of Divine Grace", Sermon 4 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.]

Bath'd in a Cold Quicksilver Sweat

The Apparition
by John Donne

When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tir’d before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, 
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threat’nings rest still innocent.

A Good Rule for Finding Truth

 A good rule for finding the truth is to draw near it with a unprejudiced mind and a will equally disposed to receive whatever the truth has to give -- if we do not approach in this way, we hear not what it says to us, but what we want to hear. When we consult the truth, we should receive and love in the same spirit everything that it has to say to us. Indeed, we should love whatever we love only because the truth has said it.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991) p. 183 (sect. 1316).]

Planet-Blinding Sprays

 Even in Slumber
by Clark Ashton Smith

This separation cleaveth to the core. . . .
Even in slumber I am fated
To seek thee in vast throngs and dreamlands desolated---
And find thee nevermore. 

Bewildering phantoms rise between, and ways
Where demons claim their olden debt;
The rote of sullen streets and streams; the spume and fret
Of planet-blinding sprays.

Juan José Urráburu on Vestment

Last year I did a few posts on the tenth predicament (ninth accident), habitus, i.e., habit in the sense of vestment, which is roughly the category in which one substance is predicated as an accident for another. I looked at a number of different people and what they said about this -- Jeremy Bentham, Robert Sanderson, James Beattie, Thomas Aquinas, John of St. Thomas. I was recently playing around with various automatic translation programs, and decided to test them with a passage from Juan José Urráburu's Institutiones Philosophicae on the same category. Urráburu (1844-1904) is a case of an extremely important figure in the history of philosophy whose name is rarely known. He was a Spanish Jesuit whose eight-volume Institutiones Philosophicae, begun about 1890 and finished in 1900, and five-volume Compendium version of the same work, was of overwhelming significance and importance for the early twentieth-century Neo-Scholastic movement; in effect, it became the primary reference for most of it, and shaped its structure and approach. Unlike in the previous posts, where I translated, the following translation is basically that of Google Translate (which has become quite good at translating Latin, even though it is still very occasionally odd in particular translation preferences and occasionally gets phrases the wrong way around), although I have checked it briefly for any very obvious errors and have also regularized its clothing terms to use 'vestment' and 'vested' for the similar vest- terms in the original. It is from volume 2 of the Institutiones, Ontologia, disputation 6, chapter 4, article 3 (section 378).

This category (*habitus*) expresses the meaning according to which something is said to be clothed or adorned by something adjacent to the body—such as vestments or protective armor (e.g., a breastplate, helmet, etc.); it is thus defined by Gilbert in terms of bodies and the things adjacent to them. Consequently, the primary subject of the determinations belonging to this category is man alone, since he is the only animal that uses vestment out of necessity and natural instinct. Nevertheless, animals can secondarily be the subjects of such denominations insofar as they are clothed or armored through human ingenuity—for example, a horse or a monkey—as can statues vested in human fashion, and temples or houses adorned with tapestries and hangings. Also included here are terms like "gilded," "whitewashed," "red-hot," and similar ones, which arise from one substance being accidentally superimposed upon another in the manner of an ornament. 

This follows St. Thomas, but in a very specific later reading that (as I have said elsewhere) St. Thomas may not have actually meant. I am a bit baffled by the last sentence, which at first seems to contradict everything else in this paragraph; but I suppose Urráburu probably means that these are figurative cases.

Now, the denomination belonging to this category can be stated in two ways: first, as "having vestment," and second, as "being vested." In the first sense, the denominating form is the act of having or wearing the vestment—or the actual state of wearing it and the union, as it were, of the vestment with the body; it is in this sense that Aristotle could write that *habitus* is an intermediary between the one who has the vestment and the vestment that is possessed. In the second sense, the form is the vestment itself, which—acting like an extrinsic form and through its adjacency to the body (a kind of union)—denominates the body as "vested." Similarly, when a body is denominated as "having a soul," the denominating form is the state of possession or union; but when it is called "animated," the form is the soul itself. Furthermore, the very habition, or adjacency of vestment is nothing other than a twofold contiguous ubication—one of the vestment, the other of the body; while this falls under the category of *Ubi* insofar as it involves the office of locating, it belongs to the category of *Habitus* insofar as it involves the office of clothing or uniting the vestment to the body. The Eximious Doctor explains all this at length and excellently, and one may also consult him regarding the species of *Habitus*. 

The second-to-last sentence I had to restructure, because Google's translation was very loose (one of its weaknesses is that it tends at times to translate technical terms colloquially, which is sometimes nicely clear but sometimes makes a complete hash of things). The 'Eximious Doctor' is Suarez. While it is true that the category of vestment presupposes the category of 'where' (or 'place', as it is often called), this is, I think, because it presupposes all of the categories. As usually conceived by the scholastics, there is basically an ordering in the categories; we have the fundamental first four (substance, quantity, quality, relation), and then the next six, sometimes called the sex principia, which all presuppose the fundamental four: action, passion, when, where, posture (situs), vestment (habitus). But even within the sex principia, it is very obvious that when and where presuppose action and passion, and that situs presupposes all four of those, and then habitus presupposes all of them. Thus I think it is very misleading to say that habition, i.e., the act pertaining to habitus, is 'nothing other' than being reciprocally in the category of 'where'; for one thing, habitus presupposes situs almost as much as it does ubi, and second, reciprocal contiguous placement would not usually be habition at all. (Indeed, on Urráburu's own acceptance of the traditional idea that the category of vestment only applies to human beings, it could not possibly be so.) Thus there must be something distinctive about vestment. The obvious thing, of course, is that in reciprocal contiguous placement, the reciprocity is precisely not enough to get you vestment; vestment involves something like a dependence, and thus involves an asymmetry. You literally wear your clothes; your clothes do not literally wear you. Indeed, even figuratively saying that your clothes wear you indicates that something has gone very wrong.

 As for the properties of this category, it possesses almost none that are peculiar to it. However, certain accidents seem to pertain to it in a special way—specifically color and shape; for just as these two contribute greatly to beauty, so too do they contribute to the nature of ornamentation. Gilbert and the author of the *Summa of Aristotle's Entire Logic* also assign a twofold property to this category: that it has no contrary and that it admits of degrees (more and less). Yet this latter property is not to be understood as the admission of degrees through intrinsic intensification. "For since *Habitus* is a kind of substance, it cannot admit of more and less any more than substance itself can; just as, for the same reason, it lacks a contrary. Rather, it is said to admit of more and less through a certain kind of addition—not merely an extensive addition regarding the subject (which is common to other accidents), but through the multiplication of vestments around the same part of the body; in the same way that a person wearing two tunics is said to be 'more clothed' than one wearing only a single tunic. Hence, it is also a distinctive feature of this category that one of its forms can be placed over another—either quasi-accidentally through human choice (as when garments are of the same type) or essentially through the very nature of the attire (as when a toga is placed over other vestments)—even though the denomination always refers immediately to the person himself; for it is the man who is denominated 'wearing a toga.' And even if it happened that he lacked inner vestments and wore only the toga, he would still be denominated in that way. It is also, in a sense, proper to this category that its forms are distinguished according to the organic parts of the human body, yet they denominate the man absolutely; for although shoes or a hat are located only on the feet or the head, the man is said absolutely to be 'hatted' or 'shod.' And one point rightly follows from the other; for when a form is not naturally suited to apply to the whole except by reason of a specific part, then—existing in that part alone—it denominates the whole, just as a man is called 'curly-haired' solely because of his hair. Thus, since a shoe is an extrinsic form belonging only to the foot, it denominates the whole while existing in that part; and the same applies to other instances. Conversely, when a denomination naturally pertains to the whole, it is not derived simply from forms of this kind; and therefore, a man is not said absolutely [to be defined by them], even if he is wearing shoes or a hat, etc." 

The long quotation starting with "For since Habitus" is from Suarez (from Metaphysics, disputation 53). I find myself of two minds with regard to Suarez's rejection of the idea that vestment admits of more and less in a proper sense (which, as he says here, would involve intensity). It is true that we usually say someone is 'more clothed' when they have (quantatively) more clothes on them. Nonetheless, I wonder if there's a sense, not often discussed but nonetheless real, in which vestments admit of degrees in how much they clothe you. That is to say, not as a matter of having more clothes, but of having clothes that clothe you more. In particular, vestment involves a relation between two substances, usually called adjunction or adjacency, that seems like it might admit of degrees, or something very like it. We perhaps talk about this very indirectly when we talk about 'fit'. But I don't know; it's something I hadn't really thought about before. Suarez (and with him Urráburu) rejects the idea that vestment admits of degrees because vestments are substances, which does not admit of degrees; but vestments are substances adjoined to substances in the manner of accidents, and the adjunction itself is not something he is taking into account.

However, I very much like two points in the Suarez quotation. The first is the recognition that vestments can 'nest', and that this is related to the fact that they function as extrinsic forms, in particular, as extrinsic forms for parts, although the vestment is attributed absolutely to the whole person. These are, I think, more important than has usually been recognized. Nonethless, Urráburu does not do anything with them, although I find it interesting that he thought it important enough to quote the whole thing.

In any case, another entry in my quixotic quest to become the World's Foremost Expert on the category of habitus, if only because no one else can be bothered.

Important in Themselves

 Only he who understands that there exist things "important in themselves," that there are things which are beautiful and good in themselves, only the man who grasps the sublime demand of values, their call, and the duty to turn toward them and to let oneself be formed by their law, is capable of personally realizing moral values. Only the man who can see beyond his subjective horizon and who, free from pride and concupiscence, does not always ask, "what is satisfying for me?", but who leaving behind him all narrowness, abandons himself to that which is important in itself---the beautiful, the good---and subordinates himself to it, only he can become the bearer of moral values.

[Dietrich von Hildebrand, Fundamental Moral Attitudes, Part 1: Reverence]

Read the Last Word, My Cultured Kid

 Ballade of Moderns
by G. K. Chesterton 

On deserts red and deserts grey
The temples into sand have slid;
Go search that splendour of decay
To find the final secret hid
In mummies' painted coffin-lid
In hieroglyphs of hunt and play.
Read the last word, my cultured kid,
They all were moderns in their day. 

Yes, it was just as bold and gay
To do what Astoreth forbad.
Yes, it was smart to carve in clay
And chic to build a pyramid.
Yes, Babylonian boys were chid
For reading hieroglyphs risqué.
We do but as our fathers did --
They all were moderns in their day. 

There are progressives who passed away
And prigs of whom the world is rid,
And there are men in hell today
As silly as old Ben Kidd;
And Webb (whose uncle calls him Sid),
God made him with the flowers of May,
And the blind stones he walked amid.
They all were moderns in their day. 

L'Envoi 

Prince, still the soul stands virgin;
"quid Times"; we tear some rags away
But shall we grasp her; God forbid.
They all were moderns in their day.

Dashed Off XXX

 Every society that takes its faults seriously enough to criticize and work on stamping them out eventually becomes identified with those faults. We know of Roman decadence because of Roman critique of decadence, of hypocrisy in various Christian societies because of Christian critique of hypocrisy, liberal bigotries because of liberal critique of bigotry.

The cosmos by nature is poetically suggestive of the divine.

Half of survival is reminding oneself of simple, needful things.

God is the cause of common being's being common.

The sign of Babylon is that it deserves its own destruction, its own sins leading to the destruction of its future (Ps 137).

The problem of moral evil is not why God would make evil; it is why God would make us.

God requires no trade-offs, but we do.

Whether or not something qualifies as overfitting depends entirely on what you are trying to do.

When we reason inductively, we do not presuppose that the future will resemble the past but that not everything in what we know is accidental.

"The Master said, Study as though you will not catch up to it, as though you fear even losing sight of it.' Analects 8.17

Analects 9.8 and Socratic ignorance

The effectiveness of punishments always depends on the broader culture.

Justice is impossible without inquiring into the point of things.

The value of life depends on what is valued more than life.

sins gravely opposed to sacraments, either literally or in spirit

Sir Gawain & the Green Knight as a reflection on penance
Pearl as a reflection on infant baptism

Our bodies are signs of ourselves to ourselves.

the Divine Courtesy, the Court of Saints, and the liturgical commonwealth

We learn how to will by following examples.

The domestic church must be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It must be so constitutively (by sacrament, union with the rest of the Church, etc.) but in a way to be symbolic of these notes in the whole Church.

'Hooray! stealing' is neither true or false as an interjection, but it is irrational as an expression of a serious practical attitude, because the articulation of the attitude is something like 'Stealing is a hooray-type object for practically reasonable attitudes' and this is false as a characterization. 'Stealing and hooray-attitudes are a mis-match' is generally true.

Propositions generally articulate things that are not necessarily propositions.

Compassion for the wicked involves wanting them to repent.

When society recognizes and rewards the virtue of penitence/repentance, hypocrisy will imitate and strive to outdo in appearance penitence. When it recognizes and rewards the virtue of compassion, hyporcisy will imtate and strive to outdo in appearance compassion. and so forth through all the virtues. We all know this, and we all forget this.

'Murder is wrong' cannot be merely an expression of a disapproval of murder, because murder itself is a moral term; but in any case, we can prove that something is not murder and therefore not wrong, but cannot prove in the same way that it is not disapproved.

Pleasures do not naturally aggregate; they need to be integrated meaningfully. They do not merely fall together; they have to be actively related to each other.

Arguments from evil are fundamentally arguments that evil is part of the fundamental nature of reality. They obviously presuppose that there is evil. (Attempting to run them ad hom runs into the problem that the people don't in fact usually think God and evil inconsistent or understand in ways that require them to be so. In any case, they are only very rarely run ad hom.) Suppose, then, that God does not exist. Then the occurrence of evil would just be a natural happening, a way the world works. Suppose God exists but could not create a world without evil; then the same thing: the world with evil is not created but fundamental. If, however, evil is not just a part or result of the way the world naturally is, so that evil is not part of fundamental reality, the argument dissipates: God can create the world, but evil occurs beyond that, as an intrusion or failure or distortion, not a natural part of fundamental reality, and the (philosophical) problem is resolved.

vague preference-satisfactions vs articulable preference-satisfactions

A difficulty all fictionalisms have to face is that the most obvious explanation for any fiction is artificial imitation of the natural.

(1) Philosophical inquiry tends to philosophical system.
(2) This tendency is not merely apparent.
(3) Real tendencies require final causes exercising causation by nature or by will.
(4) The final cause of the tendency to philosophical system is the infinite intelligible.
(5) Therefore there is an infinite intelligible as an end of philosophical inquiry.
(6) This all call God.

The sign of genuine development of doctrine is that it makes you more appreciative of the teaching of those who came before, not less.

The young tend toward kitschy ethics.

Politicians are more like scavengers than hunters, whatever their particular aim.

"Knowledge ought to raise itself up to fortitude, to be strengthened by it, lest it slip into foolishness." Hildegard von Bingen

Most of what is pleasant and painful is hidden to public view.

the principle of utility read distributively vs read collectively

prohairetic modalities

(quasi-)reactive attitudes to nature as personified

cognitive function, appeal function, expressive function

verismilitude values for propositions

"Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech." Habermas

the lifeworld, the world made alive in the person, the always already familiar

individual situation, success-aimed action: instrumental
individual situation, consensus-aimed action: natural-resonant (acting in and with role)
social situation, success-aimed action: strategic
social situation, consensus-aimed action: communicative

No discourse is structured so that any and all assertions can be questioned, nor so that any and all assertions can be introduced, nor that every attitude, desire, or need can be expressed.

human beings as utility monsters relative to other animals

Privacy and publicity come in various orders that may be nested in various ways.

Every society protects rights with conventions and concessions that are not the rights themselves, although they may sometimes be confused with them due to the association.

the formal cause as the internal ritual or liturgy of the thing

The bishop ministers to the Person of Christ both sacramentally and socially.

the facets of prudence
(1) the humane
(2) the correct
(3) the courteous
(4) the discriminating
(5) the integral

upbuilding vs downpouring grace

resemblance qua subject vs resemblance qua object
contiguity qua subject vs contiguity qua object

formal resemblance vs instrumental resemblance
formal contiguity vs instrumental contiguity

wisdom that manifests, wisdom that reflects, wisdom that adequates, wisdom that observes, wisdom that acts

Hegemony is always a nested structure, or a system of overlaps.

The hegemon holds the greatest power-underlap of many overlapping power structures.

Marriage makes strange bedfellows.

Usury is wrong not because it is lending but because it is perversion of lending.

Most people have very few strong, stable preferences.

experience as given (evident) vs experience as evidence

contrast of retention and protention in experience (incipti and desinit)

the experience of the co-functioning of the body, of the functioning of one's body with the functioning of another
-- this being quite early, before birth and continues with mother and infant
-- as we grow, we develop a sense of functioning outside this co-functioning

intimation: something in experience as what can be possible, given what is directly perceivable, thought not itself directly perceived, or required by what is directly perceived, or required to be probable by what is directly perceived

"We could not be persons for others if a common surrounding world did not stand there for us in a community, in an intentional linkage of our lives." Husserl

Our direct experience of apparent intelligibility is what lets us identify things as evidence.

Evidence is always evidence for a possible inquiry.

Confidence is not required for bleife, but for acting on its resolutely.

Responsibility for oneself always involves some responsibility for others in some matters relating to oneself.

The difficulty with spiritual warfare is that you are always already betrayed; indeed, you may be your own betrayer.

Effectiveness of protest depends on clarity of signal.

"Culture is a system of communication." Scruton
"The truth is that repair, like every other serious social activity, has its ethos, and when that ethos is lost, no amount of slap-dash labour can make up for it. The person who repairs must love the broken object, and must love also the process of repair and all that pertains to it."
"Responsibility stems from the habit of viewing our own actions from a point of view outside ourselves. Such a habit is engendered by authoritative institutions, whose edicts and expectations we lear to internalise as we mature."
"Travel narrows the mind, providing a surfeit of impressions and a dearth of interpretations. Sometimes, however, a meaning emerges, and sometimes this meaning is the aim."
"Institutions are not things but persons: they have a life, a will and a responsibility of their own."

There are far more good things that can be done than are our duties.

iron laws of nature (no exceptions) vs oaken laws of nature (no exceptions as long as interfering factors are absent) -- this terminology is from Armstrong

Because logical positivists conflated logic and language, they are often remarkably cavalier about the notion of 'decisions' in logic.

the process of getting approximate answers by identifying paradigms and analogizing (this is common in ethics and politics)

The awareness of the aesthetic content of a work of art is not uniquely determined through what is perceived by the senses.

"Calculi without calculations seem to be gratuitous algebra." Ryle

Confirmation is not a series of repetitions, which as such may simply repeat errors. It requires error reduction by division and elimination.

'Analysis' in practice often just means 'whatever has to be done to let a method cross domains'.

Time is a formal condition of *coming to appear*, not of appearance as such.

Ayer-like attempts to make the principle of verification a 'proposal' are pointless; a proposal must be such that it can be successfully implemented or not, and therefore has a success description; but the success description for the proposal of verification runs into the same problems.

cosmos as the first and primordial sign