As always, dashed off thoughts; these continue from the notebook begun at the end of July 2024.
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Nehemiah & the role of the laity
The first principle of all scholarship is extensive acquaintance.
We want not the satisfaction of our preferences, but *no worse* than the satisfaction of our preferences, for we all recognize that there are cognitive and appetitive limits to our ability to prefer.
We have inclinations more foundational than preference.
literature as a study of basic forms of goods (and challenges and temptations related to them): life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability/friendship, practical reasonableness, religion
objectivity as usefulness across perspectives
The role of the external world as intersubjective medium rquires that it have both purposiveness and expressiveness.
How a society organizes sport tells you a great deal about the society. Sports teams as big business do not exist in little village games; leagues in highly organized societies do not have the flexibility of those that have often improvised local organization.
Repentance is a cousin of humor.
Much of the attraction people have toward sex has less to do with physical desire or pleasure than with the fleshly sublimity of the experience of overwhelming and being overwhelmed, our own animal natures experienced as sublime.
"There are, in the final analysis, only two ways of making a choice between alternative ways of co-ordinating action to the common purpose or common good of any group. There must be either unanimity, or authority. There are no other possibilities.' Finnis
Every legal system creates a band or region of the semi-legal, in which things fall under the law in uncertain or confused ways that heavily depend on things that are not laws, or eve clearly recognized by laws, and in which things that are not laws are inconsistently and confusedly treated as if they were.
cGh cube
Special relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics as c approaches infinity; quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics as h-bar approaches 0; general relativity reduces to special relativity as G approaches 0. Classical mechanics: (0,0,0); relativistic quantum gravity: (c, G, h) = (with relevant choice of units) (1,1,1).
In changing things, the actual cannot exceed the potential actualized. The 'exceeds' needs clarification.
Flashback, in medias res, and flashforward are relations between plot and narrative.
We are forgivable because we are mortal.
high philosophy, low philosophy, wild philosophy
the periodic table as a system of confirmed analogical inferences
analogical inferences using plausible, probable, or proven connections (ordered similarities)
Not bare similarity but ordered similarity is usually the foundation of analogical inferences.
All human beings are at the same time both human and also inhuman expressions of the natural world.
"Intermediate causes extend the reach of the ultimate cause by their nature, and so also contribute their natures to its causal action." Chastek
The diversity of artificial classifications is sometimes based on diversity of natural classifications; that is to say, a set of related artificial classifications does not always converge on one natural classification but on a set of related natural classifications.
the multiplication of perspectives in the Church as the material of Christian culture
Reason according to those principles that could be true without qualification.
-- Reason according to those principles that could be applied to the entire system of things.
-- Reason according to those principles consistent with the existence and nature of reason.
-- Reason according to those principles that could consistently be used by the entire community of rational inquirers.
In matters of skill, act in such a way as allows skill and virtue to be consistent with each other.
-- In matters of skill, act in such a way as allows practices of skill to be consistent with friendships of excellence.
If we are not morally responsible for our actions, we are not intellectually responsible for our conclusions, and for similar reasons.
fas : religio :: ius : iustitia
You cannot have good statistics with sloppy classifications.
Sorrow is beautiful when it enriches.
endearments as negotiating conditions of vulnerability
Most of the benefits of intelligence arise from social cooperation.
"When the fear of the Lord breathes upon a person, that person begins to fear God and wisely advances towards the perfection of good and upright works." Hildegard von Bingen
viriditas as the opposite of ariditas (Hildegar)
People have a bad habit of treating evidence of complexity as if it were evidential ambiguity.
A single glance may give good evidence of existence; the conditions must be very tightly constrained for a single glance to give good evidence of nonexistence.
civil friendship as an end of civil disobedience
Every sacrament involves an implicit theology of salvation, as captured in symbol, in Scriptural association, and in functional role within the sacramental economy.
Hos 6:1-3 and the Resurrection
The act of explaining something posits sufficient reason for it.
punishment and correction as jural good
rule of law as based on the principle of legal order as neither optional, nor arbitrary, nor infeasible, and on opposition to attempts to treat it as one of these
reason, authority, and tradition as the sources of legal order
Signs are often nested in signs.
-esque aesthetic concepts and found art
Thomas Wilson's description of accident (The Rule of Reason (1551)): ' the thing chauncing or cleving to the substance'
Wolff's universal rule for free actions (see Walschots): do that which makes you and your state or that of another more perfect, omit that which makes it more imperfect.
--perfection is "consensum in varietate" (thus he thinks of it as integration or unification of one's life)
Crusius's "highest foundation of natural law": do that which is in accordance with the perfection of God and your relation to him, and furthermore what is in accordance with the essential perfection of human nature, and omit the opposite.
Crusius's "complete concept of divine natural law": do everything that is in accordance with the perfection of God, the essential perfection of your own nature and that all other creatures, and finally also the relations of things to each other that he has established, and omit the opposite, out of obedience to the command of your creator, as your natural and necessary sovereign.
Mendelssohn's "first law of nature": make your intrinsic and extrinsic condition and that of your fellow human being, in the proper proportion, as perfect as you can.
Tittel's "principle of happiness": act in such a way that through your action and disposition the common world, the well-being of sensing and thinking natures -- thus also your own happiness -- is best preserved and promoted.
(Kant's categorical imperative is an attempt to improve on these kinds of principles.)
ostension as the root of pronominality; pronouns are signs of particular ostensions
-- note that we can and do supplement and even at times substitute actual ostension for pronouns (co-speech and pro-speech ostensions)
Pantomime tends to have an SOV order even when the pantomimers speak a language with a different order (See Goldin-Meadow et al, "The Natural Order of Events: How Speakers of Different Languages Represent Events Nonverbally".)
Discussions of social ontology often confuse
(1) treating X as Y
(2) intending to treat X as Y
(3) intending that X be treated as Y
(4) acting as if X were Y
(5) making X Y
(6) X being Y in a classification in use.
These can overlap, but are not the same, and make reference to different kinds of act.
The Son is that of which it may be said that it is always false that there was when He was not.
Jesus Christ is the Son of God in the most perfect sense of sonship, being of the Father, both naturally and by adoption, both as proceeding and as received and acclaimed; Son both literally and figuratively, both ontically and morally, both by inheritance and by merit. He is thus Son truly and preeminently, unique and firstborn with respect to all creation.
Box formation
(1) Rule of Necessitation
(2) exceptionlessness with respect to simple enumeration
(3) derivation from Box at least as strong
(4) Rule of General / Conditional Necessitation
(5) self-evidence
-- Even in the same domain, these cannot always be assumed to deliver the same kind of Box; this requires further assumptions to coordinate them.
Necessitation is a problem for doxastic logics because we assume one belief-track per believer and the same axioms across belief-tracks. That is, we assume that believing is neither chunky nor fragmentary.
provability logics as strong, idealized doxastic logics
Our beliefs seem to cluster around pramanas and to require construction.
It is a common experience to discover that we were already committed to something before anyone, including ourselves, took us to be, because commitment is just part of rational living, i.e., living as a rational animal. It is also a common experience to find that people are trying to commit us to things to which we are not in fact committed.
nBP (n Believes p) -> p if True is taken not as real but as projected. If T is projected it seems plausible that nBp -> nB(nBp), unless one has an account of 'projected as true' that makes it independent of belief.
rigor as express layout and examination of possible points of error
"Such is the nature of novelty, that, where any thing pleases, it becomes doubly agreeable, if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing upon that very account." Hume
fluvial vs pluvial inspiration
adhesive vs inhesive personal relationships
The history of Arianism shows the Church trying out many alternatives but repeatedly finding only the homoousios adequate.
anhomoian -- homoian -- homoiousian -- homoosuian; three of the four were systematically eliminated in a multi-century disjunctive syllogism.
Job 38:17 -- 'doorkeepers of the underworld trembled' and the descent of hell
We come to believe by practicing believing, across all the fields with respect to which we form beliefs.
Everyone interprets the physical world allegorically; we see this even in atheists who take the vastness or regularity or materiality of the universe as implying a moral view of one kind or another.
Many deteriorations are clearly caused by chance events, and thus arise insofar as the deteriorating thing's actions and passions do not have a final cause. We preserve things by preventing such chance events (or reducing their likeliness).
