triple end of music: diagoge, paideia, catharsis
poetic existimation
Of all the arts, music has the most analogies with angelic speech.
"We are the end of all artificial things, for all such things are for the use of man." Aquinas
Mystery is made credible by sign.
the Church as a 'great and perpetual motive of credibility'
Garrigou-Lagrange's division of motives of credibility
I. External to the consciousness of the inquirer
--- --- A. Extrinsic to revealed religion
--- --- --- --- 1. Miracles
--- --- --- --- 2. Prophecies
--- --- B. Intrinsic to revealed religion
--- --- --- --- 1. Sublimity of Doctrine
--- --- --- --- 2. Miraculous Life of the Church
II. Internal to the consciousness of the inquirer
--- --- A. Universal
--- --- --- --- 1. Miraculous fulfillment of humanity's aspirations
--- --- B. Individual
--- --- --- --- 2. Individual experience of profound peace which the world cannot give
People have neither wish nor need to work only interchangeable jobs, and in fact have wish and need for the opposite; from which inequalities unavoidably arise, of reputation, of network connection, of income, of satisfaction.
A legal system inevitably rules in application of a rough picture of natural inclination and normal duty, which serves to guide the default assumptions in how the laws are to be applied.
Everyone decides to believe whether they will follow this or that plan for the day.
the phenomenon of wishful thinking (and our capacity to avoid it) --> doxastic voluntarism
We regularly believe p regardless of whether p is true, just not where the truth of p is obvious.
We often believe where the connection between the belief and its truth is that (1) its truth is not ruled out and (2) we wish to find evidence for its truth.
Our experience of beliefs shows that believes become entrenched, not that they intrinsically are.
We can recognize some of our believings as being willed by us during the time we believe them; the experiences of clinging to a belief or holding onto a belief in the face of doubt or wanting to reject evidence against a belief are all common.
Some of the evidence doxastic involuntarists point to, ironically can be interpreted as cases in which we easily believe voluntarily and then cannot voluntarily disbelieve while we are easily voluntarily believing. In this sense, the 'involuntariness' is like trying to get out of a warm, comfortable bed to do something dull or unpleasant on a bitter cold morning.
We find many cases in life in which we can voluntarily do something but only if we work ourselves up and prepare ourselves first.
Every human being in practice takes the question of whether a belief is good to have to have some bearing, even if only loose and uncertain, on the question of whether it is true.
erotetic voluntarism
inquisitive voluntarism
self-critical voluntarism
-- all three of these imply that we have quite broad at least indirect doxastic control
Conspiracy theories are a byproduct of people thinking for themselves in much the same way that scams are a byproduct of people making their own financial decisions; it is however an error, in both cases, to assume that this is the only way they arise, or that removing the autonomy would make people less vulnerable.
Psalm 119 is a psalm not merely of obeying but of studying: to delight in the law of the Lord is to take joy in earning from the key instrument of discipleship to God.
category mistakes as use of wrong kind of classification
Bodily agency presupposes bodily integrity and bodily self-respect, the body not as a mere thing to use but as an object of personal responsibility and care.
the body as a received part of the gift of self
Natural law being natural to us, our consistent and coherent self-interest requires upholding it.
That something is in our self-interest does not imply that it is easy for us.
As we are civilizational beings, our self-interest always involves the interest of a civilization and society of which we can be a part.
The fundamental divide in theories of human rights is among
(1) theories grounding human rights in human nature, or in what is connatural to it
(2) theories grounding human rights in human will
(3) theories grounding human rights in what is neither human nature nor human will
"If the necessity of science arises per se from perseity, perseity itself arises from the immateriality of intellect which alone causes openness to being as such." Chastek
Christ and the Apostles did not merely initiate the Church as a social body; they created a social ontology for it.
examples as illustrations vs examples as argument foci/lenses
GNS theory of role-playing games
-- three forms of player engagement: Gamism, Narrativism, Simulation
three forms of task resolution: drama/destiny (participants decide), fortune/chance (chance mechanism decides), karma/fate (fixed value decides)
-- five elements of role-playing: character, color/atmosphere, setting, situation, system
-- four decision stances: actor (what character would want), author (what player wants, with rationalization), director (what environment.gamemaster decides), pawn (what player wants, no rationalization)
system, story, challenge
Radoff's player motivations: immersion, cooperation, achievement, competition
"The moral law is holy (inviolable). A human being is indeed unholy enough but the humanity in his person must be holy to him." Kant
Kant sometimes gets plausibility only by equivocating between genus and species.
'For all S knows, p' vs 'given what S knows, p is not impossible'
-- the first is actually a statement of what S does not know
A useful fiction is not an error.
culture (language, mythology, fashion, ritual, etc.) as a shared reserve of signs for intellectual and volitional use
Moral life is a field in which the composite integrates to become noncomposite; this latter is called integrity. Likewise, in moral life the mutable grows immutable; we call this latter constancy or steadfastness. The two together make for what we call the principled life.
-- the implicit criticism fo utilitarianism in Oliver Twist and Hard Times
We shape experiences only by shaping signs.
principal exemplars (productive -- e.g., idea in artisan's mind) vs. ministerial exemplars (objective -- e.g., blueprint or recipe)
sketching: scaffolding marks, test marks, confirmed marks, correction marks
maintenance of anything as a system of cycles
practical intellect : goodness of being :: speculative intellect : goodness of truth
generosity as creating a mutual gain
"The intellect -- much more than the imagination -- can form the natures of things that have never come before the senses." Aquinas
Close reading is the skill of good readers; literary critics doe not have proprietary claim to it, nor is there usually evidence of literary critics being better at it than other readers. Kramnick claims that close reading is not reading but writing, but in fact this is no better; writing is the skill of good writers, and there is no evidence that literary critics are as such better at it than other reader-writers. It's just a basic form of liberal art, not something specific to literary critics. We should perhaps not dismiss the idea that literary critics in fact are liberal artisans specializing in an elementary -- but important -- set of tools that are not distinctive to them; this is perhaps not what many literary critics think, but there is much more evidence of this.
Only very few literary critics produce literary works of note in writing literary criticism.
the co-suggestivity of signs
The Gospels make clear that fishers of men will have very few fish in their nets until Christ gives them more fish than they can manage.
the coloring or nuancing of one sign by another
undesigned coincidences (in multiple testimonies)
(1) noncontradictorily differing details as to event
(2) mutually confirming different details as to event
(3) detail in one confirming the other as to acount/authority
(4) convergent accounts as to event
-- the 'undesigned' requires reason to reject collusion or copying
Evil by its nature is something endured by good.
