This is the beginning of the notebook started in November 2024.
Most explanations involve making assumptions that are justified only in terms of an assessment of what is required for an adequate explanation.
explanandum -> explanant profile -> evidence for explanatory factors -> profile-filling abductions
science fiction and the magical reification of measurements
All human desert presupposes elements of good fortune.
In the long run, taxes seem eventually to undermine democratic governance.
The actual laws of physics must be such that actual physics is possible.
Music as a fine art is concerned with the suggestion of rhythm, rather than metronomic rhythm, with the suggestion of notes, rather than exact notes.
No one can understand political equality before they understand political dignity.
scientific progress as an example of rational tradition
In the virtue of prudence we are provident both for ourselves and for others.
"A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge." MacIntyre
Naturalism cannot make specific predictions in the absence of specific natural evidences.
When people say that a field, sociology, say, is about 'is' and not 'ought', what they in fact mean is that the oughts of sociology are second-order.
common law as diffused practical jurisprudence
Critical Legal Studies is fundamentally an exploration of legal systems as interactions of practices, objects (reifications), and values (tilts), albeit one that has not always had honest intentions.
mathematical functions as abstractions of terms, sets as abstractions of formulas (Lorenzen)
"Since sets are abstracted from formulas, and formulas are built up by means of logical particles, corresponding operations arise for sets."
You should always be wary fo anything that gives you a satisfying feeling of righteousness; the feeling and the thing come apart easily and even when not, the feeling is often associated with release from what would ordinarily be restrictive -- which may be one's actual moral obligation as to means. This is why it is often associated both with hypocrisy and with immoderation.
prevention, prepared countermeasure, prepared mitigation
the Binding of Isaac as a picture of consecration
Divine reason is autonomous by nature; human reason is autonomous only by participation.
Intersubjective testing of religious experience requires something like a church; it also requires having already determined the conditions of validity of religious experience.
Series, unlike sets, are always something more than just their members. (Note that Edwards in his Eskimo example explicitly depends on a series being the same as a group.)
As the abstract principles governing the behavior of the universe do not share the directionalities of the universe, the directionalities must derive from the moving cause.
Clifford's argument against belief without evidence would, if it worked, also work as an argument against fiction, pageantry, advertisement; the love of fiction increases the risk of being affected in one's belief by them, fictions adoring things unevidenced with tinsel splendor, forming them into cloud-castles, making us half-believe through pleasant plausibilities.
causality > responsibility > complicity > culpability
the dipping method of philosophy -- taking a passage by chance and reflecting on it and the association it brings
Talk of social construction often confuses cases where we construct through social interaction with cases where we are constructed by way of social interaction.
Direct accessibility is a causal notion.
We always in practice take intelligible abstract objects to be part of the common environment shared with others.
learning by co-laboring
When people talk about agreement in the sciences, they generally talk about families of things that are in fact interpreted in very different ways; when people talk about disagreement in philosophy, they usually are talking about very particularly and distinctly conceived positions that include particular interpretations.
stage persons and play persons (e.g., in role-playing games or video games)
To say that God created the world for His glory is to say that He created it for the union of intelligent creatures to Himself.
light as 'the form of first acting body, by which lower bodies act'
sequential causation
(1) simultaneous causation; A causes B in particular respect x
(2) identity through time of B in respect x
(3) simultaneous causation: B in respect x causes C in respect y
-- thus C in respect y preserves a dependence on A despite temporally measurable gap
-- waves seem particularly suitable for an explaantion of roughly this sort
Kant's claim about the sovereign in the MM can only properly apply to God; all human sovereigns have rights because they have duties, and there are conditions under which they can be forced to do the latter, and no human legislation is the highest legislation except secundum quid.
It is pointless to criticize, rather than simpy correct, the scientific inaccuracies of the past, because no one who does so is in fact free of scientific inaccuracy, and certainly not free of inaccuracies not yet discovered by the sciences.
extension, intension, limitation (partition from negative complement)
Kant's categories as the logical ways judgments about reality can be related to temporal measurements
"A purely passive being knows not, and cannot know, either itself or any other thing." Cousin
"Kant has fallen into a grave error, in thinking that the questions raised in the antinomies necessarily require teh same method of solution, viz. reasoning."
"What are the characteristics of a moral law? Necessity and universality. But are not these the characteristics of all the principles which Kant has recognized in the metaphysics, of the principle of contradiction, for example?"
'What begins to exist has a cause' as a condition for applying mathematics to the physical world
An advocate who did not have different arguments for different judges, but only repeated the same thing regardless of court and context, would be incompetent; and pretending that having many reasons for a conclusion makes it less certain, is a sign of stupidity.
the transcendental conditions of consensus gentium and consensus sapientorum
We calibrate individual reason in light of the reason of others.
All of the principles of speculative reason are relevant to practical and moral action, always contextually and sometimes with respect to the practical action as such.
"A merely logical philosophy may die of inanition, and a sensational philosophy of paralysis; but the nature of the diseased that killed it matters little to the corpse." Edward Caird
Kant's Humean 'awakening' was only possible because Kant was already tending in that direction, and Hume broke some final restraints.
the co-worldedness of individual substances
Besides space and time, the forms of sense would have to include something like forcefulness/robustness/realness, where this is understood as structuring how we sense things with respect to other things.
"Substance, causality, and reciprocity are only imperfect expressions of that conception of unity in difference, which, in a higher form, appears as the idea of final cause, and which ultimately reveals itself as the idea of self-consciousness. In determining inorganic objects, we may not find it necessary to use any but the first order of categories; when we come to the organic world we require, as Kant himself maintains, the second order: and when we react the spiritual world, we can accomplish our purpose of making it intelligible with nothing less than the third." E. Caird
(This seems very strong and defensible *as a reasponse to Kant*; Caird is right that Kant's own principles and approach sometimes suggest something like this.)
Organisms can only be understood in terms of systems of possibilities formed by causal processes and constraints of actually existing things.
Regulation of changing things requires either enduring barrier to deviation or recurring correction of deviations or both.
Our conception of what happens is a conception of something 'being happened'.
Human beings require friendship to solidify their pursuit of virtue.
In roleplaying games, optimizing practices arise from running very specific parties through very generic stories. (This is precisely how D&D structures itself, giving lots of framework for character building and much less assistance to storybuilding, which is largely limited by the DM's ingenuity in using very constraining character mechanics.)
The only way to interpret other human beings is to interpret them as having a generic aptitude to truth, and we cannot inquire without taking ourselves to have it.
the opinion-clashing method of philosophizing
liberalism as rpg politics: 'the most interesting play possibilities to the greatest number of participants for the longest period of time possible' (Gygax)
Some things, like the laws of nature, or the decline of civilization, or the Last Things, belong to frameworks much larger than themselves, and are related to our moral judgments as background context, not as falling under the scope of their authority.
Natural religion diversifies by custom and vow.
vow -> covenant -> grace
(note that each transfigures the previous rather than merely replacing it) (note also that each is a natural candidate for final cause of the previous)
'Encounter' is itself more primitive than vow; it is something that sometimes leads people to vow. Treating it as paradigmatic to the regime of grace is a grotesque error. 'Encounter' is useless unless it is transfigured into the covenant of friendship. Christianity is not an experience but something both more fundamental and higher than any human experience can be.
The argument from moral evil is ultimately a tendentious asking of the question, "Why is it necessary to be carefully and deliberately moral?"
We don't only just have secondary beliefs about secondary worlds (in Tolkien's sense), but also secondary beliefs about the primary world.
We are saved by faith but also inspired by it.
the contingency of philosophers relative to the faith (Gilson)
"In our own lifetime, in the names of how many doctrines, since abandoned by their very authors, have we been summoned to abandon the teaching of the Church?" Gilson
"What is common to Athens and Jerusalem is the human being."
"That a nation experiences the need to promote the development of the arts and sciences does not keep art and science from essentially belonging to an order that transcends that of the nation."
"There is Christendom where there is Christian civilization, and there is Christian civilization where there is Christian thought."
Christendom as a sign and partial healing of the broken commonwealth of humanity
The Socratic approach to philosophy is not a dogmatic commitment to ignorance, and yet this seems lost on some people.