When you ask questions well, your questions grow better over time.
undesigned coincidences in scientific confirmation (e.g., good fit between experiments concerned with different questions, especially where the fit is recognized only in retrospect)
Even to get to application of Bayes's Theorem in Bayesian epistemology, you need to (1) know what the possibilities are, (2) know their relative dependence and independence, (3) know what counts as evidence, (4) have a common measure for possibilities and evidence, (5) assign numbers for that measure in accordance with the axioms for probability. That Bayesian epistemologists usually handwave these does not make them any less assumed, nor does it make them any less the bulk and substance of the actual evidential evaluation.
the setting with respect to plot vs. the setting with respect to character vs the setting with respect to theme
"People dispute with each other. One can only refute ideas. To want to refute human beings is to undertake a task whose very essence implies contradiction." Gilson
"The Church's history is slow history."
Artificially imposed change for the sake fo change is one of the worst bureaucratic pathologies.
retroclosure: p -> PFp
"Make an ark for yourself of gopher wood." Gn 6:14
-- Targum Onkelos: qadros (cedar)
-- LXX: tetragonon (squared)
-- Vulgate: levigatus (polished)
-- -- The translation in many modern versions, cypress, derives from a possible relation between gopher and Greek kyparisson.
-- -- Others have argued that gimel has accidentally replaced the visually similar kaf. Kopher = pitch, thus wood that has been been pitched. Cp. later in the verse: "Cover it inside and outside with pitch (bak-kopher)."
In the genealogies of Genesis, Cain is named before Seth; Japheth and Ham are named before Shem, Ishmael before Isaac, Esau before Jacob.
One reason it is appropriate for grace to be given through signs is so that the medicinal action may then be received by intending as well as partaking.
aesthetic experience and valuative causation
subjective vs objective propriety
The intrinsic qualities of thought must allow for the intentional qualities of thought.
Truth is the only guarantee of consistency.
Weakest Link Principle (Pollock): A defeasible argument is to be preferred to another if its weakest defeasible link is stronger than the weakest defeasible link of the other.
Reasoning, unlike the systems used for formal logic, involves continual recollection and anticipation, adjusting the line of argument in their light.
Pollockian arguments against Bayesianism:
(1) computational excess (from updating with every new evidence)
(2) combinatorial excess (from assigning a real number for every relevant proposition)
(3) logical omniscience
'degree of justification' of p vs. stability of p in evidential change
A superhero origin story is always a death and rebirth, generally symbolic. Superhero stories are stories of an afterlife.
In education people often make the error of replacing the substantive with a supplement that is in fact only good as a supplement.
Genuine novelty will lead people to overlook artistic flaws for a while; but whether they continue to do so will depend on whether the novelty is the beginning of something less flawed. In art novelty is desirable because it brings the excitement of a new beginning; this becomes durable interest only if the new beginning turns out to be good as a beginning.
defining a unit vs defining a dimension of units
"In the service of the true, the good, and the beautiful, a Christian only knows co-workers." Gilson
For the Christian philosopher, revealed truths are not merely hypotheses, although they may in particular contexts function as such, but also organizing principles, reliable testimonies, poetic inspriations, and points for inexhaustible discussion.
Testimony indirectly confirms inferences; inference indirectly confirms perceptions.
"We can do nothing useful to the Church without first situating ourselves in a climate of common faith, grace, and fellowship." Gilson
the tribunal of the citizenry
The world will always regard Christian theology as an unreal system.
Social progress in practice consists usually of each generation learning the wrong lessons, so that things improve, but not the things that they thought they were improving, and not in the way they thought they were. The history of social progress is a farce of failing upwards.
"To grow old is to accustom yourself to be dead." Gilson
It takes omniscience to study history well.
Great political systems, like Eden, are always lost through a desire to sample the knowledge of good and evil, which is fair to the eye, and appeals in appearance, as good to the taste, and suggests to us the possibility of new wisdom, like that of the gods. The most just human society that could ever exist would eventually fail from our inability to let it be merely human.
Every anti-realism presupposes a realism about something else.
The past is the wealth of the present.
"The Christian doctrine of man's beginning created in the image of God does two things: it places man within nature and at the same time elevates him above it." Emil Brunner
"The origin of all orders, and hence also the origin of justice, is like the origin of creation as such: it is God's Love."
"By the Christian idea of vocation all work is personalised as well as communalised. It is seen as part of one social body, as a contribution within a working community."
What owes its existence to man is always lacking in freedom.
Every human art illumines new values in the world.
There is no progress without preservation, and therefore all progress is progress in a tradition.
We know that we can directly create certain kinds of badness by deprivation, e.g., by literally removing something essential or important. We can also create badnesses by addition, but only where doing so interferese with something essential or important.
The lightning flashes
and while it is a-flash
my eyes are dazzled;
and set by it a-dazzle,
my tears began to flow;
and by my weeping eye
my heart is set a-flow.
Fraternal spirit is not a form of administration, nor an administrative structure. Organizations that forget this collapse.
A group may at one time have an aggregative intent, a cooperative/common intent, and a final/telic intent; coordinating these is often one of teh more difficult aspects of group organization.
inward and outward causal-explanatory power of organizations (Stephanie Collins)
God as that to which all are indebted
Whitehead's process philosophy is an attempt to reduce all causation to objective causation.
Every democracy is in fact a democracy of the privileged; the conditions of privilege change but are always what structures the effective demos.
The distinctions among daily necessities, non-daily necessities, utilities, luxuries, and excellences always play a role in structure a civil society.
What consistently begins in a certain way to exist requires a correspondingly consistent cause.
Because it is a very complex artifact, the unity and coherence of any positive legal system is always partly only aspirational, deriving from its aims.
objective end in itself vs beneficiary end in itself in the End in Itself Formulation
infrastructurally permanent possibilities of social acts
Actual intentions exist within a broader environment of intentionality, characterized by virtual, habitual, and interpretative intentions, as well as salient possibilities of intention and habitus that ground such possibilities, as well as social and environmental relations facilitating all of these.
"Scripture is written and interpreted by the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit." Aquinas (QQ XII.16.1)
God as that which the principle of noncontradiction expresses
inference to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA)
The world hits us with its intelligible order.
the ring of truth and consistency without contrivance
"The general drift of our argument is this, that when we see the writers of the Scriptures clearly telling the truth in those cases where we have the means of *checking* their accounts, -- when we see that they are artless, consistent, veracious writers, where we have the opportunity of examining the fact, -- it is reasonable to believe that they are telling the truth in those cases where we have not tthe means of checking them -- that they are veracious where we have not the means of putting them to proof." JJ Blunt
"...out of God's book,a s out of God's world, more may be often concluded than our philosophy at first suspects."
the magic spell of regulated delegation
mercantile activities done for mutual beneficial cooperation with customers vs. those done purely for monetary profit
the coat of many colors as a symbol of grace; blue and purple and scarlet cloths of service and holy garments
consecration of place with oil: Gn 28:18, 22; Gn 35:1, 15 -- altar, pillar, drink offering
undesigned coincidences in favor of the doctrine of the Trinity (Gn 1:26; the Hospitality of Abraham; the triple Holy; etc.)
"The spirit of miracles possesses the entire body of the Bible, and cannot be cast out without rending in pieces the whole frame of the history itself, merely considered as a history." JJ Blunt
minuteness of detail, touches of nature, local inconveniences resolved elsewhere, simplicity of manner, candor with regard to flaws, disintererestedness of conduct
There is no indirect indicator of truthfulness of testimony that the human mind cannot ape and imitate, but it can be difficult to maintain any one consistently or many all together.
schism in the history of Israel
the falling-together of details -- related to the capacity they have for unified explanation
points relevant to lack of mention of Dan in Rev 7
(1) Also not mentioned in 1 Chr 4-7
(2) Historically associated with idolatry (Jdg 18:1-31; 1 Kg 12:25-33) -- ntoe the explicit ties of the golden calf and its relation to the revelation at Sinai
(3) The other passages that contribute to the tradition that Antichrist will come from Dan (Gn 49:17; Dt 33:22; Jer 8:!6), suggesting something gone wrong with Dan
