rightful authority acting in an appropriately human way according to natural law for just end
The flaws of fan fiction often arise from treating a story as if it were a playable game.
Nobody in practice treats their pleasures as fungible or as all on a level.
A universe capable of being the habitation of what has dignity, itself has dignity.
The worry that immortality would be boring is the worry that thymos depends on (the possibility of) death.
"Coincidences obvious, explicit, direct, might result from truth, but would be compatible also with forgery. But oblique allusions, wherein the coincidence has to be pointed out, and does not lie on the surface, are just such as nature and truth would produce, and which no forger would ever insert." Fausset
"Coincidence consists in the concurrence or consistency of evidence. If testimony coming from two different sources perfectly agrees, and though touching upon different points harmonises in the end, we have a coincidence.---If that coincidence is manifestly undesigned, unintentional, the proof arising therefrom is proportionably stronger. The *minuteness* of a coincidence bestows greater value upon the argument founded on it; the more circuitous it is, the more difficult would it have been to fabricate; and again, if a narrative and a recapitulation of it at first sight, seem to contradict one another, but upon further investigation are ascertained to agree, then the proof of the truth and reality of the whole is augmented." George W. Hill
Becoming convinced by an argument is not an instantaneous process; where conclusions touch on matters central to a person's perspective, they can take very long to have a stable effect.
Our actual conversations with people often have very little to do with our interests and motivations.
The tendency to think of mana as a force or energy rather than a status or dignity seems reflective of late-19th and 20th century prejudices rather than of its actual roles in Polynesian and Melanesian society.
All good taste begins with insight.
Either we have human rights from the very beginning or we never really do.
Events may be by chance so as to be for the sake of something, like shuffling a deck of cards and dealing in order to play a game. Chance may itself have no particular end, but something's being by chance may have an end.
As rationality with sympathy makes us civic animals, so rationality with sexuality makes us marital animals.
Passions enable us to act even when we lack knowledge; a life of giving in to the passions is a life that can be improved but little by knowledge.
Evolution is possible because the laws of nature have greater intelligibility than what is evolved according to them; the apparent rise of order comes from the order inherent in the cosmos.
Probabilities for something being inscrutable do not rule out reasons for and against, because not all reasons are associated with definable probabilities.
Communal personal relationship is a greater good than individual personal relationship.
All authority is either bestowed, or acquired, or adjoined.
They who claim to know all God's purposes will always find themselves surprised.
Wheter 'good' or 'right' are thick or thin terms depends on context.
Every prayer requires a warrant, establishing our standing and our reason for that kind of prayer.
the interpenetration of Faith, Writ, and Church, each as an aspect of divine revelation
rumor as a mechanism for our general sense of the human community
The first step of catechizing is familiarizing with the vocabulary that makes further communication possible.
a definition of 'cringe':
-- a kind of failure
-- such as to provoke a negative aesthetic response
-- which would still allow for possible sympathetic response
-- except that the doer lacks awareness of the failure
-- in a way that is itself a social failure
-- that itself provokes a response of disapproval
Human beings think in metaphors, and the biggest divides are between people who know they are thinking in metaphors and people who think they are not doing so.
2 Sam 12:20 as type of sacrametns (baptism and eucharist, especially)
Money derives from abstractions of want.
Empiricists often confuse the beginner state and the expert state; that is, the kinds of inferences/associations of experience to which empiricists appeal are often themselves things that can only be learned over time, and are more associated with the highly experienced than originary. We do not, for instance, begin with atomistic impressions, ideas, or intuitions, but learn to analyze them out; nor kinds of association but with huge tangled masses of associated things; we learn over time different ways to develop stable expectations; etc.
Empiricism has always struggled to account for our experience of experiencing.
Brilliance and education both often founder on unexamined assumptions.
Literature grows out of ritual.
The history of the Church is a history of struggle over authority.
To understand the causal relation between grace and free will, one must first begin with the causal relations between creation and free will; the temptation is always to start somewhere else.
Since the fourth century, the clergy have not taken with adequate seriousness the problem laity face of trying to treat the Eucharist with adequate reverence while being stuck with living lives in the world that can easily erode this. Attempts by the laity to solve this problem have historically included things like rare communion, or seeking communion outside of Mass, or paraliturgical devotions, in and out of Mass, that bridge the liturgical and the more secular (like common devotional rosary prayers, adoration, etc.). In encouraging *frequent communion within a Mass in which the congregation has a direct active role*, modern bishops have, whatever the undoubted and undeniable benefits of such a policy, made the problem worse and provided nothing at all to help deal with it -- have not, in fact, even seriously acknowledged it.
We never start with clarity; we always muddle through until we clarify.
sacramentals & holy metonymy
Church Militant: the Church as sacrifice on the altar
Church Patient: the Church as sweet aroma of sacrifice
Church Triumphant: the Church as sacrifice received by God
the point of a game vs. the point of playing a game
For two probability assessments to be compared, they have to be calibrated in terms of the same field of possibilities.
When we consider our debt, we find a hierarchy: private benefactors, public benefactors, ancestors; but there seems an overplus beyond these, obligations more general even than parental/ancestral onese, and ignoring these gives our ethics a chopped-off feel. We have debts as wide as the universe itself and as deep as our existence itself. But even before those limits, we discover debts broader and deeper than the private, public, and ancestral ones we generally find in our human relations, e.g., recognizing that we owe something in some way to our broader environment.
the feeling of owing something to the beautiful or the sublime
Jn 20:22 and exsufflation rites (also Gn 2:7, Wis 15:11, Job 33:4, Ezk 37:9)
Propositions do not probabilize other propositions (outside of the analytic cases) in isolation; the links between propositions are always in light of all other relevant propositions.
An important question in Christian theology: Do you say that, or do Christ's prayer faithful suggest that?
'the natural effects of exceptional causes'
A very large portion of human thinking is backwards -- that is, when we compare it to how it is naturally presented, it actually went in reverse from how it is presented.
mutuation: the act of borrowing or exchanging
"The contract of usury is nothing else but illiberal mutuation." Blaxton
Most major American cities are near a river and mountain fall line; riverheads of navigation and early railroad/trade-travel prominence also helps (making the place a default hub). A secondary factor is having unusually good weather for a region (e.g., shelter from storm, agricultural eminence, tourism potential).
Theatrical performances are ritually demarcated.
sources of possible injustice in contract: direct loss, indirect loss, direct risk, indirect risk, uncompensated broader service, direct coercion, indirect coercion
assertion and denial --> domains of discourse --> manifold of domains --> world as limit
We describe the world with layers of kinds of assertion and denial.
principle of noncontradiction --> being ut primum cognitum --> being as primary and secondary --> creative being and creature being
ancestral piety as a bridge to religious piety
the extrinsic quasi-intrinsic and the intrinsic quasi-extrinsic
'quod quis vehementer desiderat, facile credit' Aquinas (2-2.162.3ad2), of the proud man
Green and grue imply different causal claims about the world.
Real grue-like classifications imply intelligence. (It's because we sometimes organize the world in grue-like ways that grue classifications seem possible.)
Induction is related to expectation not from bare series but to expectation from established possibilities.
Fiction/Nonfiction is a functional distinction, based on the kinds of function a thing affords in broader discourse.
fiction vs. mistaken nonfiction
durability of analogy
One of the functions of obligations in reasoning is to distinguish the morally stupid from the merely nonideal.
Positive law presupposes language already having legal force.
The notion that illocutionary force is 'suspended' when an actor says something on stage, is obviously absurd, and shows a complete philistinism about drama. Stage utterance shifts perlocutionary force in aiming at aesthetic effect in the audience; but it cannot do this if illocutionary force changes much.
In the Incarnation, theology became fully philosophical while not reducing to philosophy.
Much of political discourse is argument over the best metaphors.
inference from the best metaphor
We develop foresight out of hindsight.
There is vast power in the death of a good person.
Hallowed Be Thy Name: faith
Thy Kingdom Come: hope
Thy Will Be Done: love
A remarkable amount of the Industrial Revolution is due to northwest England happening to find low-sulfur coal deposits near iron deposits.
What is one's right is an offshoot of what is prudent.
tantundem
In irregular deposit, one gives the depository money to create a custody of the tantundem (the equivalent quantiity), with the tantundem to be returned on demand.
"...while all God's actions manifest both, justice is less causative than mercy, and explains less about a divine action." James Chastek
Dante's depictions of infernal punishment are somewhat limited by the fact that his means can only represent sins qua principal or dominating vices.
People do not evaluate debates logically but rhetorically.
Institutions within and under law can be artifacts; this is different from saying that law itself, or the legal system itself, is an artifact.
Law is more often used to simplify coordination problems than to solve them.
All legal systems get their primary unity from reason.
Tamanaha's "The Problems with Artifact Legal Theory" -- very good
Prices pre-exist money, being measurements in exchange.
forms of deontic causation
(1) imposed (e.g., on pets)
(2) delegated (e.g., soldiers, servants)
(3) dispositive/framework (e.g., citizens)
(4) contractual
The yir'ah of the Lord: fear, awe, reverence, respect
Ps 55:5 yir'ah = horror/fear/terror
ga'on Micah 5:$, Pr 16:18
=highness, overness (ga'avah works similarly)
Rationally coming to know presupposes the falsehood of determinism with respect to coming to know, because rationally coming to know precludes the conclusion and the inquiry being set in advance.
Human beings are constantly deriving physical conclusions from moral and a priori conclusions; it's why, ofr instance, we characterize alleged physical situations as absurd or obvious, impossible or necessary, explicable or inexplicable, conceivable or inconceivable.
The things that matter most cannot be deserved.
The distinction between a priori and a posteriori has to be teased out of our reasoning, which almost always intertwines both.
Ps 4:5 penance
Ps 4:6 eucharist
Ps 4:7 baptism (lumen) and confirmation (laetitia)
Ps 4:8 orders
Ps 4:9 unction
first principles as signate light
"Virtue is more precise and better than every art, as is nature as well." Aristotle NE 1106b
ordered structures that replace the need for particular trust with the need for only general trust
A population of living things often works somewhat like a living thing (herding, flocking, territorial defense, pack hunting, etc.).
