The strangest things in the world are stranger the more they are known.
People who think they have reasons to think that A does not exist have ipso facto grounds of resistance to having a relationship with A.
Part of having a relationship is overcoming resistance to the relationship.
Sacrifice does not necessarily prevent self-righteousness, but self-righteousness without sacrifice is extraordinarily contagious.
Retroactive legislation is present causation; it modifies the present's uptake of the past.
memories as re-simulations within a modal tagging structure
memory as enduring self-testimony
While Walton takes pictures to have the function of being props in visual games of make-believe, his actual discussions only really require that they be accessible for such games to give them such use.
We normally distinguish cases of pretendings from (e.g.) watching movies or even acting in plays -- the actor may pretend as part of his approach to acting, and we may pretend in response to it, but these are different.
Few things make people as miserable as utilitarianism.
The rule of law is
(1) a state of law
(2) involving a politically and morally sustainable legal system
(3) in which the laws apply impartially, even to officials,
(4) and enforcement of the law is generally peaceable
(5) and maintained in broad cooperation with the general body of the citizens or subjects,
(6) who are protected from recognized abuses by safeguards.
People often think they are making themselves strong when theya re only making themselves brittle.
persons as principles of classification
"Every perfect thing is threefold." Mahabharata XIV.39.21
"The Father's Intellect said that all things be divided into three." Chaldean Oracles 22
"One who knows Brahman reaches the highest. Satya is Brahman, Jnana is Brahman, Ananta (infinity) is Brahman." Taittiriya Upanishad 21.1
The secular exists because of the sacred that shelters it.
(1) The totality of all contingents is either contingent or necessary.
(2) A given totality of all contingents depends materially on its contingent components.
(3) What depends materially for its existence on what is contingent is not necessary.
(4) As contingent, the totality of all contingents depend efficiently on a cause distinct from itself.
(5) The cause that makes the totality of all contingents a totality must be necessary.
-- All this requires the totality of contingents. Does it require that this be a consistent totality?
Spontaneously coming to exist and coming to exist uncaused are not the same; spontaneity means that the causes are internal in some way to the effect, not wholly external.
Xunzi's criticicisms of the School of Names are broadly teleological: the dialectical paradoxes arise by ignoring the purposes of names/roles/classifications.
Nobility ranks tend to have a kind of sameness the world over, partly by diffusion, but mostly due to the fact that they are historically constrained by the structures of governance, land ownership, and military support.
Christians often err by limiting the ways they can glorify God.
Ens rationis is intellectually needed because attribution is not strictly tied to being an actually or potentially existing thing. It is metaphysically needed for an account of such things because some such attributions are true.
"When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country." George Grant
'Reliability' is a term of diachronic assessment.
We conceive before we know we conceive, and believe before we know we believe.
We criticize people for being bad, but criticize them more harshly for being worse; we take it to be the case that people should at least make the effort to be reasonably decent by the standards of their age and land. Part of the difference in harshness, I think, is that we recognize that we ourselves are biased in several ways, and take ourselves to be at least trying to make a reasonable effort in light of what is available to us, and to be doing, with all our efforts, at least as good as people in our land and age can usually be. If we are reasonably honest, we recognize that criticizing people for not being vastly better than others of the time would make us look like hypocrites; it is safer to criticize people for not reaching a basic minimum.
Without the breath of fiction there is no civilization.
Scientific theorizing is filled with fictional makeshifts and crutches, because all inquiry into difficult matters is.
All words that express sensible ideas also express immaterial conceptions.
Everywhere in law that there is legal fiction is a point at which the law is recognizing something beyond itself, which requires that something be fit into the legal account.
The removal of legal fictions from law is often a process of legal solipsizing.
Hume T 3.2.3 as an indirect discussion of juridical personhood in terms of occupation, prescription, accession, and succession; see also 3.2.10. (A weakness of Hume's account of allegiance is that he fails to recognize that 'public interest' itself has to be explained -- what makes there to be a public at all, such that we can attribute the relevant things at all? Allegiance grows up with the development of public interest, not after it.)
It is easiest to motivate oneself by pleasure, but we have motivations not necessarily linked to the pleasant -- e.g., the depressed can motivate themselves for duty or doing good to others even when it is clear that pleasure is out of their reach.
Many philosophers suffer from the intellectual malnutrition of exposure to too few kinds of philosophy.
You should not reason as if you were randomly selected but as if you were caused under specific conditions in a particular context.
We think of infinite series not by successive adding but by sweeping over all possible successive addings of a kind.
A firm is first and foremost an accounting system for a specific purpose in exchange.
The meaning of myth expands outward by suggestion, association, and allegorization.
Pleasures are often different in such a way that pleasures exclude pleasures.
We are given not merely miracles and laws but providential coincidences; that is to say, providence has set up the world so as to provide coincidences and chance events that may provide both windfall and challenge, and remind us of the world and the possibilities beyond our expectation but within our reach.
For much of ethics we need not a template but a method of discovery.
People often feel themselves indebted for the world itself.
LLMs draw texts with rational order from relationships between rationally ordered texts.
the key as symbolic title and title as symbolic key
Every normative suggests further narratives.
To understand explanations, we embed them in narratives of how they were reached and how they are applied.
We have a reason that draws from our passions. It is precisely this that occasionally leads to conflict.
Holy Scripture is a shared inheritance that must be received as such.
When we look at technological progress closely, it often is much slower than it seems at superficial glance; innovations have to be developed, refined, diffused, usually across many different people and markets. Part of the reason for the difference is that some technologies that are very obvious (e.g., for entertainment) spread more quickly than the rest.
We often have to learn how things resemble each other; that is, resemblances are often not obvious and we need to learn how to recognize them.
We legislate for hypotheticals.
Bayesianism models cognition like stimulus-response models actions; it crudely approximates it with highly restrictive assumptions under limited conditions.
"Our visual perceptions sometimes contradict over tactile perceptions, for example, in teh case of a rod immersed in water, but nobody in his right mind will conclude from this fact that the outer world does not exist." Godel
the hatred of the natural as a recurring pathology of modernity
All loneliness presupposes some form of non-loneliness; loneliness lies in the contrast.
