This ends the notebook that was finished in March 2025.
The best known truths are always amenable to metaphor.
Wisdom possesses in stillness what all other cognitive actions and state approximate in motion.
nest, burrows, and hunting territories as proto-institutions
-- they are materially the sorts of things, playing a relevant role in behavior appropriate for institutions, and could thus be institutions if formally recognized as such
Moral advice is obviously real, and its being moral, and thus is moral fact even if we assume falsely that moral counsels are the only moral facts.
The inability to find silver linings is a grave political debility.
It is common for people who have always had something to fail to grasp the significance of it.
People often confuse artifice-based (constructed) realism with anti-realism.
games as soluble-problem creation
All real persons are also possible fictional persons.
Pretty much everyone is sometimes better and often worse than they think.
"It is crazy to want what is impossible, and impossible for the wicked not to do so." Marcus Aurelius
"I am a rational creature, so I must sing hymns to the God." Epictetus
To be fully understood, arguments often have to be tried out in various ways.
We are not made sick by the presence of a virus but by what the virus does that impedes our bodily functions, directly or indirectly.
You need to develop and maintain minor skills in order to develop and maintain in major skills.
quasi-concordia, quasi-benevolentia, quasi-beneficentia as elements of relationship with a favorite book
All genuine benevolence requires a prior concord.
(concord -> benevolence) -> beneficence
The simpler the field, the easier it is to be an anti-realist about it.
French National Domain in the Holy Land: Church of the Paternoster (Eleona), St. Mary of the Resurrection Abbey, Tombs of the Kings, Church of Saint Anne
practical advisability as an indirectly moral concept
Sovereignty is a form of moral & juridical personality involving a right to legislate that is supreme in its jurisdiction-associated order.
All sovereignty is over people qua some X (as citizen, as tribal member, as creature, as resident, as territorial user, as subject, etc.), where X fixes order and jurisdiction.
A common problem empires have is that they end up training their own military opponents.
Law is a practical matter and heavily dependent on classifications, so it tends to fall out of a structure based on possible classifications of aspects of action:
(1) classification of sources of action: (a) individual statuses, (b) group statuses
(2) classification of circumstantial components of action
(3) classification of norms relevant to action
(4) classification of effects of action.
Document presupposes archive.
Practical inquiries impose standards of admissibility on evidence in light of the practical ends of inquiry.
To do justice to the true, the good, and the beautiful, one must sometimes reflect on the one, the something, and the other.
ens commenticium : ens rationis :: ens artificiale : ens reale
ens rationis: ens logicum, ens commenticium, ends ideale, ens palliolatum
"If I premise that my experience is not merely the production of the mental activity of my own nature; in other words, not merely a dream, in which you are my vision as I am yours, but in which the external as well as the internal has its share in my experience, then everything that is alike in our experience must bear a corresponding similitude in external circumstances." Oersted
No account of scientific discovery is adequate that ignores the joy of it.
"Light is the great proclaiming power of the world." Oersted
Evolutionary explanations often fail to grasp that many things are always happening at once.
weld, woad, and madder
The more intellectual a cause is, the harder it is to fit into a concrete/abstarct dichotomy, because its causal activity suggests both.
the integrity, substantiveness, and distinctiveness of discourse (e.g., of a fictional work)
Lv 19:33-34 and the Christian treatment of non-Christians who live in peace with Christians
-- much of Lv 19 can be seen as identifying specific forms, sometimes symbolic, of general conditions for being the People of God.
-- note that Ex 24:48-49 (cp. Nm 9:14) foresees the possibility of the stranger as participating directly through circumcision and PAssover, but only in becoming in some sense no longer a foreigner (cf. vv. 43-45). [Nm 15:14-16, 29, extends this to sacrifice.] Thus the 'resident non-Christian' may pray with us (sacrifice of sweet aroma), and shall not be barred from Eucharist (Passover) if he is also willing first to be baptized (circumcision), but must follow the laws on all of the these things. Nm 15:25-29 indicates that prayers for the whole congregation extend, at least sometimes, even to the non-Christian residing in the midst of the Christian assembly.
-- this certainly inclues the catechumenate; are there other categories (e.g., non-Christian spouses?)
to consider: bishops exercising divine authority per suffragium
the papal power of suppletio defectuum (power to provide remedies where the need arises from mere lack
-- related to the authority to confirm the brethren
Most of the good anyone does is in exchange for other good.
All explanation ultimately traces back to infinity.
Pleasure and pain are quite loosely correlated with survival and reproduction; they are relevant to them but also don't track them very tightly.
Every society has a mythological (imaginative), an aspirational, and an actual structure.
Reading is itself a kind of fine art.
We anticipate the wills even of people we don't know -- often badly, but inevitably.
Natural history fundamentally depends on the notion of goodness for a population of living things.
Mysticism is the hardest road to truth; it is the challenge of the climb and the triumph of overcoming it that is the attraction.
We trust most those whom we trust both from a recognition of their trustworthiness and from a recognition of the need to trust.
Every person projects a sake/behalf/cause qua person and bearer of value.
"Just as we would never see our face were it not for a mirror, so, too, we would never see our own inner life opposite us -- were it not for the mirror of art." Landmann-Kalischer
beauty as the value that reflects all other values
"The world is a collection of mutable things that are next to each other, follow upon one anotther, but which are overall connected with one another." Wolff
"The knowledge of the reason of things that are or occur is called philosophy."
"Philosophy is the science of the possibles insofar as they can be."
"If the reason of that which belongs to a species is contained in the notion of the genus, then things which we know philosophically are applied to more problems of human life than things which we know only historically."
To know many things, the human mind must first be wrong about many things.
Every liberty has a teleology.
"By *example* we mean a representation of something more determined which is supplied to clarify the representation of soemthing less determined." Baumgarten
Allegiance is not something human beings can deserve.
To the mission of the Church, we are all expendable; for the substance of the Church, we are each of infinite and everlasting value.
The very living of a human life posits some goodness to cosmos.
Comfort is an insatiably devouring god.
We should strive for what would be pleasing in a virtuous version of our society.
It is because we do not merely cognize but conceive that we can shape our judgments and reasonings.
Names are given by special fixation; it does not follow that they then only refer, nor even that there is anything special about their reference in itself.
'A new gunslinger comes to town; he's smooth-shaven, so we call him The Kid. The Kid is staying at The Royal Flush, having arrived by a riverboat, the *Far Horizon*. The Royal Flush is at the intersection of Pine and Red Oak Farm, which is where Red Oak Farm used to be. The Kid's actual name is Elwin, which means 'elf-friend'. He shouldn't be confused with the other Elwin in town.'
-- Any theory of names that cannot make sense of every sentence and proper name here is already wrong.
Theories of names often involve confusion of properties and predicates.
(1) Some beings are not real beings but rational beings.
(2) A being has properties in the way it has being.
(3) Quantifiers can be ampliated beyon the domain of real beings.
(4) We can reer to any being that can be an object of thought.
The aesthetics of sexuality can only connect to real sex by way of secrecies and privacies; this is one reason why pornographic cultures and subcultures so often seem weirdly sexless.
Never trust the feeling of empowerment.
'One person, one vote' obviously cannot apply to every person (people are not advocating that babies or juridical persons be given votes), nor can it apply to every vote. For it to apply, we must first coordiante the kind of person with the kind of vote. When we are talking about different kinds of vote (e.g., votes in Norway, votes in California), we change the persons to be consdiered; when we are talking about different kinds of person (e.g., citizen of Canada, citizen of Mexico), we change the votes to be considered.
People generally amp up public displays of sexuality to compensate for feelings of disorer, confusion, or even lack in actual sex.
The recognition of some sense of being 'self-made' is essential to the existence of a free society; and one notices whenever people attack the notion, that they are always trying to justify forcing people to do something.
Every instrumentalism is a realism about something else.
In ethics as in other things, unusual outliers can throw off our reasoning.
You will never find a democracy without fools.
patience as the maintenance of reserve forces
the integral, the real, the richly diverse
Genius by its nature makes use of lesser skills, and is limited or expanded by the lesser skills it has available.
Most politicsdoes not occur by persuasion, and most persuasion does not occur by rational justification.
"It is reciprocal action governed by proportion that keeps the city together." Aristotle
the prudent as that which tends to reasonable friendship in a way appropriate to friendship
All the evils of utilitarianism are tied to its obliteration of all consideration of the kind, mode, and order of means.
Jer 33:20-21 and the parallelbetween creation (physical nature) and covenant (social nature)
You get out of an educational institution what you put into it.
"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." Aristotle
Friendship is the foundation for shared good.
