Neoplatonism is a philosophy of intelligible experience.
Human beings overflow their experiences through story, art, and social connection.
Everything Denethor sees and infers is correct at a certain level, but he has lost his ability to contextualize it properly. Insight without proper understanding therefore becomes the seed of despair, all because pride removes the safeguards against loss of understanding.
The cosmos is evangelical, a good manifestation of divine goodness.
If we were to accept the idea that the laws of nature evolve, this would require a vast space of possibilities through which evolution occurred, which would require something actual as its sufficient reason.
"Now that is properly credible which is not apparent of itself, nor certainly to be collected, either antecedently by its cause, or reversely by its effect, and yet, though by none of these ways, hath the attestation of truth." John Pearson (he contrasts attestation and manifestation)
"Whatsoever is, must of necessity either have been made or not made; and something there must needs be which was never made, because all things cannot be made. For whatsoever is made, is made by another, neither can any thing produce itself; otherwise it would follow, that the same thing is and is not at the same instant in the same respect; it is, because a producer; it is not, because to be produced: it is therefore in being, and is not in being, which is a manifest contradiction. If then all things which are made were made by some other, that other which produced them either was itself produced or was not; and if not, then have we already an independent being; if it were, we must at last come to something which was never made, or else admit either a circle of productions, in which the effect shall make its own cause, or an infinite succession in causalities, by which nothing will be made; both which are equally impossible." (he takes this only timply a supreme maker when considering these not singly but in their order and connection)
Paley's watch argument is perhaps derived from Pearson's Exposition.
"Grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace presented to each is such as to bring him to heaven; but it is sufficient for a beginning." Newman
the solipsism of the world
law : form :: right : matter
(law as aliqualis ratio juris)
common good at moral, jural, and sacral levels
The Beast of the sea has ten crowns because it claims authority that is usurped, a suprlus of authority beyond what it can have a right to.
Every human action is filled with more meaning than any external observer could ever infer from bare observation alone.
We communicate not with bare signs but as participants in a shared system, the human system, constituted by reason and common feeling and overlapping experience-types.
We are not purely external observers to each other; our views overlaps the views of otehrs, and we observe as partly in the know.
The First Amendment protects the means by which the People form customary law and decide representation.
origin, order, overflow
Part of our appreciation in hearing singing arises from our ability to sing ourselves.
Narrators are posited in reading; authors can take advantage of this.
Make-believe is a way of socializing the world.
"Le joujou est la premièr initiation de l'enfant a l'art, ou plutôt c'en est pour lui la première réalisation...." Baudelaire
"The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of our first years." Robert Louis Stevenson
We ourselves are the primary props for make-believe. In using others, we extend them a courtesy of equality; if we can be a pirate, a stick can be sword.
music // ornamental decoration
Where Walton says 'imagination', one can often just substitute 'appearance', and his account of imagining seems even more obscure than the notions of seeing-as that he criticizes.
Adults do something definitely make-believe, and these cases are *palpably different* from even acting on a stage.
Sometimes when we say 'I imagine', we mean 'I posit myself to imagine'.
It is odd to talk of fictional and nonfictional *statements*; these adjectives more properly apply to works, stories, descriptions, etc. Merely looking at a statement is inadequate to tell whether it is fictional or not.
'Uttering fiction' is like 'uttering refutation'; it is at least partly perlocutionary, which is why it sounds odd.
degrees of fictionality
the actual world makes true the statement, 'There is a hole in the ground', vs. The author makes true the statement 'There is a hole in the ground'
There is no imaginative state that is make-believe; make-believe is a doing.
We can extrapolate from the real world: A B therefore complete for D. We can extrapolate from the real world even when we know the real world deviates: A B D so consider A B C.
accepting something for the sake of argument & accepting something for the sake of story
Imaginings, just like believings, may be corect or incorrect, and in fact in imagining we are often aiming at the true.
We don't imagine propositions as such but referents.
Gricean maxims as supplementation rules for fictions (they arguably do better as such than Walton's own rule).
Dreams are not fictions but are more like entertainments of possibilities or like loose proposals for drafts that could become fictional tales and descriptions.
Fictional worlds are the actual world, fictionalized.
the germinality of a prop for a fictional world
To exist in a society is to be the object of at least minimal indirect friendly action for that society.
It is clearly a function of biographies, text-books, and newspaper articles to serve as props for imagination, pace Walton, because that is how they inform, and why they each have a style; they are aids to imagining what happened, or what happens, or what is happening. Thisi s why they often tell us explicitly to imagine or propose little stories and fictional descriptions, or elaborate hypothetical situations. Where they difer from fiction in the usual sense is that this function is secondary.
The opposite of fiction is not reality but something more like reception.
All societies are structured by allegiances and alliances.
Waht signifying and signified and interpretant share might be called the vicus -- the signifying being that which is carrying on in the place (vice gerens) of the signified, and it seems that the two share vicus because of the interpretant.
A significant part of education is familiarizing yourself with what you are learning, and familiarization is not always dignified.
Isaiah 28:15 and the idea of demonic pacts
Each sacrament is a picture of the Church.
Machiavell, Discourses 2.2: "the purpose of a republic is to enfeeble and weaken, in order to increase its own body, all other bodies"
The fiction/nonfiction distinction is not a fundamental feature of language but a classification of language uses in terms of what they can be useful for.
etiological, physiological, and intentional functions of elements in stories
Telling a story does not commit one to implicational closure, which has to be added by the ends for which one tells the tale; nor does it always allow contradiction explosion, because available possibilities may switch and shift during the telling.
No consequentialist whose consequentialism appeals to an overall state can run an argument from evil.
the privation theory of badness of argument
Reasoning about implied fictional truths is always defeasible, involving defaults and presumptions, and ambivalent often leaving things indeterminate.
homage < hominaticum (pertaining to the man)
fealty < fidelitas
To be an animal is to live within a system of natural rewards and punishments
alethiology
(1) the concept of truth and its primary determinations
--- --- (a) truth proper and ontological truth
--- --- (b) formal truth and instrumental truth
--- --- (c) natural truth and artificial truth
--- --- (d) primary truth and secondary truth
--- --- (e) approximate truth
--- --- (f) true and false
(2) truthmaking and verification
--- --- (a) truthbearers
--- --- (b) truthmakers
--- --- (c) use and assessment of truthbearers ('theories of truth')
--- --- (d) truth values in a model
--- --- (e) the potentially true and the actually true
(3) manifestation and exemplation
--- --- (a) manifestation
--- --- (b) objective causation
--- --- (c) exemplar causation
(4) unity of truth
--- --- (a) unity by correspondence
--- --- (b) unity by coherence
--- --- (c) pragmatic unity
--- --- (d) infinite intelligible
(5) truth as good
--- --- (a) intellectual disposition to and aptitude for the truth
--- --- (b) mode, species, and order
--- --- (c) inquiry-relative values of truth
(6) splendor of truth
--- --- (a) experience of truth
--- --- (b) clarity and proportion in integrity
--- --- (c) intellectual beauty as a mark of truth
--- --- (d) truth as an objective cause of love
(7) falsehood
--- --- (a) privation of truth
--- --- (b) false by privation of mode
--- --- (c) false by privation of species
--- --- (d) false by privation of order
--- --- (e) the sophistical and merely apparent truth
Whitehead's prehension gives too little role to anticipation.
Degrading or breaking safeguards often leads to short-term benefits.
Our capacity to relate to others is increased and deepend by overcoming both internal resistance and external impediment.
In participation, the participated functions as if it were a kind of genus of participating.
(1) We ought to strive to promote the highest good.
(2) Therefore the highest good must be possible.
(3) Thereore there must be something actual such that the highest good is possible.
As we better understand a field, we often find that the explananda become harder to explain; our explanations work for what we originally saw in need of explanation, but the explaining shows there to be more to be explained.
interactive design in biological systems (one biological population shaping another biological population, like ants termites, or toxoplasma ants)
Many of the things we experience, we experience through experiencing them with others; the sympathetic experience is part of how we experience them.
The patient is first physician (although sometimes others have this role, e.g., parents for children, or immediate caregivers for those who cannot care for themselves).
hierarchy ; subsidiarity :: collegiality : solidarity :: conciliarity : common good
Orders are in a sense both sacraments and sacramentalia. (This is most obvious with the diaconate.)
One reason for freedom fo speech is that people need to be able to defend themselves against public-opinion punishments.
Bayesianism as an account of verisimilitude
Vashit as type of sin (Chastek)
Torah as sign and expression of divine goodness (Ps 25:8-10)
safeguards and fallbacks as purdential instruments of trust
