If you demand that the Church stay out of politics, the Devil will expand what people count as political until the Church suffocates. If you demand that politics be separate from anything religious, the Devil will expand what counts as religious until politics is separate from anything good.
Many problems in society arise from the corrupt pursuit of justice.
You learn to love everyone only by loving someone well.
Malebranche (LO 67-68) and the walking man argument
Appearances by their nature have causes of appearing.
Error theories generally require an easy-transition-of-mind account of the error. But this requires that the easy transition of mind not itself be an effect of a natural link. The latter is usually the weakness of error theories about large domains.
Half of thinking is making enough quiet space for it.
The distinguishing mark of the state is cooperation ordered by law for the good of civil society.
Pretending-to-be does not imply not being, but tends to be found with not being. The connection between pretending to be and not being is not contingent even though it is not logical implication. Nor is it purely probabilistic, but instead something more like necessary for the probable case.
"In general as desire burns higher, anger sinks, and as anger burns higher, desire sinks." Aquinas
Objects' being separable does not imply that they are separate.
Even if we assume that there is no free will, all the phenomena associated with free will show that human action incorporates information about counterfactuals.
If we build a moral robot, its morality would give it greater power to do evil, not less.
Beliefs, like persons, have authority based in power, wisdom, and goodness, either in themselves or in context.
Taste arises not from the singular experience but from the ensemble of experiences.
Never trust someone who always talks about rights but never about the responsibilities that make them rights.
Independence is always a causal notion.
The three essential questions for causal reasoning from statistical data:
(1) Can we ignore an observation safely?
(2) Can we make an intervention an observation?
(3) Can we set aside an intervention safely?
the do-calculus as a representation of 'suppose that'
The most important apologetics, besides honest personal discussion and public preaching, is large-scale defense-in-depth.
To be good at analogical reasoning requires a full treasurehouse of memory.
When something becomes the standard de jure, people develop simpler proxies for it, which become the standard de facto.
We are often pained by things that are not bad but only could go bad.
It is a natural and common thing to pray not only for the future but for the past.
We take God not to be limited in power and presence by location; by analogy, God is not limited in power and presence by time.
-- this can be strengthened by recognizing that limitation in time requires some limitation in location and vice versa.
There is no action at a distance only in that 'distance' is a causal notion.
Every incipit and desinit is incomplete actuality and therefore participates actuality itself.
(1) Every possibility must participate possibility itself.
(2) Possibility itself must be actuality itself.
(3) Therefore any possibility implies actuality itself.
As any literal statement may also be given figurative or expressive meaning, there is always the possibility of taking any literal statement to be only figurative or expressive; thus the pervasiveness of the realist/anti-realist divide, since figurative statements may be taken realistically (as corresponding to something real) or anti-realistically.
Pursuing rights by litigation always runs the risk of setting precedent by failure.
public opinion as part of checks and balances
In politics, there is oten great power in the mere real possibility of acting. The people get a significant power from the fact that they actually can begin to rumble and flood. This is one reason why making actions of the state open to public view, to the extent that this is possible, is an important means of free society, despite its inconvenience for government.
The prudent man's sense of disgust is worth more than the fool's considered judgment.
People often talk about 'vocation' when what they really mean is 'role in providence'.
interest-based, policy-based, and precedent-based forms of practical reasoning
staefcraeft = grammar
Human beings are policy-making animals.
James the Just as 'font of all episcopacy' -- i.e., there is an early tradition of James being the first non-Apostolic bishop, with the episcopacy in general as modeled after him, and the episcopal succession after the succession of Symeon to James
Philosophy is a kind of theomania, in that even those philosophers arguing the craziest position are sometimes a little inspired, often hitting something more closely than might be obvious. In this it is like artistic inspiration or erotic love.
'Revealed preferences' are sometimes real preferences and sometimes defective executions.
Modernity sometimes seems to be a culture of persuading young people to make bad bets in life.
Passive connection between persons is the infrastructure for active connections.
All economic systems tend toward treating people as mere means. Law and custom and virtue are what work against this, when they are able to do so at all.
The saints evangelize; even long after their deaths, they continue to convert others.
intramodal signs (e.g., actual signifies actual) and transmodal signs (e.g., present signifies past)
permissibilities in context of obligations, obligations in merely permissible contexts
Most of the good and evil we do in the world is quickly swamped out. Only prudential planning and the stability of virtue make it go farther.
All of our experiences are experienced simultaneously in the three registers of possibility, actuality, and necessity.
A society in which people cannot improve their neighborhood is a society with little prospect.
The benefits received from experts with whom one has a cooperative relationship are generally different from any received from experts in a field generally.
Every state attempts to use professional institutions as instruments to control people.
Human beings deal with evil by putting it into stories.
Every kind of grace tends toward some kind of union.
Socratic rhetoric: showing people that they already at least partly agree with you
There is no preferred probability measurement; we handle probabilities comparatively.
Entropy is concerned with that variation that is consistent with given nonvariations.
Newton's First Law allows for a physics of lines. Newton's Second Law allows precise relationships between lines.
Scientific progress is a story of footnotes becoming central ideas.
Both socialism and capitalism work only given a background morality they cannot guarantee.
Every virtue has a negotium appropriate to it, concernign the organization of self and the world to facilitate its acts: training, routines, institutions, problem-solving.
rites & the negotium prudentiae
crusade as symbol of reform (note that they share similar kinds of failure points)
three types of participation in Mass: celebrant, ministrant, circumstant
-- circumstant participation involves forming the congregation as a congregation, both physically and spiritually; circumstant participation forms the templum
Jn 5:39 -- Scripture's role is to bear witness to Christ, through whom alone is eternal life.
By faith we impetrate justification.
We culminate our feelings by how we act on them.
History is the human imitation of eternity.
"Otium sine litteris mors." Seneca
the unity of humanity as a principle of philosophy of history
kinds of sanctity: natural, occupant, referential
Bayesian epistemology continually stumbles due to equivocations between degree of belief and belief about degree/probability.
economics as the statistics of voluntary moral obligation
The primary importance of precise prediction for scientific inquiry is less to assess accuracy than to assess completeness.
We say an institutional change is organic when (1) it is consistent with institutional ends and (2) it incorporates the lessons of its history.
Reforms fail as often as not.
People who believe in degrees of belief often have naive views of how they relate to action, resulting from the clumsy original betting idea.
subjective vs objective surprise in literature and cinema
the People as universal jury
All interpretations of quantum mechanics proceeds by relating the wave function to other things (the universe, observers, measuring devices, etc.).
The limits of physics can be read in its fundamental units.
Pace many philosophers of biology, whole organisms quite clearly have functions in populations; e.g., queens and drones in colonies, males and females in sexual populations. Likewise, they can have functions in ecosystems.
Free will should be understood in terms of different possible objects chosen rather than in terms of different possible outcomes. Because objects complete us causally, they often lead to different outcomes, but this is not the freedom.
Unless we assume the existence of volition, we cannot assess the evidential value of experiment.
Ethics cannot be outvoted.
participative vs representative roles in society
History eventually covers even atrocities in oblivion; it is divine judgment, not history, that remembers.
In learning many small things one begins to learn great things.
Contingent happenings are in physics regularly explained by the necessary truths of mathematics.
Every right creates an at least minimal right to use force to defend it, where this is not explicitly excluded.
'the justice' as a jural good of society that is held by occupation, sometimes admits of inheritance (although usually abandoment and reoccupation), etc.
Human beings can communicate imperatives nonverbally, althoug this often lacks the precision of verbal imperative. Social animals like dogs also seem to do something similar, although even less precisely, and in ways that are difficult to distinguish sometimes from mere warning or encouragement.
Human beings are never 'mere animals' even as infants.
Our early dependencies intensify our social connections.
Our biology as immersed in our culture is our first material for moral character.
a curriculum as a curation of the subject
All human life is structured by the bounds of inability.
Human beings are animals who moralize our lives as animals.
The first step toward a philosophy worth having is recognizing that philosophizing is natural to us.
While rights depend on duties, we have rights before we have duties, because others have duties to us before we are mature enough to have duties to them.
Human beings do not merely exchange things; we exchange kinds of exchanges.
We lear exchange even at the breast.
Multicultural societies work by converting tribes into teams.
The human intellect sees something of the system in a bit of the system. Given some understanding of physical interactions, we get a glimmer of the physical cosmos. Given minds and intelligibles, we get a glimmer of an intelligible world. Given some morality, we begin to feel out a realm of morality. And so forth.
Play is 'secularized' into exercise.
Loeb's incoherentism arises from treating the pluralistic, analogical moral realm as if it were uniform and univocal.
There are always less and more clumsy ways of fulfilling our duties.
Morality beneits us, but does not exist to benefit us. For one thing, what counts as benefit is downstream from morality itself in at least many cases.
In any work of art, the line between natural and artificial is difficult to draw.
The interest of a story is related to intervention (disruptition of regularity) and counterfactual reasoning (different ways things could go).
The richness of a language is its set of capacities for four things: storytelling, characterization, thematization, and statement modification.
We perceive in order to have that which pleases. (Note that this is different from saying that we perceive in order to be pleased.)
Storytelling is a byproduct of our capacity for wisdom.