The hatred of the natural seems often to be a perverted pursuit of infinity.
When we reflect on human violence, we find it to be in some way both natural and alien to us.
We know the world because we border it;
inside and out we border it.
To say that a novelist is only pretending to assert is obvious nonsense; the illocutionary acts all follow the same rules as usual, unless you assume there is no sense of truth that allows being true in a novel. Iris murdoch writing about a character commits to the truth of what she says (except in cases lik deliberately unreliable narrator) for the novel -- although assertion itself does not in fact usually require 'commitment', being often a much weaker act. As novelist, she has the ultimate possession of evidence about the novel she is writing -- although the need for assertion to involve evidence is in any case domain-specific and a norm rather than a need. And Iris Murdoch herself would, I think, hold that there is a sincerity in novel-writing, and if so, rightly -- although sincerity is a felicity condition and not a strict requirement of assertions, anyway. Apparent assertions in a novel are not defective in any way as assertions. In fact, teh opposite is the case: apparent assertions in a novel are *even more properly* assertions, because they are assertions of semi-divine kind: assertions that make the truth, and the evidence, of what is asserted, and compared to which out-of-fiction assertions can only be regarded, at least as assertions, as imperfect (although this is a comparative imperfection and not an imperfection for their kind and context).
Assertions in a novel are often perlocutionarily distinct from similar assertions in similar contexts.
If I make up a babble-language and act as if I were saying things in it, I pretend to assert. If I am putting something on the board of discourse as true, even if only in a persona or a fictional case, I am truly asserting.
the illocutionary act of writing a novel vs the illocutionary act of writing a sentence in a novel
'inter-fictional carry-over'
Truth-in-fiction is truth, in fiction.
admiring Guy Morville vs imagining admiring Guy Morville, vs pretending to admire Guy Morville in make-believe
All our imagination of what we are slips away, and all that is left is what we are.
What is good both is and ought to be treated as good.
A common problem in skeptical arguments is key terms being understood entirely in terms of the skeptic's own imaginative associations with the word; this is easily remediable, and it is often possible to build a skeptical argument that does not err this way. Unfortunately, this error is exactly the kind of error that is invisible to those who commit it.
Characterization is not accumulation of scenes but the sketched and flowing line through them. Characterization is done only by suggesting it, but in different ways suggesting a unified thing.
Worldbuilding is what characters do.
In make-believe, we socialize the world a certain way.
All comedy is based on contingency.
the sense of novelty in inquiry and Descartes on surprise
Every particular story can also be a concrete universal, forming a possible genre-region (a set of imitations), with actual genres arising out of strong overlaps of genre-regions.
Particulars can become concrete universals because of final causation.
mereological fusion as unity that rules out no kind of composition
mereological self-fusion
the courtesy of being treated as punishable
The range of architectonic ends that a human being could possibly have is limited.
1. The probability of any arbitrarily given state going to war against any other arbitrarily given state is quite small. (Qatar is unlikely to go to war against Bolivia.)
2. Two states whose countries do mutually profitable trade are slower to go to war.
3. States that require more steps to go to war are slower to go to war.
4. Since WWII, the United States has enforced peace among its allies, thus increasing the incentive for negotiated conflict resolution.
5. States that are active members of defensive leauges are somewhat less likely to be involved in wars.
--- These five seem to explain all of the so-called 'democratic peace' effect.
Music makes us about things.
In business, the difficulty is often getting the basics right; the flash and fluff, in so many cases, eat up resources while the basics languish.
checklist as one-dimensional memory palace
standard memory palaces as ways of organizing multiple related checklists
Kant on moral progress as a postulate of practical reason // Cohen on messianic community as same
locomotion as change in light-accessibility to other changes (change in communicability by way of light)
Bishops should be very careful not to turn wine into water and bread into stones.
Charity vests other virtues, both acquired and infused, bringing out their inner beauty.
"The most sublime feeling of oneself is the feeling of the harmony between oneself and the rule of the world as a whole, and thereby the highest beauty." Herder
heuristics --> best explanation for why given heuristics are heuristic --> general principles
Even accidental groupings need to be explained in terms of how the accident is possible.
A theory may be valuable for discovery (1) by being strange enough to raise interesting questions, (2) by solving genuine problems, (3) by encouraging and inspiring inquisitive pursuit.
The world is intermingled with our wills; the facts belong both to the tasks and to the performances.
The ethical is borne not merely by the will but also by the reason, and of both we may often speak.
inquiry and the creation of notings-of-facts, or, indeed, facts qua constructs (i.e., truths taken as according to art, truths formed by a means or method into something cognitively useful)
-- For every Turing machine, there is a corresponding Diophantine equation. (Matiyasevuh, Ronbinson, Davis, & Putnam)
"We have come to think of the actual world as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one." Nelson Goodman
Leibniz often equates 'sufficient reason' with 'aggregate of all requisites'.
Everything presuppposes all of its requisites.
Everything that exists has some definition that is instantiated.
"...there is a surface to expressive behavior that may become detached. The child who pretends,t eh actor who portrays, the mime who imitates, and the hypocrite who feigns, all attempt, in different ways, to strip expressive behavior from the character it normally reveals." Alan Tormey
Music is expressive because we can easily express by way of it; indeed, because it is sophisticated and nuanced, it is the most perfectly adapted 'language' of expression.
The expression of others impresses on us.
"Our claims is that, because musical movement can be heard as making sense and because that sense is not determined solely by the composer's intentions, musical movement is sufficiently like the human behaviour which gives rise to emotion-characteristics in appearances that musical movement may give rise to emotion-characteristics in sound." Stephen Davies, "The Expression of Emotion in Music"
"Our point is this: Anything that can wear an expression or have a gait, carriage, or bearing in the way in which a person's behaviour may exhibit those things can present the aspect of an emotion-characteristic in its appearance. Few non-sentient things will be able to meet these requirements, but, amongs those few, music will find a place."
Music is not intrinsicially representational; this is different from saying that no forms of music are used to represent, which is false.
Time (1) defines an ordinal structure that allows description of changes in terms of sequential dependencies and (2) measures the communicability of information about one change to other changes.
Walton's df of props ("Metaphor, Fictionalism, Make-Believe"): 'real-word objects or states of affairs that make propositions true in the make-believe world, i.e., 'fictional'"
-- the fictionality seems an intrusion here; nothing prevents props making factual propositions true in a make-believe world; but perhaps one could say that things can be both factual and fictional
[Noun] was [Adjective], [Noun] [Adjective]
The way was long, the days short.
The moon was bright, the shadows long.
Her face was set, her lips tight.
How reliable a map is depends in part on how you use it.
Saying things badly often interferes with progress in inquiry.
People often say something is 'subjective' when they really mean it is imperfectly determinate, involves gray areas or fuzzy regions, or requires cultivated judgment.
formal institutional facts (cf. Searle's standing declarations) vs instrumental institutional facts
making something X by declaring it X vs making something to be X by declaring X to be
nature tourism and the pursuit of specific expressivities in nature
Utilitarianism errs in not recognizing that huamn happiness has a deontic structure.
People regularly borrow from religious language whenever they want to be very serious, regardless of their own religious views.
signs as the flora of thought in somethng like the way gut bacteria are the flora of digestion
Difficulties often hit us hardest when they ease.
Pr 17:6A and Bellarmine's Note of Temporal Prosperity
One of the greatest strengths of analytic philosophy is how much room it allows for, and how many of its methods facilitate, tinkering with arguments.
