Dashed Off XVII

Feasting and fasting alike are for the sake of the beautiful and the good.

rationality, order, stability, integrity

Pleasure and pain are such as to be signs by nature; distinction between intrinsic and instrumental good does not work here as elsewhere.

A "brute fact" is only brute relative to a model; otherwise there is no way to identify bruteness.

The effectiveness of an argument depends in part on the habitus of the one who receives it.

charity as what makes satispassion possible

Grand Rounds as humanitarian ritual

The virtue of charity is required in order to assess divine love's actions properly.

to consider: the extent to which conservation laws imply simultaneity of causation (momentum has historically explicitly been taken to do so)

Accuracy conditions are causal conditions.

wu wei and honesty

People will generally tend to press their rhetorical advantages rather than their dialectical advantages.

the 'splendid models of the Holy Family' -- (1) domestic virtues (2) bonds of charity (3) joy of household

Moral law cannot be harmed, and yet one can offend against it.

National churches necessarily presuppose that the government bodies and agencies concerned with the church are legitimate representatives within the liturgical commonwealth.

homiletics as concerned with living and not merely hearing doctrine

the confusion of intellectual or volitional numbness with the doubt of genuine inquiry

Leading questions and rhetorical questions make obvious that questions can have assumptions, but that all questions have assumptions is made clear (1) by the fact that they make sense in some contexts and not others; and (2) by the fact that they distinguish relevant and irrelevant answer-candidates. (Assumptions are determined by analysis of possibilities.)

The first minimal level of making amends is simply accepting, and thus bearing and enduring, one's being responsible.

the desire to impart something genuinely precious to the world

general culture of mind as a requirement for professional life

nonmaleficence and gentlemanliness (Newman)

notional and real as poles of assent

spontaneously grown arguments vs deliberately synthesized arguments

the role of Catholic Marian piety in supporting the doctrine of papal infallibility (e.g., Lourdes)

the royal prerogatives of the Church

the problem of corruption of supplementary institutions as the primary problem of the liturgical commonwealth

Mere reason cannot overcome apathy.

assessment of conceptual analysis
(1) explains an array of paradigmatic cases
(2) makes sense of history of concept
(3) clarifies marginal cases without violence
(4) exhibits consilience
(5) survives aporetic/dialectic inquiry

Human rituals are rational communications, just as much as language is.

physical equations as summations of relevance among measurements

Style is not a uniform thing but a pattern of effects requiring causal analysis.

Humean causal theory as stylistic analysis of the world

humanity as a system of loyalties

It is quite clear that we often think of the necessity of the principle of noncontradiction in practical terms.

While law works itself out systematically, one should not overestimate the systematicity of law.

Every Is is an Ought to Be Regarded as True.

Positive law is relative to the formation of a community standpoint.

The assessment of evidence cannot occur independently of all practical reasons (cost of inquiry, promising character of evidence, etc.).

Classification requires abstraction from corruptions and contaminations.

In law one must start not with concepts used by the ends for which they are used.

the obsessive patience of genius

motherhood as paradigmatic friendship in Aristotle (it is his typical case of asymmetric friendship, and plays a key role in several arguments about the nature of friendship in general)

Fear of ridicule often distorts assessment of evidence, since it interferes with commitment to recognizing probabilities.

causation by diffusion (Shepherd is perhaps a very good start here, given her concept of causal mixing)

a common fallacy: the conditions for X came together gradually; therefore X emerged gradually (quite obviously it in fact depends on the relation between X and its conditions)

Most of what is called politics is an excuse for not attending to politics.

true romance as involving honestas and verecundia

the wish for truth as remedy against some biases (cp. Ward)

People in assessing their own characteristics tend to try to focus not on what they do but on what they do not do.

fruitful virginity of Mary expressed in being (1) Mother of God; (2) intercessor; (3) Mother of Church

mortification and eliminating mismatch between fantasy and reality

books that are pleasure-friends, utility-friends, or virtue-friends

ordered structures anticipatory of rational inference

relation between self-evidence and goodness

Modern generations describe computing in ways similar to the way former generations described literacy; computers are the gramarye of our day.

Arguments like characters in stories must be seen from many angles.

Much of what we call misfortune is just leaving a womb, or growing out of a childhood, in which prior props and supports are taken away.

orders as the sacrament of the unity of the sacramental economy

Darwin's argument for sexual selection is partly teleological: without sexual selection, display would be purposeless, which is incredible.

the role of integrity of body in cognition

baptized : foundations :: confirmed : major means :: ordained : ends

Isaiah 60, temporal prosperity, and liturgical commonwealth

human dignity & capacity for communion with God: the infinity implicit in our
(1) openness to Truth Itself
(2) openness to Good Itself
(3) openness to Beauty Itself
(4) capacity for attending to the Infinite Sublime

rejections of God arise from
(1) bad example of believers
(2) hostile philosophies
(3) trauma of evil
(4) preference for vice
(5) poor handling of perplexity
(6) excessive attachment to the sensible world

The capacity for theistic reasoning is a precondition for receiving revelation.

good as 'fit for purpose' vs good as 'precondition for fitness and purpose'

All measurement requires memory of at least an elementary kind.

Common sense can be recognized as rigorously certain when it is also recognized as (1) experiential (2) practical (3) perspectival and (4) approximate.

He Works Sorrow to Himself

Ane His Awin Ennemy
by William Dunbar

He that hes gold and grit richess,
And may be into mirryness,
And dois glaidness fra him expell,
And levis in to wretchitnefs,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

He that may be but sturt or stryfe,
And leif ane lusty plesand lyfe,
And syne with mariege dois him mell,
And bindis him with ane wicket wyfe,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

He that hes for his awin genyie
Ane plesand prop, bot mank or menyie,
And schuttis syne at ane uncow schell,
And is forsairn with the fleis of Spenyie,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

And he that with gud lyfe and trewth,
But varians or uder slewth,
Dois evir mair with ane maister dwell,
That nevir of him will haif no rewth,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

Now all this tyme lat us be mirry,
And set nocht by this warld a chirry:
Now quhill thair is gude wyne to sell,
He that dois on dry breid wirry,
I gif him to the Devill of Hell.

William Dunbar (c. 1459- c. 1530) was perhaps the greatest Scottish poet of the sixteenth century.

Music on My Mind

Peter Hollens, "Homeward Bound".

Inclusive Disjunction

STUDENT: Is the philosophy community in general like you, or are you weird?

ME: Both!

Philosophical Thought Experiments

Thought experiments in science are generally illuminating or, at the least, benign. It is not so with thought experiments in philosophy. They are a locus of misdirection and deception. We are supposed to derive important conclusions about fundamental matters from bizarre imaginings of zombies, who behave exactly like conscious humans, but are not conscious; or of substances that share exactly all the physical properties of water, but are not water. The narrative conventions of a thought experiment authorizes us to contemplate hokum that would otherwise never survive scrutiny.

John D. Norton, "The Worst Thought Experiment" (p. 11n). (Despite this footnote, the article is actually a criticism of Szilard's thought experiment in thermodynamics adapting Maxwell's Demon -- the worst thought experiment in science, according to Norton. As with all of Norton's philosophy of science work, the article is well worth reading.)

I think the 'important conclusions' is important here. Thought experiments in philosophy are benign, and sometimes illuminating, if they are of modest aim -- to illustrate a purely logical point, or to identify a conceptual distinction, or to exhibit a similarity between two fields of thought, or to summarize a more complicated response to a very specific point. More than this they cannot really bear. But, of course, they are made to bear more than this all the time -- when people use zombie experiments, they aren't merely sharpening the conceputal distinction between conscious experience and behavior indicative of it but treating the stories they are telling as establishing truths about consciousness itself. When you come across a philosophical thought experiment with major conclusions, always ask: What is the rational account that authorizes the inferences required by this story or description? And I think this is where they so often go wrong -- they are taken as establishing things when, at best, they can usually be doing no more than gesturing at a more sophisticated account. And, of course, very often there is no sophisticated account at all, in which case they can at best suggest a line or two of further inquiry in the same way that any metaphor or analogy might.

This is remarkably difficult to get across to some people. Just as even ordinary counterexamples must be analyzed to determine (1) that they are not merely apparent; and (2) that they are not more limited in scope than they might seem, the interior logic of a thought experiment also requires analysis, and each assumption made in building it requires examination -- it is a scaffold for further inquiry, not a primary result in its own right. But people have a weird tendency to throw out alleged counterexamples and move on, or to take thought experiments to establish things on their own. When people do this, I often just start asking the ordinary questions any sort of reader or writer of stories might reasonably ask about the logic of a tale; over and over again, one finds that the proposers of these thought experiments haven't even thought through the basic story-logic of their example, much less started working out any rigorous argument. It's a case of scaffoldings being confused with cathedrals, and means being confused with ends.

Lion and Mouse

I was thinking today, for no particular reason, of one of my favorite illustrations, from Alfred Swinbourne's Picture Logic (1875):



We often need mice to free the lion, even if it is not the mouse of illustration in particular who is in a position to do so.

Maronite Year LXV

Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost
1 Corinthians 3:1-11; Luke 8:1-15

Parode

O Christ, You cast Your truth and grace abroad;
the apostles' preaching flies through the world,
their message to the far ends of the earth.
One plants, another waters, but they serve:
God does the work and God gives the increase.
The Church is the field of God's own tilling,
and all others are but His ministers.
Let us remember the sower of seed,
for seeds of truth fall on good and bad soil.

Strophe

    A sower went out to sow his seed.
    Some of his seed fell by the wayside,
    to be trod and eaten by the birds.
    Others fell on the rocks, dry and hot;
    they were withered in the noonday sun.
    Some fell among the thorny briars,
    to be smothered by those violent weeds.
    But others fell on soil of rich loam,
    yielding a harvest one hundredfold.

Antistrophe

    The seed is God's holy word, broadcast.
    Some by the path have the seed stolen,
    the devil snatching away their faith.
    Some receive with joy but have no roots,
    and in tribulation they wither.
    Others hear but never grow to fruit,
    stifled by worldly care and pleasure.
    But some with bright, noble heart endure:
    receiving some truth, they yield much truth.

Exode

O Lord, show your boundless mercy to us;
with Your Spirit, open our hearts to truth.
May we be pure, enlightened, forgiving,
receiving your truth with joy and honor,
nourished by the grace of living waters,
growing in love, in truth, and in mercy,
never distracted by this world's darkness,
but noble and generous in our hearts,
to yield by Your hand a harvest of grace.