"The salvation that Jesus obtained through his death and resurrection encompasses all dimensions of human life, such as culture, the economy and work, family and marriage, respect for human dignity and life, health, communication, education, and politics." Leo XIV
The work of baptizing the nations does not begin at the start of the rite of baptism but large before. Both catechesis and preparing for infant baptism are part of the work of baptizing, although not yet baptism itself.
Signs can be united by (1) interobjectual relations (including various kinds of sameness); (3) mereological relations of representamen to representamen; (3) relations of their interpretants to the same capacity for interpretance; (4) one sign's representamen being the object of another; and so forth.
We generally make signs by introducing differences that can serve as representamen, with teh aim of representing an object.
aphoristic condensation of the conclusions of many lines of reasoning, taken together
The most basic 'magical' effects of writing -- externalized memory, communication in absence -- are fairly immediate; but its more powerful effects take a considerable amount of art -- rhetorical, poetical, cryptographical, etc.
To understand human death requires both tragedy and comedy.
Joy is the orderliness of love.
"Genuine intellectual nourishment not only strengthens and frees our minds, but also plants in us the seeds of humility -- a virtue necessary to all aspects of the intellectual life, including the practice of composition." Brian Kemple
A philosophical approach can be improved by improving (1) its archive (accessible history); (2) its means of analysis (3) its means of synthesis (4) its mode of presentation (for communication) (5) its means of collaboration (6) its depth of conversation.
The true Christian politics bears the wounds of Christ.
Proof grows up in a stew of things unproven, and yet for all that is proof still.
The human person is both child of God and gift of God, both divine representative and divine means of love.
By identifying causes and effects, the mind fulfills its own ends.
The adequation of mind and thing involves not merely correspondence but also resonance.
aesthetic causality in fiction
Fictional characters have the same material presence to us that most of our fellow human beings do.
A sustainable morality requires not having to think things through explicitly at every poitn.
We say that something is good for something if it allows it to be and even more so if it contributes to its being.
We accumulate probabilities in order to determine where to place our certainty.
Not all thought is metaphor, but no thinking mind can avoid metaphoricizing.
We primarily learn not by private judgment but by cooperative, collaborative, common judgment.
Ward, On Nature and Grace (pp. 44-45) anticipates the open question argument in arguing against divine command theories of obligation; see also "Ethics in its bearing on Theism," which is more general. (Cf also the distinct but related argument argument pp 46-47).
"The object of thought always presents itself either as contingent or as necessary." Brownson
"Contingent existences are active only in their relation to the necessary; consequently are intelligible or cognizable only in their relation of contingency."
"Cognitum est principum specificativum cognitionis." Cajetan
External things that begin to be understood, and thus to be intellectual objects, do not exist in their own nature in the intellect, but still they must appear to the intellect in such a way that they can be actually understood; structured in its activity by this appearance, the intellect must understand the thing appearing. But the understanding is not an activity of the thing understood; so it must be an assimilative activity of the intellect that is properly the appearing of the thing to the intellect, to which the intellect adds its own intentional actions, thereby forming concepts through which it understands the thing appearing, and can continue to understand it when it is not present, and moreover can understand it in one aspect and not another, and, of course, can communicate this by further actions relying on the concepts.
Kant's categories do not apply to what is prior to judgment.
As formal languages have their notational grammar and logic, so also they have their own particular rhetoric, concerned with their communicative presentation.
Extrinsic formal causes get their relevance to any particular situation from final and efficient causes.
Boswell's Life of Johnson gives us more of Johnson than it explicitly says, through juxtaposition and composition of anecdote.
We participate in ecosystems by sharing final causes, making cooperation possible.
"One law of nature traverses and controls or reverses another." Gladstone
Marian intercession as a symbol of the work of the Holy Spirit who overshadows her
Our social relations are part of our intellectual resources.
We make choices both to gratify and to oppose our desires.
A strictly Humean account of 'uniformity of nature' would make it nothing other than consistency in present experience between our memory and our experience.
"If there be Necessary Truth, there must be a Necessary Being, on whom such Truth is founded." W. G. Ward
If you want to be completely and unqualifiedly creative about anything, you must first invent the cosmos; and if you want to be humanly creative, you must first quasi-invent it, in a point of view.
All the galaxies of all the universe are but part of the dowry of Christ's Bride.
We learn by reducing complicated chains and networks of reaosning to simple habits of thought distinct from those chains and networks.
Claims are confirmed by postulational as well as by evidential routes, by being useful to inquiry as well as probable in light of it.
A very large portion of reasoning is not so much inferential (central as that is) but simply re-sorting, re-examining, and re-organizing one's thoughts, both individually and collectively.
'Seek well to do good well.'
All constitutions are in a sense mixed constitutions, but in most parts are existent in only moral persons or in fictional/symbolic presentation. Eveyr constitution suggests mixed constitution as its fulfillment.
"Sense attains existence in act without itself knowing that it is existence." Maritain
aphorism and system built unsystematically
No person is a member of only one society.
The human person has a twofold nature, natural personhood and moral personhood that overlays it.
national landmarks as passive members of society
the educational and eleemosynary rights of the Church
"A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture." Christopher Dawson
'Affective states' and 'cognitive states' are not two different groups of component states, but constructs in two different ways of analyzing mental actions and passions.
With many forms of compatibilism, fictional characters have real free will.
Characterization is often a matter of making sure that character conduct is reasons-responsive and able to be an object of reactive attitudes.
constitutive vs attribute approaches to free will
Better to be humiliated by saints than to be praised by the damned.
Love is always the root of genuine liberty.
The skills needed to make parenting work heavily overlaps the skills needed to make conjugal partnership work.
Being for something is a resultant of integrations of attitudes.
(A) He went to the store but (B) he came home with nothing.
(A & ~(~B))
If but is and-not-not, a question is how it works in systems without double negation rule.
Etiquette and fine art have affinities in how they relate to morality as a higher system of norms.
We learn in childhood many good habits and survival skills that have to be re-learned in adulthood.
palliative and curative medicine as both forms of sub-creation (Sirach 38:1-5)
The history of the Roman See has been alternating between walking on water while focusing on Christ and sinking into the sea on attending to the waves.
The reason we find in us is an echo-reason.
'The world is everything that is as it falls.'
Human beings are active personators.
Ps 73:12 LXX (Ps 74:12 in MT): God as "our king before ages"
The principle of noncontradiction is implicit in the notion of method and in the notion of clear and distinct perception.
The First Day of the Church: The Light of the Gospel, as separated from heresy (First Eight Ecumenical Councils), approximately to 1000 or so
The Second Day of the Church: The Boundaries of Authority (up to & including Vatican II at least) approximately to 2000 or so
--- by this speculative scheme, the third day would be symbolized by gathering together land and seas, and by vegetation. Perhaps this suggests the building of a framework for a massive pluralism of institutions in the Church.
In the end, only Eternity can remember us as we ought to be remembered.
There are many stories on the theme of 'Sometimes you have to wander to find the right version of your life'.
The Holy Virgin in the Annunciation represents all of Israel and all of humanity, making the most important decision after Christ's own acceptance on the Cross, and as daughter of Adam, the son of God, she willingly becomes the ground (adamah) from which God forms the New Adam, Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man (adam).
Covenant is the framework by which God works with human beings and not merely above or through them.
We can understand a stone as a composition of atoms, as a system of forces, as a tangle of relations within and without, as a logico-mathematical structure, as a symbol of other things, and as a type of higher things.
semiotics as the origami of intelligibility
All human events have a rationality, and while they often have it very defectively and in an absolute sense, they only rarely have it defectively in a local sense.
'Advisability' is a moral notion connected with the virtue of prudence.
If you're a moral error theorist, you should stop trying to give advice; it's optional, and you have no basis for it.
causation -> dependent intelligibility
Sociology of religion is often very poor at explaining the social self-image of religious participants, despite the fact that this is one of the things it is supposed to explain.
In one-directional (single process) causation C -> E, we can use E to estimate C, if there is a connected measurement.
A contract only has force within a legal system; this would have to be true of the social contract as of any other.
Like gardening, building a good vicinage and neighborhood is hard work; like gardening, a healthy society will do reasonable things to facilitate it; for civil society, however, good vicinage and neighborhood is an actual end and thus facilitating and supporting it is a requirement.
Liberal Christianity always has difficulty with the concept of disciple; this seems not logically necessary, but rather emergent from the kinds of motivations that typically lead to explicit Liberal Christianity.
An interesting aspect of 19th century Anglo-American philosophy and theology is its slogany nature; people are always trying to condense systems, positions, and dsiputes to catchy phrases and capitalized nouns, and then they factionalize with them.
There is never a single art or skill for coming to know things.
the role of scientifically adjacent hobbies in science education and popularization
Adventure, literal or figurative, often begins with a windfall, literal or figurative.
Love is the principle of the possibility of value.
ordinary language philosophy as clearing up "ragged-outlined notions" without worrying about strict formalization
"Dilemmas derive from wrongly imputed parities of reasoning." Ryle
The natural, used socially, becomes conventional as well.
In fiction we often explore the logical powers of words, including the lesser-used powers.
The person is that to which all kinds of talk can be related.
The fact that the verb 'know' does not wholly behave like the word 'run' is the impress of the world on our language.
Much of domain-specific competence is just knowing how to avoid the most likely avoidable errors.
Sometimes when we speak fo virtues we are really speaking of virtue-skill complexes or of complexes of different virtues.
Acquired virtues are connected because (1) they have a common architectonic standard (prudence) which we know from the definition of virtue; (2) they have shared general properties, which we also can derive from the definition of virtue (activity, reasonableness, moderateness, and firmness), although in different proportions; (3) they are cooperative in a shared pursuit, that of the life of eudaimonia; (4) they converge toward a shared exemplar, God; (5) they express one shared kind of source, personal subject of human nature; (6) they facilitate each other incidentally in many ways, in that there are circumstances in which only one virtue can safeguard or support the action of another virtue.
Before we have virtues, we have habits that can become virtues.
Everything in both Ockham's life and his moral philosophy suggests that he did not really understand prudence.
Notitia complexa is only one action of prudence.
Ockham's arguments on the connection of virtues seem little more than an unintentional admission that he uses the term 'virtue' equivocally.
Acts of prudence are not merely natural acts.
Okham's five degrees of virtue are in fact just things that might be done by a virtue; anyone withou courage might act at any of those levels, although one might perhaps argue that, all other things being equal, more developed virtue more consistently attains the higher degrees under difficult conditions.
Stone holds us up, and stone weighs us down, and such is law.
We form legislatures because reason already legislates; we form courts because reason already judges.
the sitos and the opson of an argument
"(1) Christ entrusted His religion to the care of one corporate Society as its infallble expositor, (2) He declared that the corporate Society should last to the end of the world. (3) in every age, therefore, one corporate Society exists which is thus infallible. (4) But there is no existing corporate society of which any one even alleges that it is thus infallible, except the Chruch in communion with Rome." W. G. Ward
A problem with nineteenth-century freethinking explanations of miracles is that they often just take the miracle and deem it psychological, despite there being no more a psychological mechanism for it than a physical. Thus they stay miracles; they are just now located in the mind, as if that somehow made them ordinary.
Edwin Abbott Abbott has a rather bizarre argument (in The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman) that 'holiness' is a concept made otiose by Christ, lingering in the NT only as a relic, that should be 'used with caution' because it reintroduces, or can, the servitude of law. Does he talk about this elsewhere?
We don't make beliefs; we grow them. But it is *we* who grow them.
Tractarianism was a movement of young men enamored of tactics, negligent of strategy, inconsistent in logistics, disparaging of diplomacy. That they had the effect they did is an indicator of how much can be achieved on will alone.
As sacramental person, the Church has features of both natural person and moral person, although, if forced to classify it as one or the other, it should be classified as moral because of its collegial solidarity.
John Froelich's invention of the gasoline tractor was a greater achievement for civilization than you would likely learn from history books.
Analytic propositions are grounded on (logical) genus-species relations. Synthetic propositions are grounded on broader classificational matters that these relations presuppose, or that these relations force either singly or (more often) collectively. Therefore if there are a prior analytic propositions, there are a priori synthetic propositions, namely, those based on what is presupposed or force by the subject matter of a priori analytic propositions themselves.
From deduction we get the (at least conditionally) certain. From induction we get the (at least conditionally) reliable. From abduction we get the (at least conditionally) explanatory. From examination or trial we get the (at least conditionally) secure.
'Exact' is a relative term and always presupposes measurement against a standard.
Whether something is exactly true or approximately true is a matter of how the truth is measured, not of whether it is true.
We trust memory like we trust the only person who helps, by necessity and availability, independent of (but not exclusive of) any further reasons to trust it. Indeed, this trust is a precondition for even getting to the point of knowing enough about memory to ask about further reasons.
The veracity of the Creator is the explanation for why we have a capacity to discover truth, but not the reason why we know it is a capacity to discover truth.