Dashed Off XVIII

 the Church as model of both consecrated virginity and matrimony

Spirit by its nature is attracted to sign as meaning-bearing.

We make trade-offs not merely with quantitative assessments but also with judgmetns of quality, and the latter kind of trade-off assessment has features not found in the former.

It is a fact that some way sof playing poker are cheating in the context of the game being played; therefore there are moral facts.

Communication always begins with having-in-common.

Loves tend toward uniqueness, and the deeper they are, the more in them is unique.

Most words can be used o fhte potential as well as the actual.

Lk 24:51 (Christ taken up into heaven) // Lk 24:52-53 (Disciples going to Jerusalem and staying in the Temple)
-- the disciples do on earth what symbolically corresponds to what Christ does in the Ascension

The Ascension and Session are the culminations and completions of Incarnation.

Every advance in one's education consists in recognizing how what one had learned is a shadow of what one is learning.

'postulates of respect for the individual'

The modality of coming to know is not separate from the object of knowing.

We know there are molecules composing tables because there are tables that are necessarily composite, and study of the components brings us the molecules (and atoms &c.).

the sensible matter of matrimony as consenting presentation

That one can *model* discovered solutions as optimizations does not imply that optimizing is the best *strategy* for finding such solutions.

It follows from Malebranche's account of the passions that they should only be followed to the extent that doing so preserves society and our body.

Communication begins before we actually communicate.

What we usually call evidence is something we project to exist in a 'steady and general point of view', the open field of the publicly accessible.

One reason a school needs to support high-achieving students as smuch as possible is that such students are part of the support system for lower-achieving students.

You learn how to comprehend what you read by reading lots of things like it.

Coolness is a form of novelty.

Our ability to refer to fictional entities in pretense and make-believe is itself a metaphysical mystery.

Many of our assertions are parts of testimonial claims; higher-order reflection may classify those chains in different ways, but that does not affect those assertions as assertions, just as linked in systems with other assertions.

pretending to assert vs asserting what one pretends

We make believe in order to think through.

To say that we refer or assert in a game does not fundamentally affect any questions about reference or assertion.

Walton's discussion of fictional entities captures the whole problem with his project: saying "it is fictional that" or "in a game of make believe" reclassifies parts of the problem but doesn't actually answer any of the questions he seems to assume it does. (He seems, in fact, to be smuggling in loose, colloquial tones into a technical account that doesn't obviously require them -- e.g., on his account, something that is make-believe may also actually be the case outside the game, but he regularly borrows on our tendency to take 'make belive' as a marker for the *not real*. On his account, saying we fictionally refer can't give the conclusion that we don't actually refer, but he treats it as if it does whenever it is convenient for him to do so.

When people ask, "What is the value of X?", there is often no such thing as 'the value' but many very different values.

LLM behavior is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a blending of a huge number of people who talk too much.

"The affirmative proposition is prior to and better known than the negative (since affirmation explains denial just as being is prior to non-being)." Aristotle Met 996b

Strategy is a fundamentally analytic field.

symbolic habitus in the imagination

books as quasi-friends of pleasure
pets as quasi-friends of pleasure

the illocutionary force of what is said on the stage vs the illocutionary force of the stage-play

Cinema is in many ways a four-dimensional art; it requires use of space and time in visual storytelling.

"What then stops us from calling happy (eudaimona) the one who is active in accoradance with complete virtue, sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some arbitrary duration but over a complete life?" Aristotle NE 1101a

The human state, like the human life, exists both by nature and by artifice.

Without the good of family and of civil society, no individual good can reliably exist.

All names admit of both nonfictional and fictional uses.
-- this is a specification of transperspectival and perspectival uses

"A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds." JRR Tolkien

The Chinese translation of The Lord of the Rings (which includes Silmarillion and Hobbit)
Mojie ("Magic/Demon Ring")
(1) Jingling baozuan ("The Elves' Jewels")
(2) Huobite ren ("The Hobbit Person")
(3) Mojie zaizian ("The Magic Ring Reappears")
(4) Shuangl-a qibing ("The Surprise Attack of the Two Towers")
(5) Wangzhe wudi ("The King is Invincible")
jingling = spiritual/refined/skilled mind/soul/spirit/sprite (hence 'Elf')

To live morally is to be living before the tribunals of conscience and God.

the technical infinity of humanity

We all begin to pray before we know what to pray.

allegory as tending toward a virtue ethics

The species-function of an institution is not the same as its society-function or its intrinsic function.

A game in game theory consists in
(1) a set of logical objects (agents/players)
(2) mapped to multiple elements in sets of choices
(3) so that the set of such elements is modeled by a maximizing function.

In most of what we care about we don't know what to maximize or optimize.

Any result that can be reached by natural selection can in principle be reached by intellectual intention.

There are usually very many coordination devices for solving any given coordination problem, and they are selected in general on the basis of things having little to do with the coordination problem itself.

A man trapped alone on a desert island would still form institutions (home, names, designated gathering areas, latrine-areas, gardens, pets, or what have you, depending on the situation). If joined by someone who refused to recognize these, the result would be an obviously recognizable form of institutional conflict.

Beore you can have an institution of diriving on a given side of the road, one must already have the institutions of driving and of roads. Roads presuppose institutionalized forms of travel and transport. These in turn presuppose other institutions (militaries, king's messnegers, postal services, merchant trade, or whatever else).

Every Bayesian seems in practice to have a different Bayesianism.

Before every coordination problem is the selection of which coordination problem to have.

Either some moral principles are necessary or we live in a universe that favors some moral principles over others.

principles of administrative design
(1) facilitated compliance
(2) easy return to compliance
(3) penalty for continued noncompliance commensurate with severity of problem created by noncompliance

Large-scale problems are often solved by degrading the solutions to other problems.

The deontic power to buy, pay, and close debts may usually involve money, but it doesn't actually require money (favors or force may close a debt even more effectively than funds).

Either 'purchasing power' already presupposes money or the power to invade and occupy is a form of purchasing power.

Philosophical naturalists are in general only aspirationally so.

Promises are not necessarily forward-looking; we also promise that we have done or are doing something.

strongly actual: necessary things
properly actual: substances & accidents existing in the world
weakly actual: ficta and rational beings

The inevitability of inquiry grounds the postulate of intelligible order as inevitable, the necessity of inquiry to moral life grounds the postulate of intelligible order as obligatory.

If A is angry at B and as a result says, "No, have nothing more to do with me; you do not exist," the "you do not exist" concerns status as object rather than status as thing.

'Bad company' arguments are arguments a pari.

The existence conditions for fictional objects qua objects are the same as for any other objects; the differences between fictional and nonfictional objects are causal, not objective.

Most of the philosophical difficulties asosciated with fictional objects are not conclusive to fictional objects.

If I say of an erratic friend, "Which A will we meet tonight? Every day, a different A," I am distinguishing A objectively and not really.

fictional characters and practice opponents in arguing and fighting
-- this is one of the stronger analogies for a make-believe account

the use of make-believe in philosophical argument (e.g., imagining an opponent or a conversation)

prefix realism -- the prefix would in fact just be the domain indicator

artistic idea --> objective artifact --> external artifact

ampliated vs nonampliated existence games

purely figurative uses of 'fictional'

If I'm puzzled about "There is a center of gravity here," it is  pointless to try to answer questions about what it is for a center of gravity to be here by saying, "Ah, what this really means is, *metaphorically* there is a center of gravity here." Adding 'metaphorically' has not addressed any questions I am asking. All it has done is given limited information about how the *statement* relates to other statements. Likewise, if I say, "In a game of make-believe, there is a center of gravity here," this answers no questions about it unless I am asking how the statement relates to other statements, and even then very incomplete information (e.g., which of the many possible games of make-believe)?

fictional characters // words

"If we admit a certain kind of entity, we cannot but admit all the other kinds of entities that figure in the identity conditions of an entity of that kind. Yet we admit fictional works. So, we cannot but admit fictional objects as well, insofar as the latter entities figure in the identity conditions of the former entities." Alberto Voltolini
"Insofar as i) fictional objects are necessary identity conditions for fictional works and ii) the latter allegedly exist, then of course fictional works are logically sufficient for the existence of fictional objects; hence again, fictional objects exist as well."

To say that fictional objects don't exist is to say that they are neither primary beings nor secondary beings.

general powers of trusteeship (incident to the office of trustee) vs special powers (arising from special authorization and direction of the settlor)
-- special powers cna be mere naked powers (discretion of trustee) or powers in the nature of a trust (obligatory)

Swinburne's kinds of religious experience
(1) public object
--- (1a) through ordinary sensory object
--- (1b) through unuusal sensory object
(2) private object
--- (2a) through typical spiritual sensations
--- (2b) through atypical spiritual sensations
--- (2c) without any sensations

A means is potential to what acts for an end.

Every argument against God's existence is a defective part of an argument for God's existence, namely, the argument whereby it is shown to be wrong.

To be a person is to be a potential classifier; to live as a person is to be an actual classifier.

We often begin an inquiry into something by fictionalizing it.

(1) Necessarily, some propositions are not both true and false.
(2) Therefore there are reasons why some propositions are true or false but not both.
(3) The collection of all such reasons is called reality.
(4) Therefore, necessarily, tehre is some reality.

counterintuitive vs praeterintuitive

Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda is an argument that thinking must be a principle of the universal heavens and of nature; that is, that change (kinesis) presupposes thought (noesis).

laws of nature --> intelligible order --> divine intellect

The universe is as if it were designed to produce stars.

The Bible makes very clear, in both the Old and the New Testaments, that there was prophetic revelation that did not contribute to Scripture, that not all prophets were concerned with public revelation.

Intellectual understanding infuses the social medium, descending thereby into the material world and transfiguring it.

Philosophy is a work of both discovery and invention; truth is sought in both ways, and most perectly through their union.

Habitude XXXV

 It seems that original sin is not habitude. For original sin is lack of original justice, as Anselm says in the book on the virginal conception, and so original sin is a sort of privation. But privation is opposed to habitude. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

Further, actual sin has more of the notion of fault than original, inasmuch as it has more of the notion of the voluntary. But actual habitude of sin does not have the notion of fault; otherwise it would follow that a man sleeping, culpably sins. Thefore no original habitude has the notion of fault.

Further, in badness, act always precedes habitude, for bad habitude is never infused, but acquired. But original sin is not preceded by any act. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

But contrariwise is what Augustine says in the book on the baptism of infants, that due to original sin little children are capable of craving [concupiscibili], though they are not actually craving [concupiscentes]. But capability [habilitas] is called according to some habitude. Therefore original sin is habitude.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said above, habitude is twofold. One is that by which power is inclined to act, as kinds of knowledge [scientiae] and virtues are called habitudes. And in this way, original sin is not habitude. In another way, habitude is said to be a disposition of a nature composed of many things, according to which it has itself [se habet] either well or badly toward something, and especially according as the disposition has been turned as it were into nature, as is obvious from illness and health. And in this way original sin is habitude. For it is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition coming from the dissolution of that harmony in which the notion of original justice consisted, just as bodily illness is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition of body, according to which the equality in which the notion of health consists is dissolved. Whence original sin is called languor of nature.

To the first it must be said that, as illness of body has something of privation, inasmuch as equality of health is removed, and has something positive, to wit the humors themselves being disposed disorderedly [inordinata dispositos], so too original sin has privation of original justice, and with it disordered disposition [inordinatam dispositionem] of the parts of the soul. Whence it is not pure privation but a sort of corrupt habitude.

To the second it must be said that actual sin is a sort of disordering [inordinatio] of act, whereas original sin, since it is sin of nature, is a sort of disordered disposition [inordinata dispositio] of nature itself, which has the notion of fault inasmuch as it is derived from the first parent, as was said. Now this kind of disordered disposition of nature [inordinata dispositio naturae] has the notion of habitude, but disordered disposition of act [inordinata dipositio actus] does not have the notion of habitude. And because of this original sin is able to be habitude, but not actual sin.

To the third it must be said that that objection proceeds from the habitude by which power is inclined to act, but original sin is not such a habitude. Although even from original sin some inclination to disordered act [actum inordinatum] follows, not directly, but indirectly, to wit, through removal of the impediment [remotionem prohibentis], that is, original justice, which impeded disordered change [inordinatos motus], just as also from bodily illness there follows inclination to disordered bodily changes [motus corporales inordinatos]. Nor ought it to be said that original sin is infused habitude, nor acquired, save by the act of the first parent rather than the act of this person, but it is innate through defective origin.

[St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.82.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

It's important to grasp that original sin is not sin in a strictly proper sense, i.e., in the sense that the person who has it has thereby sinned; rather, it is the sin of the whole human race, in the first parent as the head of the human race. In that parental sin, original justice, which protected from actual disorder, was lost, with the result that all descended human beings are disordered in their desires.

Besides the importance of original sin itself, one of the important points emphasized here is that the infused vs. acquired distinction is not exhaustive for habitudes; original sin is neither infused nor acquired by the person who has it, but is a result of a defective origination of the person, namely, being generated when original justice has been lost. This makes original sin a natural habitude like congenital illness rather than a rational habitude like science or virtue, although since it is a disordered state of our rational ability to organize our inclinations, disordered acts follow from it, which makes vice possible and, indeed, in the long run inevitable where there is nothing to counteract it.

And Stand a Barrier to Eternity

To a Daisy
by Alice Meynell 

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide 

From where I dwell---upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide, 

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?

The Guardian 100 Best Novels

The Guardian recently published their list of 100 Best Novels As people have been commenting all over, the list is very weird. They took 172 authors, critics, academics, had each give a top ten list, and then compiled them into a single list, taking into account the weightings of the individual lists. I suppose it's inevitable that a list made this way will have some strangeness to it. It's absurd, for instance, for The Handmaid's Tale to be on a list of 100 best novels ever published in English, and even if it were, it is certainly not a better book than The Left Hand of Darkness. Charles Dickens doesn't even make the top 10, which is already a sign that the list can't be taken seriously. There are also some novelistic powerhouses that seem very underrepresented: if I haven't missed anything, Japan and Norway don't show up, France is represented entirely by Flaubert and Proust, and Germany seems to be represented entirely by Thomas Mann.  The author that I'm most disappointed not to see on a list like this is Alessandro Manzoni.

Still, it's been a while since I've done booklist around here. Bolded I have definitely read. I have linked to the ones that I've done as Fortnightly Books.

Looking at the ones I haven't read, I don't have a particular interest in reading most of them (which is not say that I wouldn't do so if the opportunity happened to arise).

I find to my complete and utter astonishment that while I've discussed them occasionally, I've never done Emma, Middlemarch, or Jane Eyre for the Fortnightly Book, which I could have sworn that I had. That will have to be rectified at some point. Vanity Fair, too, perhaps. The Great Gatsby is already on my list to do as Fortnightly Book sometime this year, and I have had Sentimental Education for years, intending to do it but always forgetting, so maybe I should actually get on that sometime.

100 My Ántonia
99 The Go-Between
98 The Road
97 Catch-22
96 Pedro Páramo
95 The Return of the Native
94 The Known World
93 Invisible Cities
92 Sentimental Education
91 Life and Fate
90 Jacob's Room
89 The Left Hand of Darkness
88 Ragtime
87 The Line of Beauty
86 The Turn of the Screw
85 The Vegetarian
84 The Talented Mr Ripley
83 A Farewell to Arms
82 The End of the Affair
81 Buddenbrooks
80 Rebecca
79 Go Tell It on the Mountain
78 A House for Mr Biswas
77 The Rainbow
76 Dracula
75 The Bluest Eye
74 Nervous Conditions
73 Austerlitz
72 Our Mutual Friend
71 Kindred
70 Jude the Obscure
69 Crime and Punishment
68 Blood Meridian
67 The Man Without Qualities
66 The Master and Margarita
65 The Color Purple
64 The Good Soldier
63 White Teeth
62 Half of a Yellow Sun
61 The Rings of Saturn
60 Howards End
59 Never Let Me Go
58 Disgrace
57 The Sound and the Fury
56 Mansfield Park
55 The Waves
54 Orlando
53 The Transit of Venus
52 The Golden Bowl
51 My Brilliant Friend
50 Wide Sargasso Sea
49 A Fine Balance
48 The Metamorphosis
47 Vanity Fair
46 The Leopard
45 The Golden Notebook
44 Giovanni's Room
43 Housekeeping
42 The Magic Mountain
41 Heart of Darkness
40 Song of Solomon
39 Their Eyes Were Watching God
38 The Age of Innocence
37 Invisible Man
36 The Handmaid's Tale
35 Great Expectations
34 Wolf Hall
33 David Copperfield
32 The God of Small Things
31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
30 Frankenstein
29 Pale Fire
28 The Brothers Karamazov
27 The Trial
26 Don Quixote
25 Lolita
24 The Remains of the Day
23 Midnight's Children
22 Things Fall Apart
21 The Portrait of a Lady
20 Wuthering Heights
19 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
18 Persuasion
17 One Hundred Years of Solitude
16 Nineteen Eighty-Four
15 Moby-Dick
14 Mrs Dalloway
13 Emma
12 Bleak House
11 The Great Gatsby
10 Madame Bovary
9 Pride and Prejudice
8 Jane Eyre
7 War and Peace
6 Anna Karenina
5 In Search of Lost Time
4 To the Lighthouse
3 Ulysses
2 Beloved
1 Middlemarch

Links of Note

 * Jacob Allee, Dorothy L. Sayers on Facts, Feelings, and Natural Law, at "Study the Great Books"

* Exploring the Richness and Roots of Fantasy, at "The Library of Lewis and Tolkien"

* Boaz Faraday Schuman, To Contradict Is to Cooperate: Prior, Abelard, Buridan, Grice (PDF)

* Harry D'Agostino, A MacIntyrean Auto-Biography (Part I -- After Virtue)

* Chris Bobonich & Katherine Meadows, Plato's Laws, at the SEP

* Ravi Thakral & Guillaine Arthur, Normativity and the Indefinite Singular in Morality (PDF)

* Brad Skow, The Plague Crucifix, on Danto's The Abuse of Beauty, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Benjamin Robert Koons, The Justice of Punitive Wars, at "The Journal of Controversial Ideas"

* Joseph E. Blado, Dölpopa, Shentong Buddhism, and the Three Jewels: An Analytic Friendly Analysis (PDF)

* Ambrose Gardeil, Evolution and the Principles of St. Thomas, translated by Matthew Minerd, with an interesting discussion of habitus, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Rob Spence, The Leopard, on Lampedusa's classic, at "First Folios"

* Toby Ord, Interpolation, Extrapolation, Hyperpolation: Generalising into new dimensions (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, It's Hard to Make Sense of Marxism Without a Conception of Objective Human Flourishing, at "Philosophy for the People"

* Chris Fraser, Tang Junyi on Mencian and Mohist Conceptions of Mind (PDF)

Music on My Mind

 

Meret, "Breath of the Dying Sun".

Fortnightly Book, May 17

 Hermann Karl Hesse (1877-1962) began writing while working at a bookshop in the 1890s, but it was only in 1904 that he published his first successful work, Peter Camenzind, which became a bestseller in Germany. It did well enough that Hesse realized that devoting himself fulltime to writing could be a viable career. It was not as straightforward as he perhaps had hoped -- he had to work around a very complicated personal life and the Great War -- but he did well enough, and in 1931 he began writing a book that was originally intended to be the story of a man reincarnated across several lives. Of course, at this time things were rather complicated in Germany; Hesse had lived in Switzerland for a while at this point, but the rise of the Nazi regime would seriously impede his work. Because the Nazis looked at him with suspicion, German journals and publishing houses stopped working with him, so he couldn't get things published. Finally, having worked on the book for eleven years, resulting it in its having a very different character than he had originally intended, he published Der Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game in 1943 in Switzerland. It is largely this work that resulted in his reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later, in 1946. It would be his last major work, although for the next decades he did write many shorter works while keeping up an extensive correspondence.

The Glass Bead Game is the next fortnightly book. It is set in the future -- exactly when is unspecified, but Hesse elsewhere suggests that the narrator is looking back from around the beginning of the 25th century. The world's intellectual life has become dominated by the Glass Bead Game, a logical and mathematical system allowing players to improvise elaborate compositions of cultural values and ideas like music. The narrator is trying to figure out the life of Joseph Knecht, a young man with an interest in music, who rose to prominence as Magister Ludi, a key figure in the Order that primarily organizes the public games for the Glass Bead Game, who eventually becomes disillusioned by the intellectual life of his time.