a recurring pattern in analytic philosophy -- defining a technical concept, someone gives it a name of convenience, then a double action occurs: people discuss the technical both in terms of the original technical point *and* as if its name were effectively a definition -- e.g., possible worlds, divine hiddenness, skeptical theism, justification
the phenomenon of talking at someone by talking to someone else in their presence
Human cognition requires marvels on which to work.
Man is the animal who sees himself as weird and funny.
Every divine revelation is through sensible or imaginative appearances, either directly, or by further mediation of angels.
Good conscience posits a higher judgment according to which conscientious judgments are vindicated. The tribunal of conscience is authoritative because it is under authority.
Bentham gets his version of utilitarianism in part by treating communities as nothing but an aggregate (cf. IPML c1, sections 4-5).
Pleasure and pain are intrinsically instrumental.
Metaphor and declamation, while not the foundation of moral science, have much to contribute to its development and improvement.
The botanist does not study merely this leaf but this leaf as representative of a whole class of possible leaves.
Time travel stories are fundamentally stories about choices.
Ideas are precious, but they are a difficult currency to convert.
Every serious personal relationship creates its own personal mythology, the imaginative iconography of commitment and devotion.
calibration problem (e.g., in arguing on another's premises) --> possibility of calibration --> participation in First Truth (cp. Aquinas, QQ X, 4, art1)
Trust is built by letting yourself be proven.
The first work in building and maintaining a free society is preserving age-old liberties; it is remarkable how often this is forgotten.
Nothing intensifies sorrow so much as beauty, and some beauty is seen more clearly through sorrowful eyes.
specific versions of the Third Way with the cosmos, with the rational soul, with angelic spirits
There is no opposite to divine goodness; evil is opposite only to the effects of divine goodness.
emotional responses to fictional characters and emotional responses to imaginative fictionalization of the real world (e.g., when people imagine those they have not met yet, or what it would be like to meet a certain kind of person)
The Second Way more easily blocks pantheism than the Third Way; the First Way more easily establishes providence than the Fourth Way.
kinds of argument people use to rationalize unjust actions
(1) normality
(2) advantage
(3) superior value
(4) necessity
Whewell's consilience could well be influenced by Johann Bernoulli's work on the problem of fastest descent -- Bernoulli explicitly notes that he is simultaneously solving an optics problem and a mechanics problem.
'Righteous Peace, Godly Glory' as a name of the Church (Bar 5:4)
experiment: a relatively bounded system involving change intended to allow representative causal inferences for the ends of inquiry
No experiment can possibly rule out the possibility that things exist for the end of being understood, by the very structure of experimentation.
Much of mathematics is concerned with virtual containment -- e.g., divisors in numbers, or triangles in polygons.
Analogizing between very different fields is often misleading, but not always, and few things are more fruitful for inquiry when it even approximately succeeds.
plot integrity in historical explanation
Poets construct their themes, but historians have to draw them out, in effect working out the plot, i.e., story, of events, classifying such plots, and in the best classification is discovery.
poet : historian :: mathematician : physicist
Quite a few personality disorders seem to involve defective capacity for introspection. Think about this.
The more we understand, the more beauty we find.
As our understanding is most often discursive, our loves are most often mobile and composite. Even those things and people we love most, we often love in a piecemeal and successsive manner.
Some kinds of imperfection are defects of competent execution, but some kinds of imperfection are badges of personal endeavor.
"That which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master." Aristotle
"The power of speech is disposed to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and tehrefore likewise the just and unjust."
"Things are defined by their working and their power."
"A possession is spoken of as part of something else."
The household is concerned with the natural supply of human everyday wants and needs. The village goes beyond everyday wants and needs, and the city to the point of self-sufficiency appropriate to good life.
Human beings become godlike insofar as they contain in themselves the incipience of all civil society.
The principle of order in civil society is administration of what is right.
parts of oikia (Aristotle): husband-wife, parent-children, master-slave, art of acquisition
-- the Confucians seem right that fraternal older-younger and friendship are also essential part; and king-minister is part of royal oikia
As we are instruments capable of our own work, God does not want us as slaves.
Aristotle explicitly takes the natural master-slave relationship to be a form of friendship for common good; the master cares for the slave, he says, as part of his own body, and vice versa.
That we may merit what God promises, we must come to love what He commands.
The Church Militant works for Truth, the Church Patient waits for Truth, the Church Triumphant dwells in Truth.
All election systems are structured by the arguments for them.
cascades and material transport explanations (Ross) as generalizable historical explanations (both the generalizable and the historical seem to play a role)
The plurality of forms thesis makes the mistake of thinking that because a substance has many explanations in the order of formal causes, it has many substantial forms, i.e., forms that properly make it this substance.
Reflective equilibrium is janitorial work, not construction. That is to say, given a framework, it cleans it up; but the framework is never established by reflective equilibrium. The framework establishes what judgments can be made with confidence, what judgments are considered, how cases are understood; parts of the framework are then adjusted, but only by holding other parts fixed, with the aim of making the building more convenient for janitors by making it more or less self-cleaning, or as close to it as possible.
Wide reflective equilibrium is not a method but an aim such that people use very different methods in the attempt to reach it.
If you understand cases as systems of possible rules, reflective equilibrium will lead you one way; if as systems of sources for consequences, another; if as the materials of human life, another.
diagrams as philosophical technology
"There is an urge in the human being toward beauty, truth, and goodness, which entails and demands freedom, joy, and peace." Raimon Panikkar
"Rhythm combines in a unique way at least four fundamental elements of human awareness: time, space, objectivity, and subjectivity."
sorrows are breaking
like waves on the shoreline
as I am a-whirl in the foam
design defective as design vs deteriorated good design
As creatures have providential meaning, Scripture has spiritual senses.
Limit interpretations of the derivative are related to infinitesimal interpretations in terms of the derivative characteristically representing (as the slope) the tengent line recognized as the best linear approximation of teh function for a value, that exists; the limit interpretation emphasizes the linear part, the infinitesimal interpretation (using the standard part function) emphasizes the approximation part.
It is not the acceleration of progress that matters so much as its jerk and jounce.
When written in a senary number system, all primes except 2 and 3 end in either 1 or 5. (Sequence A004680)
the actual as the maximally distant from the impossible
We see the intellect as free power in dialectical syllogisms, rhetorical persuasions, and poetic designs.
modal supernaturality
(1) in manner of efficient cause: the natural directly used as instrument by what is prior to itself (supernatural intervention)
(2) in manner of final cause: the natural used as instrument for what is beyond its power (supernatural vocation)
(3) in manner of formal cause: the natural as receiving an accident that is beyond its natural accidents (supernatural capacitation)
(4) in manner of objective cause: contemplation
The Trinity is a mystery so rich that all of the gifts of grace in a sense have it as formal object quod, but in inexhaustibly many different ways.
We must imitate Christ not merely morally but also sacrally and spiritually. He must be not merely our precedent but the light reflected in us.
What pleases us is in some way in harmony with us.
Our soul and body have a native unity but also a practiced unity.
Many explanations appealing to natural selection presuppose a fundamental asymmetry between benefit and harm.
An intellectual discipline cannot survive ignoring its past.
Voting is not a political action that is able to be very sensitive to counterfactuals.
Reason is relentless, and human minds can only follow her until they tire.
People have an odd tendency to say that something has no meaning when what they really mean is that its meaning is inconvenient.
Every form of society has a dystopic possibility; sometimes many.
Unearned moralism often poisons what it touches.
Neurath's boat requires that doctriens be, partially or wholly, self-sustaining (the boat must keep floating); this is never established.
syllogisms as relation-multiplications (DeMorgan, cf. Lorenzen)
Every angel has, so to speak, a map of the entire angelic world, carrying intentional species of all otehr angels as to their natural being. Through this map they also have natural knowledge of the physical world, insofar as it pertains to some angels naturally to order it. Beyond this map, they also receive knowledge from their epistemic presence to themselves, from divine revelation, and from angelic communication.
"The usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety." Paley
Serious historical work is a kind of semi-tesselation. It is as if one were completing a jigsaw puzzle, but rather than doing it with the pieces themselves, one were doing it with projections of the pieces from different angles and distances, so that the pieces have to be re-sized, speculatively rotated in three dimensions, shifted to account for distortion, etc.
"The philosophers themselves cannot divest themselves of their nature." Balmes
"Consciousness is an anchor, not a beacon."
In the Beatific Vision, truth, goodness, and beauty are seen in perfect unity in their principle.
To be a rational being is to be a being continually completed by being.
The sensory systems are not formal means but instrumental means, which is why modifying the sensory organs can change their suitability.
the wager for realism
Knowing is a species of co-being.
We tend to take the sensible for the real because the sensible is the relatively easy.
The concept is both formal sign and formal similitude; it is of its object and it has a kind of sameness with respect to it, so that the object is in the sign, formally.
Understanding the Gospels starts with enjoying the stories.
Mark's colloquialism often seems deliberate -- i.e., the author often seems to be deliberately not trying for the more formal.
Dance often has a spiritual quality in it because it is the fine art whose artifact is sensible activity as object.
One cannot be intimate with what has no nature.
"Sense does not cognize actual being save under here and now, but intellect apprehends actual being absolutely and with respect to every time." Aquinas
All our loves are lovelikenesses.
our experience of beauty as charm -> innner integrity -> gracefulness
enkapsis of sign in sign
The myth that all scientific explanation is mechanistic has obscured many things.
Actuality relates fuzzily and dynamically to the manifolds of possible worlds.
quantum entanglement and the information implicit in the context itself -- possible analogies between quantum entanglement & how we learn certain things in conversation?
the 'being drawn in' aspect of aesthetic experience
harmonious, stable, systematic intelligibilities
All sacraments require something of the minister and something of the recipient. The former, however, is essential to the sacrament as such, and the latter to its application.
All grace we receive sacramentally flickers within us, at least in effect, not because of its weakness but because of our own.
If sin could receive nothing but human medicament and repair, then (as in bodily medicine) the inevitable result is deterioration, at most deferred.
