Fortnightly Book, June 14

 I accidentally sliced my finger cutting sausages for red beans and rice; nothing serious, but extensive typing is still a little awkward, which has slowed down getting things out. I should have the post on Sentimental Education ready tomorrow. But I wanted to say a little about the next fortnightly book, which is short enough that it might well be a one-week 'fortnight'. The book is Murder in the Cassava Patch, by Bai T. Moore.

Bai Tamia Johnson Moore (1916-1988) was born to the Gulah tribe in Liberia. He went to a missionary school and did so well that the missionaries arranged for him to go to high school, and then college, in the United States, where he attended Virginia Union and Howard. He returned to Liberia in 1941 and began collecting, editing, and studying Liberian poetry. The novella, Murder in the Cassava Patch, was published in 1968, and became an instant bestseller in Liberia, a status it has had ever since, having become the national novella of Libera, so to speak. It looks interesting enough, so we will see what it's like.

Anglican Theologians

It has been a very long time since I have done an internet quiz, so here is one I saw recently that was actually interesting food for thought: What Anglican Theologian Are You?

My broader 'constellation', according to the quiz consists of, besides Andrewes, Charles Gore, Joseph Butler, Dorothy Sayers, and William Laud. That makes a lot of sense; given the list of Anglican theologians used by the site, if asked what my favorites were, Butler and Sayers both would certainly have been in the top five. I would have also placed Richard Hooker in the top five, but, as it happens, he's number six here. I actually don't particularly like Gore, but it also makes sense -- just as a matter of abstract description, Gore reads as the sort of theologian I would like (I just don't think he does it very well). 

Laud is a bit of a surprise, but, of course, in real-life rather than just internet quizzes I am more High Church than even Laud, because I am actually Catholic and not just Catholic-ish. I suppose it also ties to why the Anglican theologians I am least like are all liberal Anglicans of various kind, which is not that I dislike liberal Anglican theology as such, but that I consider it to have an irritatingly defective ecclesiology. Liberal Anglicans and Latitutidinarians  tend to treat the Church on earth as a sort of clubby association, a Jesus fandom, the sort of ecclesiology that most grates on my nerves, but I tend to think of the Church on earth as more like a rough frontier town of a divine civilization. Thus it makes sense again why Gore would be the liberal Anglican, and Butler the latitudinarian, that score most highly for me.

Of course, it's purely a matter of questions selected and how they assign the answers, but Anglican theologians I would have expected to be higher on the list than they ended up here: Coleridge, Wesley, Farrer, Keble, Herbert, especially Farrer and Keble.

Music on My Mind

 

Celtic Thunder, "Heartland".

Dashed Off XVI

 We learn to love others as our neighbors by doing good to and for them.

the duty to aid others in the fulfillment of their duties

(1) Everything requires possibilities adequate to its own possibility.
(2) Possibilities require actualities with respect to which they are possible.

-- a horror story in which an otherwise normal narrator repeatedly puts himself/herself in danger due to having caught a mental infection

'It's disgusting' is a perfectly good reason, in most situations, for refusing to have anything to do with something.

To operationalize something requires first attending to the reasons why we take it to exist so as to be operationalized.

kennings (Jackson Crawford)
determinant + headword, e.g., raven + wine
Kennings do not merely describe; the headword must replace the word intended with something not merely descriptive.
There are typical kenning topics (men, women, weapons, elements, seasons, body parts, gold, ravens).
Not to be confused with heiti (alternate names), e.g., calling a woman Frigg, which however are sometimes used as parts of kennings.
Kennings are properly for occasional poems; they are only rarely used in narrative poetry like the Poetic Edda, with raven-related kennings (using 'raven' or about ravens) being the primary exception (presumably because of their easy recognizability).
Kennings can incorporate kennings (e.g., fire of the eel's road: eel's road = water, fire of water = gold).

the I as subject, the I as object of itself, the I as projected to be the object of others, the I as projected to represent others as subject
-- all of these are many-layered

the subjective anticipation of the self as objective, the objective recollection of the self as subjective

Everything that comes to be knwon is already implicit in what is already possessed.

We feel forward toward that which we take to be ourselves.

"The success of philosophy depends on its ability to combine the rationalist's intention of radicality and consistency with the empiricist's intention of concreteness." Patočka
"...man is not only a finite being, part of the world, but also a being which *has a world* which has knowledge of the world."
"Human life is not a life lived in and for itself; it is a living with others and with regard to them."
"The whole of being appears to us, always, in a certain mood-coloring; though the mood is in fact always our own inner 'state', it colors surrounding things at the same time, so that our objective environment, too, seems to partake of it."

Phenomenological method is essentially a method of the same and the different; this is what gives it its occasional quasi-Platonistic feel.

Given a tendency, recognized as such, we can often jump to an approximation of that to which it tends; and, indeed, this is required for beginning to have full understanding of the tendency.

The govenring principle of Malebranche's The Search After Truth is the radical contingency of mind-body union, as exemplified in error. Malebranche explicitly recognizes that this depreciates any conception of the soul as form of the body (LO xxxiv). It also leads to a conception of philosophy as dying until one dies (LO xxxvi-xxxvii).

The pursuit of elimianting error quickly reaches diminishing returns.

The possibilities for a thing are either inherent to it or received from something else.

The Church is inherently vocational.

The social often crosses the natural/artificial divide.

the Church as home away from home

'Home' as a name of God

Faced with liturgy, we respond with hymn.

We use models only after we have identified relevant causal information from the situation.

It is important to critical thinking to recognize that you also are intellectually crippled, and your intellectual agility is an adaptation to this.

Pardes: Song 4:13, Ecc 2:5, Neh 2:8

Trypho in Justin Martyr's Dialogue 7.9 rejects Christian interpretation because Christians hold that angels sinned and revolted from God.

Mal 2:7 -- priest // angel

Pirkei Avot 4:1 & the cardinal virtues

Ex 24:9-11 & Eucharist

Creativity in the mind is often a lot of fragments and a system of goals.

suggestive moral reasons, inclining moral reasons, definitive moral reasons

world as indefinitely expansive object of shared thought and action

The ideal demand for unification of our experience in terms of the world is in some sense a demand we receive from the world, as a final cause of inquiry. Part of the whole, we find ourselves in an order that tends to be, or at least suggests, the whole, and our most obvious possible role in that order includes knowing something of the whole and acting in light of that knowing.

affordance as an experience of possibility
--all experience is in some sense an experience of possibility, but affordance has a currently- counterfactual as well as presently-factual character

We experience the actual not merely as actual but as possible, but these are distinct experiences in our experience, however united.

affordance & action as involving the possible as available

volitional use & ourself as available for action

As measurers of time, we have a sense of ourselves as in some way beyond or outside any particular given measure of time. The same is true of space.

The body is experienced as a (broad) now as well as a (broad) here.

the flow of time as the narrativization of the temporally measured

the world as the domain of possible becoming and perishing

In talking about the 'flow of time', we are 'spatializing' time jsut as much as when we talk of it as lines and points and dimensions.

In the flow of change, we measure temporally and locally, and therefore by metonymy treat the measurement as flowing; this gives the local measurement a temporal character and the temporal measurement a local character.

"Ignosce Christe quod fui
Quod sum potenti corrige
Mei misertus dextera.
Quod sum futurus dirige." Robert Southwell

Virtue is important even for solving systemic problems, but if your plan for solving a systemic problem is to scold and punish people for being nonvirtuous, you have already failed.

Every person has many selves; we organize our lives by selves.

traditions as cultures of allusions

Pr 30:8 NIV 'daily bread'; NKJV 'the food allotted to me'; NRSV 'the food that I need'; HCSB 'the food I need'; D-R 'the necessaries of life'; ASV 'the food that is needful for me' with note, 'Hebrew the bread of my portion'; CJB 'the food I need today'; ESV 'the food that is needful for me'
Hebrew: lechem huqqi: prescribed/appointed bread
-- NIV seems on right track here in drawing on Lord's Prayer associations.

Everything in Proverbs 30 is concerned with some aspect or other of accepting limits and wanting the appropriate amount.

Pr 30:31 -- rooster/magpie/greyhound/charger
-- the Hebrew actually has along the lines of 'the agile girt in loins'; translators have been assuming an idiomatic expression for some kind of animal, but the literal meaning seems the point.

In order to interpret data, you need to know something about the causal process by which it was reached.

(actual possible effects -> nonactual possible effects (counterfactuals)) --> causes

Social institutions have developed in power and flexibility by increasingly being personified.

All legal systems exist before they are fully effective.

And Larks Hang Singing, Singing, Singing

Summer
by Christina Rossetti 

Winter is cold-hearted,
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weathercock
Blown every way:
Summer days for me
When every leaf is on its tree; 

When Robin's not a beggar,
And Jenny Wren's a bride,
And larks hang singing, singing, singing,
Over the wheat-fields wide,
And anchored lilies ride,
And the pendulum spider
Swings from side to side,

And blue-black beetles transact business,
And gnats fly in a host, 

And furry caterpillars hasten
That no time be lost,
And moths grow fat and thrive,
And ladybirds arrive.

Before green apples blush,
Before green nuts embrown,
Why, one day in the country
Is worth a month in town;
Is worth a day and a year
Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion
That days drone elsewhere.

Happy Efforts of Sagacity

 The business of Definition is part of the business of discovery. When it has been clearly seen what ought to be our Definition, it must be pretty well known what truth we have to state. The Definition, as well as the discovery, supposes a decided step in our knowledge to have been made. The writers on Logic in the middle ages, made Definition the last stage in the progress of knowledge; and in this arrangment at least, the history of science, and the philosophy derived from the history, confirm their speculative views. If the Explication of our Conceptions ever assume the form of a Definition, this will come to pass, not as an arbitrary process, or as a matter of course, but as the mark of one those happy efforts of sagacity to which all the sucessive advances of our knowledge are owing. 

[ William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. 2 (John W. Parker: 1847) p. 16.]

Knowing and Loving

In fact it is knowing that causes love and gives birth to it. It is not possible to attain love of anything that is beautiful without first learning how beautiful it is. Since this knowledge is sometimes very ample and complete and at other times imperfect, it follows that the philtre of love has a corresponding effect. Some things that are beautiful and good are perfectly known and perfectly loved as befits so great beauty. Others are not clearly evident to those who love them, and love of them is thus more feeble. 

[Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, DeCatanzaro, tr. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press (Crestwood, NY: 1974) p. 89.]