Saturday, February 03, 2018

Dashed Off III

The saints in purgatory satisfy their penal debt by doing what they did not fully do in life: letting Christ's love do its work and sharing in His passion.

Error must be exposed to light, not chased into warrens.

Democracy is government by enthusiasm.

Free society must be built

2 Pt 2:4 threw down to Tartarus (tartarized)

portal, immersion, and intrusion approaches to philosophical interaction
-> in effect you can get the analogy because these are modes for the sense of wonder

elegance : logic :: gracefulness : beauty

extrapolation as fractional reserve inference

'Clarity' is an aesthetic evaluation of arguments.

Gender terms operate at various degrees of abstraction, which should not be conflated; woman, female, feminine, she are not all on a level (and do not, for that matter, use the same reference points in practice).

possibilities and the principle of plenitude

Death of Judas as portrayed in Matthew // Death of Ahithophel as portrayed in 2 Samuel
- Note that Ps 41:9, which is applied to Judas, plausibly is applied to Ahithophel
- Note that there are even verbal similarities with LXX
- See J P Holding, who argues precisely for a typology here

subjective-reflective empiricism, social empiricism (general points of view), theory-driven empiricism
(one can adapt Sidgwick's discussion of hedonism very easily)

To say that Scripture has canonical authority is to say that is an internal regulator of the liturgy of the Church.

Greatness of mind is never measured by what one disbelieves.

divorce // suicide

"men are apt to think desirable what they strongly desire, whether or not they have found it conducive to happiness on the whole." Sidgwick

introspective, endoxastic, and deductive methods of aesthetic evaluation

Disquotation is in fact a switch from mention to use, from entertaining to asserting.

In philosophy, as elsewhere, crooked furrows may yet yield full sacks.

A rational self-love, precisely because rational, drives one to higher motivations and standards than itself.

To love oneself as a rational person requires loving oneself as being capable of higher things than merely loving oneself.

vainglory & thinking one can get away with it

The Father's explicit approvals in the Baptism and the Transfiguration establish the royal authority of Christ.

Christ exercises His roles as Redeemer, Prophet, and King constantly and without cease.

The problem with treating offensiveness as a crime is that it would be a crime for which anyone can manufacture evidence against anyone.

The right of reasonable conscientious objection is nothing other than the right of human beings to uphold their rights of conscience is an appropriate way.

"God is silence, and the devil is noisy." Robert Sarah

Confirmation is the sacrament of greatness.

Where we cannot define, we analogize.

The principle of rational accommodation seems to require that metaphors have meanings.

If possible reasonable responses to A and to B differ, this seems a good test of difference in meaning. What is more, the reasons for the difference are the best clue to how the meanings differ.

Business need not be done to maximize anything.

None can mount to heaven except by sharing the cross of Christ.

Inquiring into X does not entail suspending judgment about X. (For instance, one can believe but want to try to know.)

inquiries that are shared activities (e.g., police investigations)

curious whether X vs curious about X

"It is the business of the wealthy man / To give employment to the artisan." Belloc

(1) Catholic life consists in love of God and of neighbor.
(2) Love is practical.
(3) A practical solution to one problem can be part of the practical solution to another.

Who does not constantly try to do better is not growing as a person.

"The Holy Spirit bestows all things" and the Holy Spirit as Gift

The Son is explicitly acknowledged as such at the Annunciation as well as the Baptism & the Transfiguration.

Character is our grip on the future.

p therefore p or q // A exists, therefore No nonA is nonB

(1) The Father will give you another Paraclete. Jn 14:16
(2) The Father will send the Paraclete in the Son's name. Jn 14:26
(3) The Son will send the Paraclete from the Father. Jn 15:26
(4) The Son will send the Paraclete. Jn 16:7
(5) The Paraclete will come. Jn 16:13

acts of Magisterium: teach, remind, testify, guide, show, glorify, help, intercede

1 Corinthians 13 is not a denigration of prophecy, knowledge or faith; understanding the point requires having a very high estimate of these things.

hope as orientation to truth

transcendental postulates of love

The notion that sexual desire is not a sign of anything is one of the serious modern errors.

(1) Being-in-the-Church as the state of the Christian soul
----(a) What 'in' means here
----(b) Theological virtue as the concrete way in which the Christian soul is in the Church
(2) The Churchhood of the Church
----(a) The nature of the ecclesia
----(b) How the Church environs the Christian soul
----(c) The sacramental nature of life in the Church
----(d) The Church as the Body of Christ
----(e) The Church as the Bride of Christ
(3) Being-in-the-Church as Being-with-others
----(a) Being with Christ
----(b) Being with the saints (Church Triumphant)
----(c) Being with other Christian souls (Church Penitent)
----(d) Being with other Christian souls (Church Militant)
----(e) Separation from the world

Martyrs, virgins, and doctors give us anticipations of heaven in mundane life.

"in a universe without God there is not room enough for a man" GK Chesterton

The hubris of Bulgakov's sophiology becomes blatant whenever he criticizes the Church Fathers for not being Bulgakovian.

The questions of the existence, origin, and accuracy of perceptions and intuitions are interlinked although not conflatable. The common link seems to be the notion of foundation or ultimate reason.

Common sense morality will always tend to be satisficing rather than maximizing.
It is never devoted to making moral saints, only people decent enough to live with.

Human beings share in happiness through signs.

Box - ought to be judged true
Diamond - can be judged true
It makes sense to think of this in S5 or (at the very least) S5-like terms
An interesting idea is to conditionalize this (Given X, it ought to be judged true that Y)

God, as that in which all coheres, is the true and fundamental actuality of the principle of noncontradiction.

The 'temporal' logic appropriate to arguments seems to be discrete (unless we Achilles & Tortoise it), interval based, backward- and forward-branching; it would make sense to have universal modality and clock variables, and/or a difference operator

the Incarnation as the ultimate opposition to the practice of barbarism

the social necessity of philosophizing: discovery of goods, evaluation of means in light of ends, setting of priorities

It can matter whether someone is a victim. It never matters who is most a victim.

Hyopothesis-based methods as metaphysically satisficing rather than maximizing.

Christian charity is not a mere resolution to benefit others; that is just incipient benevolence.

Epistemic probabilities may explain how close we are to knowing; they do not tell us what we ought to believe.

modus ponens (-p+q, +p; therefore +q) // subalternation (-p+q, +p+p; therefore +p+p+q)
hypothetical syllogism // Barbara syllogism
modus tollens (-p+q, -q; therefore -p) // ?

Val(p:r) ∀ Box
DVal(p:r) ∃ Diamond
valid : indefeasibly good :: x : defeasibly good
- to get analogy to ∃, Diamond would need to be at-least-defeasible (i.e., D axiom)
-it would be nice to have interpretation for negation of argument (p:r), especially if we can get K-like inferences; most probably is 'any case in which p&q but not r' (but really DVal seems to mean, the premises don't yield the opposite conclusion0
-M doesnt;t make sense (existence of argument necessarily assumed regardless); chains of operators not on table, so this keeps it fairly simple. Is the appropriate logic just a basic deontic logic (That would make some sense)?
- a square of opposition with Val(p:r), DVal(p:r), ~DVal(p:r), ~Val(p:r)

The basic principle of ritual is that things must proceed from their sources in ways appropriate to them.

Beauty is that whereby we dwell beyond ourselves.

remote know-how (knowing how it can be done) vs proximate know-how (being able to do it knowingly)
this seems analogous to abstractive vs intuitive cognition

In considering the neighborhood of an argument, one would want to take into account truth or falsity (or at least conditional co-verity and co-falsify).

eustochia as the virtue of discovery

A true morality must be consistent, expressive of real rather than merely apparent good, and accessible to reason.

hypothesis & confirmation as a method for finding middle terms

the virtue of munificence in the liturgical commonwealth

works of mercy as the manual labor of the Church

the figurative corporal works of mercy within the sacramental economy

Ex 17:8-13 & the role of the bishop

The purifying action of grace in the Eucharist is the same as that in Purgatory, although the conditions of the recipients differ.

Scholarship consists of using breadth as a means for depth. The danger, obviously, is treating the means as if it were the end. Scholarship without breadth on the other hand, is using inadequate means. In eschewing the pedantic and the parochial both one reaches good scholarship. But the parochial is more truly scholarship than the pedantic.

For freedom of press to be protected properly, each citizen must be recognized as having at least some elementary press rights.
Part of freedom of press is freedom of people to read the press.

Note Suetonius's implied criticism of Seneca as Nero's teacher: "from the konwledge of the ancient orators, his master Seneca withdrew him, because he would hold him the longer in admiration of himself".

The priestly authority of Christ is expressed in the Church in the sacraments, the prophetic authority by its evangelization, the royal authority by its universality and independence. Thus bishops have a responsibility to uphold all three.

Each of the Gifts of the Spirit has a priestly, a prophetic, and a royal aspect.

Loving relationships require systems of equitable expectation.

It is essential to the health of one's conscience that it be formed with the consciences of others, especially the prudent and thoughtful. There are many ways this can be done, however.

Recognition of the principle of noncontradiction is a reflection of the divine in the human intellect.

"Devotion is nothing else than a certain readiness and aptness for doing good." Thomas Aquinas

the conditions of existence for rational life