"actus intellectus est imago objecti" Thomas Carleton Compton
"Libertas quadruplex est: a miseria, a peccato, a coactione, & a necessitate."
The apparent conservatism of old age generally consists in three thigns: more experience (and thus less surprise), more consistency (and thus less mutability), more caution (and thus a reluctance to venture without reason).
the kind of person who, without writing anything, generates a literature -- Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus
-- Note that there are several way sin which Jesus does this more completely than the others do -- a life, like Socrates, a doctrine, like Gautama, a form of teaching, like Confucius, but integrated together and placed in a larger context (Israel) that is not negated but absorbed, and (perhaps as significantly) contributes to organizing a literature-making community in myriad different ways.
"...though the fact of Selection does not make it harder to believe in design, it makes it easier to believe in accident...." Balfour
Things seem intelligent to the extent that they seem to set their own ends.
Metaphors mutually attract and repel, naturally organize into systems, mutate to produce other metaphors, die off to provide materials for other metaphors.
transworld, transtemporal, translocal identiy -- what is the analogue for deontic, epistemic, doxastic, provability?
Metaphors and the like sometimes arise out of slips of language, sometimes out of dreams, sometimes out of aesthetic experience, sometimes out of constructed analogy, sometimes out of social associations, sometimes out of the attempt to speak of something while avoiding direct speech about it.
Where some organ of government O properly belongs to government G and by nature exists for some end E that is required for G's ability to govern well, then it is a corruption for G to use O in a manner inconsistent with E.
Repentance is intrinsically ascetic.
Malebranche as giving a traditionary argument for the external world
Music is not just heard; it acts within us.
"the Christian is at one and the same time inseparably person and member" Maritain
-- all of Maritain's discussion on this is good for theology of redundantia.
The modern world continually tries to treat Limbo as higher than Purgatory.
Philosophy functions best when wisdom is seen as a divine gift in which we may participate.
To be a person is to be an echo of 'the Absolute'.
Luck is interest-relative.
Pfleiderer: We get the idea of causation from will as the corresponding original experience, and by analogical inference reason about causation in the world. "But our thinking is as essentially teleological as causal; both are grounded on the same original experience."
The Church does not get its identity through time either memoratively or by self-identification.
Athanasius's criticism of talk of the Holy Spirit as bond: Contra Arianos 3.24 (note that this is literally against the Eusebian notion of binding)
Note that there is a very wide variety of views on which there has to be some due process of public opinion (e.g., Mill's harm principle).
Human beings do not easily distinguish the historical and the normative, because it is not natural to distinguish them in narrative. This is not to say that the link between the two in narrative is straightforward, but in fact human beings tend to do better at tracking complicated and atypical linkages (irony, satire, etc.) than at making a sharp distinction.
Natural languages are term classifications with precedential templates for usage.
Any present- or future-tensed assertion with a subject term in second person address has an imperatival counterpart ('You are going to the store' can be an assertion or an imperative, sometimes indifferently).
"Where sexual morality is rooted in nothing but consent, sexual mores will be decided by nothing but power." C.C. Pecknold
Modern representative government is an attempt to have aristocracy based on artificial rather than natural relations.
Note that Pfleiderer interprets the Reformation as breaking away from the remnants of primitive Christianity, particularly its ascetic supernaturalism, in its break with Catholic Monasticism.
I wrote a word
and like a seed
the word from bounding husk was freed.
Blame is the most fluid thing in the world.
Spontaneous excellence arises from extensive preparation.
Every question proceeds from a division of possibilities.
Diamond and Question are related b division, but they seem to handle it differently.
Do X! Therefore, possibly there is an action X.
Do X! Therefore, there is a possible action X.
Do X! Therefore, possibly X can be done.
This shall be done. Therefore, this is possible.
This cannot be done. Therefore, do not do it.
An erotetic ontological argument: If one can ask whether God exists, God exists. One can ask, therefore etc.
possible lines in erotetic theistic argument:
(1) Idea of God (cp. Cartesians)
(2) division (cp Kant on disjunction)
(3) capacity to question
Definitions are always normative. The question is, for what?
loaded question // begging the question
raising questions as part of conclusion-construction
the method of imbrication: distinct but overlapping arguments in response to objections
the Zenonian argument (attributed to Zeno by Sextus Empiricus M9.133-6)
(1) One may with good reason honor the gods.
(2) One may not honor with good reason what does not exist.
(3) Therefore the gods exist.
-- The parabole in response places gods with sages, thus intersecting Stoic pessimism about the existence of sages.
-- note that the parabole does not really address the key point of the argument, that anything making reasonable the honoring of the gods ipso facto makes it reasonable to accept that they exist.
The ugly in a greater context is often beautiful; and genuinely understanding the ugly is itself beautiful.
The possibility of something ugly is not itself ugly.
an ecclesiological commentary on the book of Proverbs
-- already extensive discussion on Wisdom's house and the strong woman (Caesarius, Augustine, Albert)
-- the carrying on of tradition and exhortations to listen to father and mother
-- harlotry and the deviations from the faith (heresy, idolatry)
There is a story told of the greatest goldsmith in all of ancient Greece. He was a devotee of Aphrodite and once spent thirteen years making a necklace of extraordinary intricacy and beauty to dedicate to her temple. After he had done so, he had a dream in which the goddess herself appeared, stunning in her beauty, wearing her necklace.
"I am pleased with your gift," she said, "and in return I grant you one wish. You may ask of me anything, and if it is in my power, I will grant it. But think well; mortal men often do not choose their wishes well."
"O most beautiful of the gods," said the goldsmith, "I am no longer a young man, but I have never known love. Grant me this: to be sure not to die before I have been able to know a love that is pure and true."
"As you have asked, so shall it be," said the goddess. "You shall not die until you have known a true and pure love."
The goldsmith lived a very, very long time.
assertion-completing questions vs assertion-using questions
cooperative assertion
self-evident principles taken as self-evident
taken as guidelines for what is always reasonable to believe
taken as heuristic structures (topoi) for hypotheses
Baptism proper reflects death; baptism by blood, by desire, and by vicarious desire are all themselves kinds of death with Christ.
eternity in our hearts and never enough time for it
trustworthiness of testimony as part of common good
A world of thought comes together out of little bits, just as the physical world does.
The justification of scientific inquiry by its working well or working best is a folk-reasoning justification.
The Holy Church is the notary of grace.
One of the important discoveries of dadaism is that you get meaningful patterns just by pulling random words out of a hat.
Speculative truth does not necessarily lie in a mean, but a mean is relevant to it, namely the mean constituting reasonableness in the consideration of evidences and reasons.
the miracles of the saints as emblems of the properties of the Church
