This ends the notebook completed April 11, 2018.
photography & the decisive moment (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
- candid photography and images à la sauvette
- 'Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif.' (Cardinal de Retz)
- "Photographier: c'est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l'organisation rigoreuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait." (Cartier-Bresson)
- the 'creative fraction of a second' in choosing the time to click the camera
"Error always begins with the use of our will." Rosmini
Occasionalism naturally slides toward idealism because (1) it complicates the relation between mind and world and (2) already treats the world as if it worked like a mind.
Perhaps the principle of union for Purgatory is not receiving signs (sacraments) but receiving being a sign.
Asceticism is proto-purgatory; thus the elements of asceticism linked to 'being like the angels' are clues about what purgatory is like.
Cp Adams on self-delusion 29 Aug 1768 with Butler
"Without local institutions, a nation may give itself a free government, but it will not have a free spirit." Tocqueville
the people as a civil service
To confine the monarch too much to the merely ceremonial leaves the Crown looking like a decorative expense, even if the ceremonial functions are, in fact, necessary.
A supreme court's primary function is not to decide but to persuade -- to give a widely acceptable set of reasons for a certain way of organizing society, in a form to which people may practically appeal.
"All the passions fatal to republics increase with the extent of the republic, while the virtues that sustain them do not increase at the same rate." Tocqueville
"An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex."
"Despotism often presents itself as the remedy for all ills suffered in the past. It is the upholder of justice, the champion of the oppressed, and the founder of order....Liberty, in contrast, is usually born in stormy times."
"Despotism can do without faith, but liberty cannot."
"The jury teaches men the practice of equity." Tocqueville
"...the jury, which is the most energetic form of popular rule, is also the most effective means of teaching the people how to rule."
Standing parties are as dangerous to liberty as standing armies.
Fregean tone as reserve meaning
"A completed poetic action is a whole unto itself, a technical world." Schlegel
I like my ideas to jumble, intermingle, tumble,
thick as sprouting jungle
interjections as labeling
Note Republic 475e on the spectacle of truth // Bendideia
Photography is not a bare picture-taking event but a practice of finding, pre-selecting, taking, post-selecting, presenting.
Social contract theory inevitably leads to the sovereign citizens movement (taking every matter to be one of individual consent).
State Shinto was proposed in Meiji as an education form based on the tradition of the Imperial house, as something explicitly distinct from religions like Buddhism or Christianity. (Note that PropFi accepted this explanation even despite some points at which it functioned more like a religion.)
Kant confuses 'end in itself' with 'end from itself', in se and a se.
laity as spiritual militia
Kant's ethics is an ethics of avoiding slippery slopes.
Slippery slope arguments are not about slopes so much as about principles.
Hutcheson recommends a tax for not being married, as well as mandatory military service (apparently for eight years).
Aristotle gives us the word 'monopoly': Politics 1252a.
pusillanimity as "the Want of a just Indignation against Wrong" (David Fordyce)
We can think of the passions as vectors extending out and ask, "Is there something that can be posited as the point, or at least the region, on which all of these converge?" In an irrational life, the answer is no (think of the many-headed monster in the Republic); in a rational life, the answer is yes, and the region is called eudaimonia.
Fordyce EMPp65: number, weight, measure
the three caves of Empire Strikes Back
Attacks on cultural appropriation tend toward the extinction of the cultural elements they are supposed to protect, like bottlenecking an already shaky population.
Tensive and restive modes of emotional mediation of experience make different things salient.
the modes of Holy Saturday: rest, victory, eternity
Science fiction works by overlay.
Genres are genealogical and governed by a principle of precedent.
world-building extrapolation and future-building extrapolation
The kind of good there may be depends on the kind of beings there may be.
Anything that did the work of 'credences' would have to be inquiry-relative.
- probabilities are relative to method of measurement
- would also follow from a broadly Lewisian approach to Sleeping Beauty and the recognition that what counts as evidence is inquiry-relative
three kinds of tolerance: based on common good, based on negotiation, based on functional good
Under socialism, those who produce social benefit do not have full right over the means of its production; they must trade their labor for it, for their freedom and livelihood, as protection fees to the state, which legislates the alienation of their work to subserve the benefit-preferences of those who control the state.
the occasional causes of error: likeness and inclination
"Where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present." Bach (annotaiton in Calov)
If logic is only about the way one says things, one may change the logic just by changing one's manner of speaking. If it just involves rules for signs, one may make it anything one wants just by changing the kinds of signs.
tendentiousness
(1) well-poisoning
(2) option-biasing
--- (a) example (cherry-picking)
--- (b) division
--- --- (1) incomplete division
--- --- (2) misclassifying division
--- (c) description
option-biasing by division, by implicature, by translation
insinuated allusion corrosive to fair assessment
Rule of law rather than men means, at least, that citizens should not be mere suppliants, in the normal course of society.
The difference between an academic and everyone else is primarily infrastructural.
probable inference as inference from premises plus residual (yet to be specified)
Appearance-as always implies resemblance.
the pleaching of cultures
test-balloon believing & doxastic voluntarism
sophistry as a confusion of argumentative true good with argumentative goods of fortune
internal sense theory as a way of organizing everyday aesthetic concepts (e.g., messiness and neatness with order, mind-blowingness with sublimity, etc.)
The modal logic of laws of nature seems often to be treated as an M/T or higher logic, Box implying True. But (cf. Cartwright) idealization seems to make them D or weaker.
-- a related issue is how one would handle strings of operators, laws of laws
Otium sine litteris mors.
The Virgin's submission at the Annunciation parallels Christ's submission in Gethsemane, but Mary submits as handmaiden and Jesus as Son.
the hint-of-sublime vs the sublime itself
the melammu of the gods
All morality taken seriously tends to take on a religious tone as it approximates a general system, symbolically expressed, of general compensators.
Bayesian accounts of belief usually fail to distinguish fullness of assent and nonprovisionality of assent.
"Effective union between many individuals is brought about by means of courtesy and tolerance in the midst of varying opinions." Rosmini
"Intelligence, cut off from the divine loses its human quality." Rosmini
"The laws of nature are the laws of natures." Oderberg
Even sound arguments need regular refreshment, because arguments are not words but understandings.
infinite regress, the external world, and the need for an unsimulated simulating cause even in a simulation
