This begins a notebook that was begun in July of 2018.
To receive the sacraments is to accept Christ's taking moral and juridical responsible for us, and in doing so to receive a responsibility ourselves.
Every child is born already in relation to parents.
An endless amount of our lives consists in making the best of a bad thing.
The seal of confession is integral to the sacrament's character as the tribunal of mercy.
(1) Christ's occupancy of the sacraments by presence
(2) Christ's designation of the sacraments through his priests as representatives
-- (1) presupposes Christ's jural title by creation; (2) presupposes Christ's institution.
(1) Social relations are mutable and uncertain.
(2) The mutability and uncertainty of them is a significant impediment to the maintenance of society.
(3) Thus we tend naturally to submit to the easiest reasonable remedy available, because we are unwilling to leave everything in suspense.
(4) Thus we rely on biological parenthood as our default for understanding parenthood.
Analogies for sacraments
-- medicine in vial (Hugh of St. Victor)
-- tokens in demonic pact (William of Auvergne)
-- water in aqueduct (Augustine)
-- ring &c. of investiture (Bernard)
-- axe used by artisan (Aquinas)
-- promissory note issued by king (Bonaventure)
-- pencil used by artist (Bañez)
-- paid ransom (Cano)
"By His wine, union; by His oil, sanctification." Ephrem
"Jesus mingled His might in the water."
An instrument that is visible is, by the very fact of being such, a sign of the effect.
A divine pact with the Church gives the framework for the sacraments (the new covenant) but does not explain the actions specifically performed in the context of the pact.
"Non-experience of something can prove that it is absent only when positive experience of it can prove that it exists." Vatsyayana
(1) Suppose moral relativism.
(2) Then there are many moral standards.
(3) Then there are features of these standards that make them identifiable as specifically moral.
(4) Then there are conditions required for anything to count as a moral standard in the first place.
(5) Then there are general constraints on morality that are not relative.
-- Not that a family resemblance response would still fail -- there must be a way to sort family resemblance from its lack.
-- A stronger possible objection: we only call them moral by analogy; we could also regard them as just something different from morality. -- But this would have to be principled. And once one allows analogies, partial overlaps, and approximate convergences, it becomes impossible to take descriptive moral relativism (insofar as it suggests 'Moral disagreement is more pervasive than moral agreement') seriously: partial and loose agreements are pervasive.
Relative to any particular way of measuring, truth values may be glutty or gappy or both.
Morality // Laws of Nature:
emotivism // pure naive empiricism
expressivism // conventionalism
error theory // fictionalism?
nonnaturalism // Necessitarianism/primitivism
nonreductive naturalism // Aristotelianism/powers theory
reductive naturalism // counterfactualism
Because of its complexity and the difficulty of making and confirming estimates, utilitarianism in practice works more like a rhetorical method than an ethical account.
All arguments for separation of Church and State have analogies for separation of Press and State.
Booker T. Washington & the working man's cosmopolitanism
Law tends to accumulate endless idiosyncratic, quaint, and otherwise obsolete usages because precedent, and classes of precedents, are important for its reasoning, particularly since imprecision can hurt you badly. Thus keeping old usages is often the easiest way to avoid going wrong.
logical ampliation as shift of standpoint
the principle for perception that corresponds to the principle of credulity for testimony
The modern world is premised on the inexhaustibility of fertilizer results, accessible petroleum, and antibiotic efficacy.
Defeat by sin is a worse evil than suffering.
We should treat our imagination sometimes as if it were a sophist inside us. (Cp. Epictetus)
"The Council of Trent was a Council of Recapitulation." Manning
Standard probability theory cannot distinguish happenstance actuality, conditional necessity given causal factors, and simple necessity.
(1) dangerous -- (2) unhealthy -- (3) shameful -- (4) culpable -- (5) wicked
Each category overlaps the one before and the one next.
safe, healthy, honorable, decent, virtuous
Four things need to be explained in talking about the principium individuationis: being one and the same, being in fact undivided, being subject, being such as to be uncommunicated.
families of accounts of sacraments: Dualism, Organicism, Memorialism
sacramentals as linking public and private devotion
entertaining, supposing, suspecting, opining
arguments for realism about grace (donative realism)
(1) from miracles
(2) from religious experience
(3) from human requirement + divine ability
(4) from ordinary language of believers
(5) from sublimity of sainthood
forms of donative anti-realism (liberal theologies of grace)
(1) symbolic natural
(2) ordinative/prescriptive
(3) fictive
Each of these takes one of the genuine elements of the phenomena and treats it as exclusive: symbolism, action-guidance, and narrative.
All forms of moral noncognitivism focus on an associated feature fo moral life: expression (attitudinal, emotive), prescription, symbol-building, etc., There obviously has to be some form of associated feature from which to draw plausibility, and the strength and weakness of the noncognitivism lies entirely here.
forms of lay Catholic contribution
(1) Catholic Action
(2) Catholic Worker Movement
(3) Humanitarian Traditions
(4) Catholic Education
Advaita means 'nonsecondness' or 'no second'. And in much of its position that there is no second to Brahman, it is attractive. Avidya can in that sense be seen as the ignorance that is an idolatry-tendency (seeing the world and its parts as if they were ultimate). Nonsublatability (abbadhyatvam) is like Rosmini's ultimate reason.
Each of Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita Vedanta as a philosophy captures something important: Advaita the nonsecondness, Vishishtadvaita the distinctness of souls with aptness for union, Dvaita the personal real difference. Each arguably focuses too narrowly on something it definitely gets right.
Any possible evidence for an error theory of morality is also interpretable as evidence for a modest success theory of morality.
"Considered in general, competition through honest means is a natural right relative to all kinds of earning." Rosmini
"Titles are those factual conditions in which the application of law takes place."
It is essential to double effect in the case of self-defense that we have an obligation to defend ourselves, broadly speaking.
forms of acts of satisfaction: (1) attestative (2) honorific (3) pecuniary
Hope is what converts opportunity into freedom.
Diversity is primarily a strength within the context of friendship.
The laity have a right to episcopal protection and aid.
We experience ourselves as actualizing potential.
"The cogito in general is explicit intentionality. The concept of intentional experience generally already presupposes the opposition between potentiality and actuality...." Husserl
person-relative modalities: epistemic, doxastic, deontic
as-if modalities: fictional, hypothetical
alethic modalities: alethic proper, provable, temporal, locative, dynamic
The experience of potentiality and actuality is related to the experience of incompleteness and completeness in act.
Love, and everything then belongs to you.
recognition of the vastness of the universe --> sublimity of the mind --> teh sublime as such, which all call God
health (sanitive) nonnaturalism
Everything in later Christian doctrine must find its seminal reason in Apostolic teaching.
Doctrine, that is, teaching, by its very nature unfolds.
NB that Augustine holds that for the baptized concupiscence is not sin if there is no consent (Mar & Con 1.23); i.e., the regenerate have grace such that it does not immediatley produce sin, although it is an effect of sin and through consent can become sin.
The text is the governing guide for interpreting the text.
elements that are in Apostolic teaching 'invisibiliter, potentialiter, causaliter quomodo fiunt futura non facta'
preexistence in Apostolic doctrine
(1) materially
(2) in cause
(3) in active powers (germinally)
(4) by similitude
[Compare Aquinas, ST 1.73.1 ad 3.]
"In order to be successful in any kind of undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself, that is, to lose himself in a great cause." Booker T. Washington
"Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work."
three kinds of aporia
(1) variation according to perspective
(2) disagreement
(3) apparent infinite regress
"Once there is a religion, it must necessarily also be social." Schleiermacher
Once there is a religion, it must necessarily also be semiotic.
sign as an intentional instrument of cognition
sign as mediating instrument for cognition
example-diagrams vs analogy-diagrams
the Church as standing memorial of duty to God (Butler)
Philosophical accounts of artifacts too often drop the recognition that 'artifact' is a denomination relative to art (techne, skill).
The analogy between motion of particles and motion of cracks suggests a higher-order generalization of which both are merely specifications.
creation as giving readiness to appear (communication of readiness to appear)
sacraments as artifacts of divine art
artifacts as quasi-deontic objects
the sacramental economy as the material culture of salvation and deification
Never enter an argument without having some grasp on the larger context.
If the First Way yields sacraments as instruments (moved movers) and the Fifth Way as expressions of providential plan, what do the Second, Third, and Fourth Way yield?
God is the subsisting and exemplar principle of noncontradiction, the 'turhtmaker' and 'truthbearer' for all necessary truths, all of which 'unfold' from Him.
While we speak of contingent truths as a lot, not all contingent truths are contingent in exactly the same way.
sanctity as a sign of the Holy Spirit, as signifying the Holy Spirit
the Ascension as the initiation of the full sacramental economy (Cp Leo Serm 74.2)
sacraments as: artifacts, signs, instruments, gifts, mediations, memorials, occasions of presence, synergies/cooperations, pledges
Matrimony effects what it signifies by forming the domestic church.
Purgatory is like mystagogy, but away from the sacraments rather than to them.
the ivy of analogy threaded through the trellis of demonstration
kinship, friendship, patriotism, and worship
marriage as partial asceticism
Out of much foolishness an occasional brilliance can be born.
opening (Diamond), illustrative (True), and binding (Box) precedent
angelology : learning :: demonology : temptation
synousia with the saints through relics, icons, and hagiography
"No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial." Tolkien
partwise cooperation vs wholewise cooperation
the gifts of the Holy Spirit as forms of freedom
