So much of human decay consists in people seeing the value of something but losing the point of it.
A theory of intentional action has to take into account the relation between intention and command. "Do this" is said with regard to the intentions of the commanded.
facta unifying res and verba
Morality takes a different and higher aspect when it is seen not as disparate individuals each playing their lone violin but as a harmonious symphony. then minor moral matters acquire new meaning, major moral matters new depth.
Regularity for a clock is consistency of measurement results for a wide variety of changes.
Good is to be done and sought, but it is to be done and sought in the way appropriate to it. (This follows by a double application of the principle.)
The universal premises Aristotle gives for the practical syllogisms he uses as examples makes more sense if you think of them as universal for a domain set out by to orekton.
People tend to think reform requires major actions, but the most successful reforms are usually base don small actions in the right place.
To seek pleasure rather than pleasant things is a sign of something wrong.
the ressentiment of the pusillanimous boor
photographs as experiments in seeing
People will use the good to try to excuse their evil.
Everyone resists obligations that put them in the power of another.
Because photography involves an inherently replicable medium, it is conducive to abstraction.
Gifts (in the most proper sense) are themselves bestowed without reference to remuneration; but this is a distinct question from whether remuneration, or even in context expectation of remuneration, is incongruent with them.
giver-or-gift as transcendental distinction
(1) Scientific study shows that some regions of the natural world are, despite local variation, consistently orderly.
(2) Consistent order despite local variation cannot be due to chance.
(3) Therefore consistent order despite local variation must be due to some final cause or formal principle.
Clarke vs Butler on whether alethic Box implies temporal-locative Box
presented image as aesthetic personality
wholes as bounded parts; thus boundaries as wholes minus all parts
To be a person is to be such that one necessarily posits infinite value.
CCC #1697: "it is through the manifold exchanges of 'spiritual goods' in the 'communion of saints' that Christian life can grow, develops, and be communicated"
The distinction between 'skilled' and 'unskilled' labor is often in reality about demand rather than skill itself; there is no sense in which clerical work is more skilled than janitorial work except in what skills are taken to be harder to replace.
'simplify, formalize, generalize, abstract, apply, reformulate, articulate, refine, and replace' (Shalizi)
"The assembly of the saints is a symbol of paradise." Ephrem (Hymn 6 on Paradise)
Experimental inquiry cna only see causal actions.
We learn from history by treating it as a system of metaphors.
There must be at least some a priori knowledge of some possibilities so that we can begin to assess what counts as evidence or not.
those intellectually sympathetic to Christianity as the Rich Young Man
All sentences occur within a field of address between at least one speaker (or writer) and at least one addressee (but the latter may be indefinite).
All human beings are different stages of mess.
"All concepts exist to be used." Mary Midgley
"Concepts lead us to make investigations, are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest." Wittgenstein
Since commands can be fulfilled or not fulfilled, and the fulfillment of commands depends on other things, we can certainly characterize commands as fulfillable or not fulfillable, with 'Do X and Do not do X' and necessarily not fulfillable together. Given this, we can treat fulfillability and nonfulfillability as truth values.
Beatific Vision as cure for avidya
"Whatever the Old Testament contains figurally, the New has fulfilled through the very reason of truth." Fortunatianus
(Fortunatianus)
Matthew: rule of justice (starts with Abraham): Man
Luke: rule of law (starts with priesthood): Calf
Mark: rule of prophecy (starts with prophecy): Eagle
John: rule of the beginning of the Son of God (starts with Word): Lion
-- NB he takes the order to be significant because justice-law-prophecy-Christ is historical order.
All probabilities are calculated for particular causal frames.
Paths to God (causation, remotion, eminence)
cre - rce - erc - ecr - cer - rec
First cause arguments are cre/cer; Anselm is erc; infinite intelligible arguments seem to be erc/rec; God-shaped hole arguments seem to be rec/rec. Think about this a bit more.
the virtue structure, honor structure, and interest structure of intellectual inquiry
"Ideas arose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making stable combination." Poincare
logical instants or moments // possible worlds // signa rationis
next // nearest accessible world
Philosophical skepticism often arises from the error of treating a posture of inquiry as if it were the same kind of thing as a position.
suspense and the collapse of possible to likely to known
A poem cannot catch your eyes
and turn them into words;
on wings of light evading grasp
they fly away like birds.
The world always attempts to make two things tame: guilt and God. In this pursuit it has invented pseudosciences, made up fantasies and at times murdered, so to prevent guilt from showing forth or God getting His due.
"Where people are not longer sustained by a majesty which transcends them, they are in danger of delivering themselves into the hands of limitless power and false ideals, which will destroy them." John Paul II
When assessing historical/philosophical influence, we start with temporal and spatial contiquities and with resemblances. So far Hume works. But we can only use these to assess possibilities, so we cannot reduce causal influence to these. We need, for instance, to rule out other possibilities (common source, for instance, or convergence due to shared environment). And throughout we are assuming action. So here is a kind of causation that cannot adequately be captured in a Humean way.
unus - primus - semel - simplex - singuli
good - best - well - goodful (as good) - as a good
true - truest - truly - truthful - as a truth
While possible worlds discussions tend to assume bivalence for propositions, nothing about the structure nor about most of its uses requires this.
Morality is both a standard for behavior and a symbol-system for communication. It is essential to its nature to be both. However, as they are distinct functions, the temptation is to aim for having one without the inconveniences of the other. Thus we get purely abstract schemes without community-building on the one hand, and the hypocrisy of manipulation by symbolic gesture on the other.
A politics of symbolic gestures, even if harmless, quickly tends toward a politics of quick fixes, which can be very harmful.
Eco's distinction between maxims an daphorisms is backward; 'maxim' is not a genus, but 'aphorism' is. This inversion leads him to misunderstand Wilde entirely. The failure to grasp that many of Wilde's aphorisms are reversible because they are deliberate reversals is especially embarrassing. Much damage can be done to literature by an intelligent man with a bad theory.
God's gift (causation) leads to devotion (eminence) and reverential asceticism (remotion).
The ability to slough off the negative is a major component of masculinity, and sill at it is one of the primary ways that dangerous animal, the human male, is brought to valuable maturity.
a gaudifluent feeling like a liquid flowing down
the violet fields of heaven with their vivid, vital light
are limpid like to lakes enlaid in mountains' lonely arms
Indiscernibility should be seen as converging on identity at the limit. (We can recognize grades of increasing strictness in indiscernibility.)
there are at least as many A's as B's
there are perhaps as many A's as B's
there are at least nearly as many A's as B's
A's are as possible as B's
A's are at least as possible as B's
A's are at least nearly as possible as B's
A's are at least as much parts as B's
compossible : overlap :: as-possible : underlap
betrothal // funeral
The most manifest aspect of the sacraments is the material of the change, which is why, for instance, the sacraments and sacramentals of oil are jumbled together in the minds of men, and why sacraments of subtler matter (like reconciliation or ordination or marriage) are originally grasped in a muddle (although still complete) way.
The natural human response to the symbolic is commentary.
We have no criterion for what would count as a list or set of all possible propositions about something.
If the propositions associated with possible worlds must be all propositions that can be evaluated, the notion of possible worlds depends on the prior opossibility of value propositions.
The history of the principle of sufficient reason is complicated by the conflation of intelligibility with necessity.
"...a lover's first gift is his own heart, an dwhen this gift is received and deeply appreciated by his beloved, it joins the two by an intense inner bond.' John of St. Thomas
the gifts of the Spirit as subsisting inspiration
the harmony consonant with sublimity
convention, environment, and ambience as miscellaneous categories
democratic vs oligarchic news reporting
In any political movement, some are only there for the aesthetics, and some are only there for the dating.
