the principle of benignity: "in penal matters the more benign interpretation must be followed" (Regula Iuris 49)
idea -- diremption -- conciliation
| personal identity arguments | arguments for immortality of soul |
| experience of continuity | near-death experience |
| memory | recollection |
| I (substantiality) | simplicity |
| priority of person | immateriality |
| moral law | moral law |
| natural desire | natural desire |
The administrative state is the child of colonial empire.
In a modern republic, every consensus has a built-in obsolescence.
the dedication of a a church as teaching the graces of baptism (symbolic baptism)
"the work of the ministries of God should be rational" (Hugh of St. Victor)
If you won't let people be honest, you get lies, not conversions.
"The heart of man is not compound of lies, / but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, / and still recalls him." Tolkien
Human freedom can only reach its complete form cooperatively, and not in a vague and abstract cooperation -- one person with another.
It is in human nature to share autonomy.
having less suffering vs. enjoying less suffering
The ultimate absurdity of mental epiphenomenalism is that it tries to be dualistic and materialistic simultaneously.
Intent is often the only difference between sin and tragedy.
Will is the subject, but reason the cause, of freedom.
One must always oppose the notion that only the individual is natural.
classification → order → final causes
"perceived order proves intention, and unperceived order does not exclude it" Maistre
The errors of the modern age repeatedly come to wreck on this solid rock, that there are holy things.
"Every day one says, this is a hypocrite; but why therefore, when it suffices to say, this is a man?" Maistre
to do one's best and pray to God for the rest
The Zeitgeist doesn't need to organize to propagandize; its propaganda is part of ordinary interaction.
the underbabble of language, implicit in the more-or-less common corpus known by speakers
All adjectives imply a reason.
Dvaita: God and soul are distinct; Shuddhadvaita: They are not both independent, but God has absolute primacy; Dvaitadvaita: The union is intimate without eliminating distinction; Achintya Bheda Abheda: God works in and through creation; Vishishtadvaita: the relation of creature-united-to-God is found in devotion.
As milk unaware works to nourish the calf, the physical works to support the intellect.
Stare decisis implies that change should be justified by the appropriate authorities, and not much else.
Randomness is relative to unit chosen -- e.g., random series vs. random element in series vs. random selection from a group of series.
articulable familiarity
Every genius has something of the ploddingly tenacious.
defensive self-victimization
A common problem with etiological theories of biological function is that they require an etiological theory of health (i.e., adequate functioning).
adequation of organ to function
Any argument for rejecting skill as an efficient cause (as Aristotle makes it) would be an argument for rejecting software (an imitation of skill) as an efficient cause.
temperance : self :: friendliness : others
symbol consequentialism
the 'hypercompetent bad man with one morally good reason' pattern in action movies
To say a sacrament works ex opere operato is to say God is operatively present in it.
In the sacrament, grace proceeds from the res through the sign.
fight choreography in movies as symbolic competence
Poets can make use of deviations because, seeing the whole, they can correct back and thus can both selectively deviate and selectively return.
Economic planning by the government tends to solidify the status of the laborer as a commodity. There are things that can compensate for this, but it does not change the underlying tendency to make workers subserve exchanges.
State economic planning turns the whole economy into a factory-system for producing abstract nubmres, and the laborer a cog in that number-producing machine.
Economics-based politics is not generally about money but about the use of money to redistribute status according to some antecedent scheme.
the alienation of human self-governance
the Consolation of Philosophy as a study in the alienation of happiness
You can only be fulfilled in your work if the working expresses appropriately the tendency to happiness and if through the working one acts in union with that which constitutes happiness.
The point of infallibility is not certainty as such but protection from dangerous error.
"the reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist" Francis, Evangelii gaudium
The purpose of a cross-examination in court is to display the argument, not get answers from the witness; the latter is only the means, and the best cross-examinations are structure so that it doens't matter what precisely the witness says.
a planning counterpart to PSR: everything can be taken into account in some kind of planning
"Boredom is the demonic pantheism." Kierkegaard
holy water : penitence for past :: holy salt : caution for future (Hugh of St. Victor)
As Christian life has faith, hope, and love, so Christian marriage has fidelity, hope of progeny, and sacramental bond.
Vainglory makes God to be among our enemies; envy makes all our neighbors, even those with good will to us, to be our enemies; wrath makes us enemies to ourselves. Sloth makes us slaves to what is unpleasant; avarice, gluttony, and lust make us slaves to what is pleasant.
"Nirgunam means that the attributes which relate the Infinite to the finite are not necessary to His being. For example, Creatorhood is not an intrinsic attribute of the Divine Nature." Brahmabandhav Upadhyaya
"He is Sat -- existing by Himself; He is Chit -- self-knowledge, knowing Himself without any external intervention; He is Anandam -- supremely happy in His self-colloquy."
"The knowing God is mirrored as the kown God in the ocean of Chit."
"When we have a dream, we make the objects an events we dream about to be possessed of independent existence, whereas they are merely the product of our brain. In like manner, when perceiving this external world through the sense we imagine it to be an independent reality, existing by itself and not as the product of the Divine Mind and Will, then verily our perception of the world may be fitly styled a dream. And it is exactly in this sense and only to this extent that the Vedanta likens the world to a dream."
Love emanates joy by reflecting on itself.
maya as being-from-will
The rich will always capture some portion of any advantage one tries to give the poor, because the rich are always in a better position to play the game for advantages than the poor are.
In Kipling, the Gods of the Market make three false promises: Peace without force; Life without restraint, and Prosperity without work.
Thinking politically and factionally comes so easy to human beings that we cannot consistently transcend the political and the factional without the four cardinal virtues.
Our actions are not merely affected by our desires but by the inertia that has to be overcome to pursue them.
three signs of tyranny: forcing people to violate the laws of religion; imposing taxes arbitrarily; preventing the political participation of the people
to participate in humanitarian traditions in such a way that the participation is a prayer
Christianity is
(1) corporate: Our
(2) familial: Father
(3) spiritual: who art in heaven
(4) directed to God: hallowed by Thy name
(5) evangelistic: Thy kingdom come
(6) historical: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
-- our petitions as individuals and small groups always occur within this context and with this understood
The fetus (a) belongs to the mother as part of her and from her; (b) belongs to the father as from him; and (c) has personal rights in his or her own right.
overlapping personal spheres and shared rights
self-harm // self-deception
Human beings do not merely have capabilities, they use them for ends according to the exercise of their rational capacities.
'Capitalism' is not itself a cause; when effects are attributed to it, they are always the effects of particular institutions or practices that are being classified as capitalistic, or else people are just making things up for rhetorical effect.
Societies are layers of classifications of activities.
the negotiation interpretation of logic and the impartial middleman
the ironic standpoint as the indefinite negative
Kirkegaard's Philosophical Fragments is an argument that any conception of truth beyond the Socratic starts to look Christian.
A truth can be viewed aesthetically, ethically, politically, religiously, etc.
an ethical commonwealth not merely governed by moral law but adequate to its sublimity
articulated premises + unarticulated/loosely articulated premises = probable inference
- the residual as capturable in terms of tendency (final) vs in terms of structural analogy (formal)
- the asserted vs the expected
"Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry." Peirce
The experience of the present is permeated by past and future; nothing is experienced as present except in light of memory and anticipation.
intelligibility ( referentiality ( functionality ( purpose
The ruling class in every epoch steals their ruling ideas from elsewhere. They do not arise from the material relations of the ruling class to others, which is why more or less the same groups are so often in the ruling class both before and after ideological revolutions. They assimilate the justifications of the invaders, or of the most stable institutions, or of whatever is convenient.
"No conclusion is trustworthy which has not been tried by enemy as well as friend; no traditions have a claim upon us which shrink from criticism, and dare not look a rival in the face." Newman
Feminist philosophy is a branch of history of philosophy as a discipline.
-- Charles Williams's suggestion that post-Reichenbach Falls Holmes is really Moriarty (in his review of Roberts's Dr. Watson)
Poetry is the preeminent form of language as mediation.
The primary purpose of courts is to provide public record of reasoning in decisions about law.
like Heimdallr
the human mind has nine mothers,
a shining god
upon a steed of burning gold
the liturgy as the symbolic depiction of the true common good
social media as general 'consciousness-raising'
-- never-ending 'clicks of recognition'
Everybody is put upon by somebody.
Inference to the best explanation requires prior establishment of possibility and of ability to explain.
"The great instrument of propagating moral truth is personal knowledge." Newman
"It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless." MLK, Jr.
Autonomy is something that must be grown into.
"The Catholic saints alone confess sin, because the Catholic saints alone see God." Newman
The test of whether you are really acting in righteous indignation rather than mere wrath is the golden rule.
in Euthyphro, the link between piety and making others better before the gods
superlegal, contralegal, and preterlegal forms of acting in a legal context
The indelible character makes us channels of grace.
the sacraments as templates of holiness
