Friday, September 11, 2020

Dashed Off XX

This completes the notebook that was finished August 1, 2019.

pankalia as a guide for law and its application

Thomson, "The Right to Privacy": the right to privacy is a derivative right in the sense that it everywhere overlaps other rights
-- we might put this in a different way form Thomson by saying it is an extra template put on top of things that are rights already

"A spectral version of moral reasoning can survive in the world of the trolley problems; but it exists there detached from its roots in the person-to-person encounter, lending itself to mathematical treatment partly because the deskbound philosopher has thought the normal sources of moral sentiment away." Scruton

anticipatory gratitude
-- one can see friendliness as having this sort of act; friendliness acts in an anticipatory way along the lines of gratitude, justice, mercy, etc.
-- anticipatory gratitude as a major source of courtesy

the paperwork-submitting aspect of citizenship (note that while this is often compelled, sometimes it is voluntary, and in a sense is a participation in the administrative capabilities of the state)

massifying count nouns and countifying mass nouns
"I'll have water" -- "I'll have a water but not that water"
"I'll have a cake" -- "I'll have cake"

"Red wine" is not an overlap of "red" and "wine" but a division of wine.

The target domain of a metaphor is usually not arbitrary but just whatever you are intending to talk about.

Exodus: Baptism :: Leviticus : Orders
(could we say Numbers : Confirmation ?)

Nature is temple as well as workshop.

The family is the foundation of communal unity; so essential is it that if the natural family is disrupted, people will seek artificial families.

Better a patriot-king than a republic with nothing but an outward formality of being a republic.

"People who shout so loud, my lords, do nothing, / The only men I fear are silent men." Wilde, The Duchess of Parma

"The backbone of Philosophy is Logic." May Sinclair

for the greatest number, their greatest happiness vs. for the greatest happiness, the greatest number to experience it

The Achilles' heel of liberation theology is often its failure to have an adequate theology of Israel.

Gn 18:19 -- yada, to know, is the word for the divine choice in the election of Israel (cp. Amos 3:2)
Dt. 7:6 -- bara, to choose

election → covenant → mission

The mission of the people of Israel is not to preach to the world but to be a light (Isaiah 42:6).

Election or choice is the natural expression of love; what one loves, one chooses in particular.

To be holy is to be for-another.

Envy seeks to portray people in villainous guises, in order that it may play the heroic character.

(1) God said, Let there be X
-- the creature in the divine Word
(2) And it was so
-- as divine works are ministered by angels, this indicates the impress of the idea of the creature, as occasion for ministry, in the angels
(3) And God made X
-- the creature in its own existence
----
Then, as Augustine notes, the tale of time indicates the complete cycle of knowledge,
(4) the evening knowledge of the creature in its manifestation
(5) the morning knowledge of the creature in its end

Declarations of rights are abstract depictions of human nature, citizenship, etc.

interpreting sentences as existential claims about propositions

General strike is not an opening move.

The being of the Church is being 'of Christ'; each of the Notes of the Church is an aspect of being 'of Christ'.

the importance of unlived experience for lived experience

maternal dignity

Rights discourse inevitably tends to collapse whenever it becomes used as a technical means for coercing people.

Science is only self-correcting if scientists are.

The soul is a vale of world-making.

Only those with pietas can appropriately judge traditions.

The human person not only is handed down; he or she hands himself or herself down. We are the inheritance and the testament of ourselves.

Hegel often attributes to the state what is only attributable to the common good the state protects.

the zoo of physical analogies for solving problems (Terence Tao)

proof-building as means-end reasoning

Analogies are powerful for both wisdom and folly.

"We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time...." Wilde
"Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol."
"All bad art is the result of good intentions."

usury a perversion of subcreation

Hegel's error with regard to the state is not recognizing that the constitution of the state is an instrumental or organic structure of civil society.

Energy conservation presupposes that the system maintains translational symmetry over time; this is often forgotten in philosophical arguments appealing to it.

All knowledge-that is knowledge-how if you can use it as a template for doing something.

Steyl's taxonomy of approaches to the claim that care is a virtue
(1) analogical: care is analogous to some virtue
(2) supplementalist: care is a novel virtue
(3) caridinalist: care is a cardinal virtue

the temptation of trying to be just by association

Charity toward others often begins with looking honestly at yourself.

friendship as the bene esse of free will

The Church is in the world in several ways:
(1) it is drawn out from the world
(2) it is the sacramental extension of the Incarnation, and thus is Christ in the world
(3) it is in a state of wayfaring through the world
(4) it is sent throughout the world to spread the gospel to the world
(5) it is against the world, but in such a way as to be breaking free from the world

The Church's being in the world is structured by layers of community and noncommunity.

world as presence, world as totality, world as context, worldhood

"The unity of a thing is not behind each of its qualities, it is reaffirmed by each of them, each of them is the whole thing." Merleau-Ponty

nature as glory (manifestation of divine), nature as context, nature as reserve

the importance of distinguishing your politics-of-your-circle and your universal politics

the altar-consecrated states: orders, vows, marriage

One thing the early modern natural rights tradition (of the sort in the Declaration of Independence) gets right is that human persons are already jural beings.

conjugal ancillaries
(1) self-respect
(2) affection for the spouse
(3) sense of fairness
(4) respect for marriage as such
-- these are not constitutive of marriage but contribute to its health
-- sometimes marriage itself constructs these things

the common good of the human race as the foundation of philosophical history

Ceremonial life is the sphere in which a nation defines what it posits as true.

The End in Itself and the Kingdom of Ends formulations are both explicitly attempts to show how the categorical law is implicit in the concept of a rational being in general. (The Law of Nature formulation instead unfolds the categorical imperative out of the nature of duty. It is also notable that the establishment of LoN is (1) conditional, because it does not establish existence but only existence if our ordinary concept of duty has authority of law, and (2) not a priori.)

Kantian ethics as the attempt to unfold ethics out of the 'I think'

Rules-lawyering is sometimes the point of having rules.

citizenship as inherited tradition, as resource for human living, as commitment to community

By 'right' Hobbes simply means nonrestriction.

In a capitalist society, the state works as supercapitalist.

Weblike distributions of power create competitions.

No form of ethics is so conducive to allegory, both verbal and visual, as virtue ethics.

beautiful : moral good :: moral good : divine good

monks as knights of temperance

self-desecration as a moral concept (the natural sacredness of the body, the body as a moral object of respect/reverence)

sharing in the selfsame (Ps 122;3, Augustine DT 3.1.8); cp Ps 102:26

worldbuilding & the machina for the stage

(1) vestment proper: that which we wear (e.g., hat)
(2) secondary vestment: that with which we dress other things (e.g., drapery)
(3) quasi-vestment: that which is itself as if it were proper or secondary vestment (e.g., hermit crab's shell)
(4) figurative vestment (e.g., heavens as the robe of God)

Everything wrong with Hegel's philosophy is summed up in his criticisms of the Eucharist, of Confession, and of Ordination in The Philosophy of History. And it can be summed up further in a phrase: denigration of the external. What was later called the heresy of Modernism could indeed be called the Hegelian heresy. Note that Hegel attributes the idea to Luther.

A republic requires checks and balances among all sources of sanction; conscience, public opinion, and legal agency must all have both a power of self-protection and a power of opposition.

imperfect duties as duties to be virtuous / cultivate virtue

allegory as an essential part of moral reasoning

Experiments involve several kinds of bookkeeping (time, resources, problems, solutions, physical actions), some formally and some informally kept, any of which may be relevant to interpreting the experiment.

Moral theory of consequence, theory of obligations, and theory of character all converge on divine providence.

'ought implies can' is the structure of excuses and exculpations

Kant needs the postulates to close down fully all possible excuse for not following the moral law.

In secular discussions of the basis of human dignity, the tendency is to confuse sign and basis, and also to ignore the importance of our already being co-human with others.

The Law of Large Numbers only explains coincidences in union with an already known causal context affording opportunity for that kind of coincidence.

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small." Nietzsche

"Whoever repudiates causes, repudiates reason." Averroes

self, cause, and whole as the lenses for viewing the world

In argument we are all foolish sometimes.

error
(1) under the mask fo achieving the right
-- (a) theoretical
-- (b) practical
-- -- (1) of inquiry
-- -- (2) of life
(2) under the mask of avoiding the wrong
-- (a) theoretical
-- (b) practical
-- -- -- (1) of inquiry
-- -- -- (2) of life

All vice is a collapsing into oneself.

Extensive bureaucracy seems to cultivate intensive atomism of individuals.

There is a straightforward sense in which lies do not communicate anything, are only appearances of communication, being the veling of the mind and not, as 'communication' properly means, the formation of a *common* understanding.

present tense as main-show tense
relative to this we have backgrounds to and anticipations of the main show
-- Thus punctilinear, iterative, historical/dramatic, and conative presents are all really doing the same thing, setting the main show, and the taxonomy is really of functions or implications. Likewise various imperfects etc. are background settings. Futures identify ways in which the main show prepares or looks forward to something.

infinitive : noun :: participle : adjective

causal, evidential, and equivalential implication

The body is not an infinitely malleable thing; it is not an arbitrary act of will; it is something received and has a logic of its own.

hierarchy of internal goods: of cosmos, of earth, of human race, of complete societies, of person, of body, of functional origin

'From each according to his ability' sounds well and good, but doing all that you are able is working yourself to death.

the Book of Acts as reflection on the doctrine of the Ascension