"The man of today feels that his life is more a life than any past one, or, to put it the other way about, the entirety of past time seems small to actual humanity." Ortega y Gasset
"Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia."
Life imprisonment is a kind of exile without actual exile.
Equations are defined only for specific kinds of cases.
'Religion' is an analogical term; applied to different religions it involves a reference to one.
the value of unchosen bonds and obligations
Greek drama & politics-as-unifying-story
"Every creature is capable, by nature, of vice and of virtue. Nor would any action of theirs be worthy of praise unless they had the power to incline to either." Justin Martyr
"...Christ, who appeared on earth for our sakes, became the whole Logos, namely, Logos and body and soul."
"Toil summons the best men." Seneca
"What is the duty of a good man? To offer himself to fate."
Kinds of Cooperation
--prior to proper intentio--
command
counsel
removing impediment
refusal to impede
--with proper intentio--
express consent
participation
praise/encouragement
--posterior to proper intentio--
protection
concealment
Counsel is contribution to another's deliberation
tacit consent vs. nonimpediment
----contributing----
--direct--
command
participation
--assistant--
counsel
consent
praise
----clearing----
refusal to impede
removing impediment
----furthering----
protection
concealment
Motherhood is a profound participation in common good.
suspicion on the basis of
preliminary indication
profile-fitting
pattern-guessing
suspicion & ease of story-making
Persuasion begins with listening.
literature, esp. the novel, as a quasi-substitute for casuistry (cp. Thomas Fleming)
Not all the probability theory in the world will help you if you don't have the possibilities divided correctly.
giving material to the sinner vs. giving material to the sin
participation in a sin vs co-sinning with it
the link between Alcidamas's On Sophists & Plato's Phaedrus (a reasonable evidence for the early date of the composition of the latter
"May these mysteries, O Lord, in which we have participated, profit us, we pray, for even now, as we walk amid passing things, you teach us by them to love the things of heaven and hold fast to what endures." First Sunday of Advent, Prayer after Communion
"By nature the mind of man is active and prone to movement." Seneca
vestiges of virtues
political boredom as one of the major diseases of civil society
'uncontroversially' as modal operator
- it makes sense for it to be related to deontic operators, since it's often used as something like a deontic operator in common discourse
mysterium tremendum as exponentialized sublimity
- tremendum's three aspects, awefulness, power/might/majesty, vitality/urgency/energy, all are elements in sublimity, and the mysterium guarantees stupefaction and fascination reather than ordinary dread, as well as beyondness
- the sublimely beyond, acting with sublime force
the ecstasy unto tranquility
Being overwhelming, the experience of sublimity will inevitably tend to strike one as an experience of reality for the same reason that experience of resistance to will does for ordinary things.
The beauty of a sunset is ready to appear.
interior touch in mystical experience and sense of body (Paton suggests this analogy)
ligature of faculties in mystical experience and sense of reality
Romantic love clearly requires an I-He/I-She experience of some sort within which the I-Thou takes place, an experience that is both often preparatory to and often a sort of overflow from it.
Song 2:7 -- note that 'by the gazelles or wild does' has similarities to two names of God and, indeed, is very plausibly a euphemism for them (like 'gosh' in English)
-- seba'ot (gazelles) // 'elohey seba'ot
-- 'aylot hassadeh (wild does) // 'el shadday
classification as the infrastructure of reasoning
acting with honor, respecting dignity of persons, protecting the vulnerable
An insufficiently regarded problem in business ethics is the manipulation of people into obligations (obligation-pushing).
reservoir practice of traditions (e.g., archiving, preserving little-understood practices)
sublimation in the sublime
'the solidaristic system of human work' (Pesch) -- contrasted with individualistic capitalism and collectivistic socialism
"The common good of political society overall is conditioned by the good of the families which comprise the state." Pesch
the thrifty and well-conducted wage-earner in economics // the reasonable person in law
Living wage is a matter of *household* living.
The economic health of households requires at least the standing possibility of workers-in-reserve, i.e., people who can chip in when things get tight but primarily devote themselves to household goals when things go well.
The distinctness of mover and moved is not something immediately known, because what the mover does in acting and what the moved receives in undergoing are the same; one must come to recognize that this one act is the act of two things, and thus notionally distinguishable relative to each, while not erring by treating the notionally distinct as separate things.
When it is not anchored by Christ, 'universal love' as an ethic inevitably slides into 'universal subordination to my preferences'.
Holy communion is something done *with* the Church.
professions within humanitarian traditions (law, medicine, ministry) vs. profession within standing instrumental institutions of civil society (military, civil service)
-- the latter will nonetheless have analogies to the former due to subordination to common good
-- education at times has been the former but in modern times in practice tends to be treated as the latter due to the prevalence of public education
-- the spread of public medicine tends to have the same effect on medicine, but medicine's humanitarian roots are very deep, so we get something of a hybridized version
-- law is arguably also a hybrid, or perhaps has a dual face by nature. Perhaps, though, it depends on how much the legal profession maintains an independence from particular institutions
-- journalism seems to be an instrumental tradition with occasional aspirations to a humanitarian tradition
-- perhaps we should think of the border between humanitarian and civil tradition as not so much a border as a question of the role of civil society vs the role of humanity as such. Then possibly:
humanitarian: medicine, ministry
intermediate: law, journalism, education
civil: military, civil service
The latter two are civil-dominated by nature, the middle three (and others in societies in which they are strongy dominated by the state) have a necessarily humanitarian regard but may be heavily instrumentalized by civil society, as if they existed to serve civil society as such, without detriment to core functions; the first two are so bound up in humanitarian ends that instrumentalization tends easily and directly to perversion (e.g., human beings as existing for the state, states as having totalitarian control over human life, public opinion as subordinating informed conscience)
the regress of consent: consent cannot be a precondition for everything, because that is infintie regress; you would need consent to ask for consent. Thus all consent has, as precondition, something that does not depend morally on consent.
needy love → dwelling love → Love Itself
Utilitarianism is just the abstract expression of the dream of a universal panopticon.
Jesus marvels at the faith of two people -- the Centurion and the Canaanite Woman; the Centurion persists because he recognizes true authority, the Canaanite because she recognizes true grace.
Violence is a more serious issue than pain.
"I do not have the technical ability to do that" // "I do not have the moral ability to do that"
Skill must be used in good conscience.
the Iliad as an exploration of rule by many (cp. the Exhortation to the Greeks attributed to Justin)
Iliad and Odyssey revolve around the theme of woman (Discourse to the Greeks attributed to Justin)
Almost nothing that does real explanatory work in Marx is actually material; it's the dialect of groundward rather than sunward ideas.
accessible, intelligible, usable, and assessable
Drive the will one way and reasoning will bend in that direction.
contradiction explosion = there is only one impossible world
-- the relation between disjunction introduction and "All possibilities are found in every possible world"
-- the relation between disjunction elimination and discreteness of possibilities?
-- Posit impossible world (world with contradiction); Every disjunction of contradictories divides all possibilities in the world; therefore every possibility is in every possible world. Whether you get explosion or annihilation depends on how you move from possible world to possibility.
disjunction introduction // deduction theorem // arbitrary assumption introduction
four degrees of integralism
(1) incipient: the state recognizes and supports the Church for its value to the ends of the state
(2) reciprocating: the state recognizes and supports the Church as a particular benefactor
(3) direct: the state recognizes and supports the Church because it is the Church
(4) ordered: the state acts as a secular part of the Church, supportive of the Church
-- Vatican City State is an example of (4), officially Catholic countries are (2) or (3) in principle (in practice they all slide back to (1) or sometimes further).
responsibilities of civil society to individuals: food, drinkable water, housing, security, self-determination, and independence
-- note that all of these admit of many different possible degrees and means
"Of all men, only those who find time for philosophy are at leisure, only they are truly alive, for it is not only their own lifetime they guard well; they add every age to their own; all the years that have passed before them they requisition for their store." Seneca
The greater part of progress is preservation of the treasures of the past.
ancestor df. (Nyamiti): "a relative of a person with whom he has a common parent, and of whom he is mediator to God, archetype of behavior, with whom, thanks to his supernatural status acquired through death, he is entitled to have regular sacred communion"
Christ as our new ancestor
Christ as Proto-Ancestor (Bujo)
"As social beings, men and women are also generational beings." Moltmann
If self-identification were really identity, there would be much less in the way of obsessive attempt to validate one's self-identifications.
Much of the difficulty of modern political theory is that it theorizes on the basis of individuals, when in reality the basic unit of society is the family, in which individuals are formed.
right of volunary association
- right of assembly
- right to unionize
- right of shared project
Even relatively secular horror tends to have a religious edge because horror involves boundary-breaking.
professionalism & integrity of practical action
acting according to fully universal maxim
-- acting according to maxim universal to a universal role
-- -- acting according to a maxim universal to a universally required role
-- -- -- acting according to a maxim universal to a socially required role
&c.
