readiness to appear, either (A) 'created purposely' to appear or (B) continuing to exist when not appearing; note that (A) just moves it back to a cause that is (B)
explanations of the form [disposing cause + particularizing/activating cause]
cooperative vs compulsive measures of government
Brilliance is only as good as its paideia allows.
People seem to find it easier to process and apply normative descriptions than prescriptions.
modalities of personhood: creature, image of God, member of household, citizen/subject
hope & the sense of adventure
All of philosophy, East and West, is filled with altars to the Unknown God.
externality: "the capacity of being taken notice of by more than the perception of one mind" (Shepherd EPEW 35)
evidence for reliability vs evidence for trustworthiness
logical systems as abstract machines
Those who genuinely dare to be wise do not forget the teachings of their fathers and mothers.
Human words are not static; by their nature they flow out.
Love transfigures knowledge to wisdom.
Body transfigured becomes manifestation.
Life turns the physical into sign.
semiosis as living, abstractly considered
Fight scenes in movies are made interesting by story, by choreography, and by the visual context shaping it.
The earliest references suggesting a collection of Paul's letters (2 Pt and 1 Clem) are both from Rome.
In his greetings, Paul substitutes his apostleship for what would usually be identification by household or city, and changes charein (greetings) to charis (grace).
Inspiration works in the manner of a final cause or lure.
Mt 9:36 -- What moves Christ's pity most is not the illness but the lostness.
"For that which we call ourselves, and that which forms any individual mind, is a continued capacity in nature, which yields a liability to sensation in general." (Shepherd EPEU 42)
-- As she notes, this gives us as well the sensations being such as would occur to (possible) other minds like our own.
sensation of passing through different points of space --> extension of space / unresisting medium
'Inordinate' is relative to appropriate end; appropriateness is relative to the nature of the thing.
Psalm 1 on the temptations of the World
The primary difficulty with the problem of the external world is superabundance of information, not paucity. Skepticism gets its results by introducing hypotheses to flatten the evidence arbitrarily; this flattening, like projection from globe to plane, introduces distortions as well. Nonetheless, as map projections, the skeptical flattenings can have use in bringing out features of the globe.
Every positive right is constituted by the remedies that makes it possible.
We do not merely sense; we use our senses.
analogical inference
(1) from bare similarity
(2) from complex of similarities
(3) from system of similarities
light activating a body to activate by light the eye
We know that reality exceeds what we can articulate because we never run out of things to articulate.
gifts as speech acts
developmental delay, medial delay, and resistential delay in causation
Shepherd's analysis of memory: masses of sensible qualities + idea of lapse of time + idea of removed causes
-- thus memory is both a temporal and a causal experience
-- the lapse of time includes the self-ness of memory -- it is the perception of our own continuous existence as able to link the original experience and the remembering
"Self is always considered as a continuity...." (Shepherd, EPEU 139n)
Shepherd's definition of miraculous evidence: "a similarity in the course of nature, with respect to the necessity and action of efficient cause, but a variety from its apparent regularity, in order to be used as a means toward a specific end." (EPEU 145)
power, wisdom, goodness --> fear/respect, trust, love
modalities as modalities of powers
miscibility and immiscibility are 'properties' applying to pairs of chemical substaces
Shankara
The Lord is
(1) cause of origin of the world
-- -- like clay is substance of jar
-- -- like gold is substance of gold ornaments
(2) cause of the substance of the world
-- -- like magician is source of illusion
(3) cause of reabsorption of the world
-- -- like creatures reabsorbed into earth
conscientious humanity, conscientious citizenship, conscientious professionalism
God considered as alethic Diamond : principle of noncontradiction :: God considered as deontic Diamond : first principle of practical reason :: God considered as actual : principle of causality :: God considered as alethic Box : principle of primacy
US Constitution, Article III, Section 2, Clause 1 clearly recognizes the law/equity distinction
"The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself." Kant
q is a natural consequence of p
suppose q is found true
q implies ~(~q)
therefore q rules out rivals of p that imply ~q
therefore p is more likely to be true than before
A very large part of using one's own reason is determining what authorities to trust.
"By denying abstractions, Berkeley denied analysis -- by denying analysis, he truly kept up the associations of the vulgar...." Shepherd (EPEU 304)
In assessing the veracity of men and women, we are not directly assessing the truth and falsehood of what they say, but rather where they stand with respect to temptations related to truth and falsehood. (Do they have incentive to lie, do they have a history showing a susceptibility to temptation?)
No one can take a survey of human argument and reasonably conclude that polemic is not a pervasive mode of human argument on serious matters; indeed, argument wholly devoid of polemic only exists under artificial conditions.
People often retreat to polemic when they feel themselves pressured to be hypocritical, or to argue under assumptions they think inappropriate.
Scripture as prophetic and apostolic presence
Everything holy is dangerous.
three kinds of aesthetic response: formal admiration (to artful presentation), catharsis (in response to tragic events), material admiration (sense of how well artful presentation presents tragic events)
storytelling as classification-facilitating
The Church is both catholic and apostolic, and therefore looks both forward and backward.
Salvation by its nature is something that must be prayed for.
yes/no question as a 'subpossible' modality
to endure evil, to wait prayerfully for Christ, to rejoice in God
What is it in itself?
What is it in respect to another?
from predication of what is wholly in itself to predication of what is wholly to another:
substance | quantity | quality | relation
extrinsic but more in itself: action, place, position
extrinsic but more to another: passion, when, vestment
People treat elections as magic, definite and precise and immediately clear, but in reality every election is more like a cooking or brewing process.
creative ideas as 'potentially valuable improbable constructions' (Fedyk & Xu)
Lauren N. Ross, "Causes with material continuity" (2020)
-- 'material continuity' here means 'reliable movement of material from cause to effect'
-- meets a minimal interventionist criterion, so can be regarded as genuine causes
-- contrasts with contact-interaction causation (dominoes falling series) and also absence/prevention causation
-- useful to consider because they help us differentiate distinct causal systems
-- at least two main categories: (1) manufacturing (material transformed); (2) movement (material flows through)
-- one way to study is to use tracing & tagging techniques (traces are relatively inert in, or at least only minimally interactive with, the relevant system, but are distinctively recognizable so they can be identified and followed -- e.g., dyes or radioactive isotopes or radio tags). Use of these requires prior understanding of the system as causal, so a proper tracer can be identified; the technique is used to get more precise and particular information.
The word is implicit in the person, the person is explicated through the word.
Hirschman argues that there are three categories of conservative argument: futility, perversity, and jeopardy. This is true and valuable but less substantive than it looks because these are also the three categories of progressive argument, as well. When you argue for or against a change, you do so by arguing one can't really stay or go (futility) or that staying or going is actually self-defeating (perversity) or that staying or going harms something valued (jeopardy).
Mary in Luke-Acts as symbol of faith
"Prayer is higher than theology." Maximus the Confessor
"All beings are believed to exist in three modes: in essence, in difference, and in life."
"I think the human being sins according to four ways: by impulse, by deception, by ignorance, and by inclination."
It is good to believe together, and pleasant to hope together, when by charity we dwell together.
The choices of angels are related to each other as circles within circles, as wheels within wheels.
The increase of domestic devotion lays the foundation of evangelism.
debt as the engine of urbanization
| SENTIMENT | REASON | |
| NATURE | temperament | contemplation |
| ARTIFICE | taste | action |
