convention (Hume)
(1) sense of common interest
-- (a) felt in own breast
-- (b) remarked in others
(2) carrying in concurrence with others into a general plan, or system of actions
-- (a) which tends to public utility
[Note that you get a very different definition depend ing on whether you take 1a, 1b, and 2a to be components of the definition or clarification of the components.]
obsessio-epiphania structure in cinema
divine prime mover -> God is a precondition for both time and space
The whole universe is built on little things.
Number-words are often not used univocally.
"that which is the very essence of the passions -- subjection to the power of others." Stael
"Everybody imagines he has been in love, and almost everybody is mistaken in this opinion."
"The spirit of party is the only passion which erects he destruction of all the virtues into a virtue, which lays claim to glory from all those actions which men would labour to conceal, if they were performed from motives of personal interest."
If an institution fails, then either
(1) it was designed incorrectly;
(2) it was operating outside appropriate conditions;
(3) it was not properly maintained;
(4) it was sabotaged in its operation.
Locke's idea of substance, despite its limitations, still has the function of indicating that there could be more to something than the ideas we have about it. This is an essential function without which we can make sense of very little.
potential, virtual, and actual arguments
HoP and the eduction of virtual arguments
The People is a special moral/juridical person, one that specifically has to be a person of persons.
Zech 9:12 // Is 61:7
humanitarian respect, civil friendship, neighborliness (hospitableness)
PSR in reasoning itself (e.g., superfluity arguments, parsimony, etc.)
Hegel thinks that divine omnipotence commits one to Spinozism.
Liberal societies often begin deteriorating because of the difficulty of guaranteeing equal rights -- e.g., everybody has to have the same right to protest, but people don't actually want everyone to have equal right to protest, preferring that the right kinds of groups have more of a right to protest, and this becomes corrosive because people don't agree about what the right kinds are.
"Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." Madison (Fed #55)
Episcopal gradation is a gradation of communities.
humanity as a family of peoples
household, civil society, realm
Act according to the maxims of a philosopher king in a just society.
Many things are attributed to democracy that are more correctly attributed to subsidiarity.
Liturgy of Hours as heartbeat of the Church
effect -> cause inference failures
(1) impossibility of cause in itself
(2) defect of proportionality in this case
(3) defect of implication
not-Diamond, False, and not-Box approaches to arguing for atheism
What Scotists call univocity indicates participation or co-participation.
courtesy exchanges
(1) purely symbolic exchanges
(2) favor exchanges
(3) token exchanges
evidence inventories as part of probable inference
Instruction grows to knowledge within the soil of belief.
The notion of 'a reasonable chance of success' is more causal than probabilistic -- it is primarily about implementability.
the domestic aptitude for working with other families
It is important to understand that the devil can imitate an angel of light better than you can, and that the wicked are better at faking goodness than the good at being good.
faith in reasoning, trust in evidence, cooperative inquiry
atheism as a kind of transhumanism, building man without a trace of God or religion (cf Del Noce)
-- of course, this would not be quite right for Comtian or Feuerbachian forms of atheism
"Truths of the natural order cannot be drawn as pure consequences from the truths of the gospel either in the scientific, philosophical, or political fields. Otherwise, if it were a matter of pure and mechanical deduction, how easy the Christian's life would be." Del Noce
"It is impossible to explain Marx's own doctrine through historical materialism."
Trinitarianism is what you get when you immerse yourself in Scripture in communal prayer with the Church. The same is true of Chalcedonian Christology.
law enforcement vs citizen security approaches to policing
Good statesmanship is inherently polymathic.
analogization between humanitarian traditions as a source of moral progress
-- indeed, humanitarian traditions are a source of moral analogies generally (e.g., nonlegal uses of 'due process', nonmedical uses of 'triage', etc.)
Liebniz's view of infinitesimals is similar to the view that takes them to be relative nothings (nothings secundum quid) -- negligible as if nothing relative to a given level of analysis but not at their own.
the three aspects of literal sense
(1) plain meaning
(2) sense under canons of construction
(3) intertextual sense
caused differences that are not changes
(1) existence vs. nonexistence
(2) difference in kind
(3) difference in space
(4) difference in being signified
arguments against creation itself being delegatable
(1) proportionality: Creatio ex nihilo bridges infinite gap between being and nonbeing and thus requires a power that is not in any way finite.
(2) instrumentality While instruments move through a higher power, they achieve the effect through their own. But the power of creatures is to actualize potential; thus creation is wholly outside their power.
(3) primacy: the more widely a principle underlies something, the more directly it proceeds from a higher cause; secondary causes presuppose something caused by the first cause, but creation is cause of the whole being itself. Thus the only cause that can properly have caused being itself as its effect is the first.
the underdog trope as the central trope of American cinema
Interpretation of revelation is one form of interpretation of testimony.
What the more composite does more compositely, the more simple does more simply.
Tribes are expansive domestic societies, with incipient elements of civil society, that can function as juridical persons.
Tribal authority is juridical patria potestas. This means that the tribe has (among other powers) inherent educational authority that cannot be trampled on by the civil state, and a right in some kinds of matters to act in loco parentis for children, arising from its nature as a unified greater family. Likewise it has authority associated with its right to pass down the tribal inheritance.
deep fuzzy repetitive: woof-woof-woof
high sharp repetitive: eep-eep-eep
deep sharp repetitive: whap-whap-whap
high fuzzy repetitive: eegh-eegh-eegh
You are a supporting character in many more stories than you are a main character. One of the things one learns in both family and friendship is that the supporting role is sometimes more important to one than the main role, a more precious performance.
When we talk about good overbalancing evil, we are not talking addition and subtraction, but contextualization: an evil is overbalanced by being part of a framework that is good.
The universe suggests both order and boundlessness, both unity and hierarchy.
hummocks and flarks
Equality is always either interchangeability or sharing an order in a hierarchy. Interchangeability cannot ground worth; we have a specific worth in a hierarchy, and equal worth *as something* in such a hierarchy: human beings under God, or above uncivilized beasts, or united beneath a higher cause, or some such. It is the hierarchical contrast that gives equality a substantive content rather than treating equals as indifferent tokens.
If we were not born equal, we could not become equal; all equality springs form our natural equality.
In the divine nature, there is no confusion, no change, no division, no separation.
After-the-fact accountability is often not accountability at all, particularly in political situations.
remotion as an intellectual expression of the fear of the Lord
alienable right -> inalienable right -> divine moral order
quasi-causality as instar-causality
categorical real substance: human person, tree, etc.
transcendental real substance: God
categorical rational substance: partial substance, genus, species
transcendental rational substance: juridical person?
