This begins the notebook started in October 2022.
Nothing is a number except to the extent that it can be taken as a unity.
Most people don't have a political system, just a hodge podge of excuses and rhetorical instruments with which they improvise.
History of philosophy consists primarily in the study of
(a) the diachronic transpersonal life of arguments
(b) the big-block elements of philosophy (schools, movements, families of positions)
(c) the person as creator and transformer of philosophy.
academia as naturally attracting schemesmen
Simple-vow religious communities developed to avoid the cloister restrictions that began to be imposed on solemn-vow communities.
Scripture as a long-term shaping instrument vs as a personal guide
Scripture has its effects not only directly on its readers/hearers but also indirectly through them.
Very large numbers of political and policy decisions are made on the basis of historical metaphors and analogies.
We often perceive the world by means of interpretive quasi-forms, recognized usabilities that are treated like actual forms.
People often mess themselves up by assuming that loving their enemies, or even being just to them, requires conceding more to them than is in fact necessary or even appropriate.
the I Ching (in its Confucian interpretation) as teaching what things to look for in decision-making
the greatest rational good for the greatest portion of society
Judgments are the structure of motivations in the actions.
People often confuse source of motivation and the object of the motivation, both of which are said to motivate.
Motivation is not the same as 'feeling an impulse'.
We have 'moral reasons' for taking things prudentially and 'prudential reasons' for taking things morally; part of the reason for this is that reasons may be both simultaneously. The overlap of providential and moral in fact plays a significant role in moral education.
each citizen as a symbolic representation of the People
Judgments, including moral judgments, constitute the framework for actions to which we are impelled.
We can be motivated toward an action to which we don't feel an impulse; feeling an impulse is reflective, not constitutive.
Legal systems typically work by forming particular encodings of broader communicative actions -- notices of intent, authorizations, directives, remindres of process (memoranda), etc.
Following a trail of evidence and logic requirs finding a reasonable middle ground in doing so.
What can be made can be counterfeited, counterfeiting being the replication of the mere appearance.
motivation as having a problem-solution structure -- we are motivated by apparent solutions
It is part of medical care to act in a way that is materially, technically, legally, and morally reasonable.
Proof virtually rules out most alternative possibilities, it does not actually rule most of them out. But virtually ruling them out is all that is needed. It is nota flaw in a proof if it does not consider explicitly every possibility; it just needs to use the self-evidence and the evident in such a way taht they don't need to be considered explicitly.
In dialectical situations, people spontaneously adopt something like evidentiary rules, taking them not to cover all circumstances but to apply to the relevant ones in such a way as to allow for simpler inquiry.
When we care about things, we always care about them for a purpose.
One of the often overlooked forms of soft power exercised by states is found in the ability of states to create jobs for those whom it favors.
Every aspect of our life expresses itself in habitude (habitus), whether it be health or taste or preference or skill or virtue or any other kind there might be.
Scripture as culture-building instrument
cause laundering: the increasingly common phenomenon of donations to nonprofit X for X's ends being distributed to very different nonprofits Y and Z
Kant's argument against suicide is a perverse faculty argument.
Private good is grown in an environment of common good.
Everyone is enthusiastic about education if they aren't the ones who do the work. Even teachers who love teaching are easily scammed by things that promise to make it easier.
architectural hospitableness as arising from the edifice's suitability as an instrument for dwelling
Love is the conduit of inspiration.
Human reasoning is naturally well suited for considering secondary causes.
The world is always twisting us into something ugly; and our untwisting is often imperfect.
How we understand a negation depends on how we understand what is negated.
All human goodness is toward a higher good than itself.
philosophical positions as ships on the sea of truth
Every experiment can be modeled as a list of lists of yes-no questions with answers, each list of questions and answers describing one possible state of the experiment; these questions include the relevant features of the experiment as experiment and each possible failure point.
Heaven and hell are not symmetrical.
Kantianism as in general the position that ideas of reason are autonomous (cp Opus Postumum): autonomia rationis purae.
subsidiarity of inquiry
Freedom of will is an openness to possibilities commensurate with universal good.
triplex via as the structure of exegetical interpretation
The boundary between general and special revelation is fuzzy.
Our ability to affect the happiness of others is remarkably limtied. Indeed, our ability to do so with ourselves quickly reaches sharp limits; one of the temptations people have to drugs is the false promise they give of providing us with a means of increasing our control over our feelings of happiness and suffering.
Anything that can be formulated in a statue can eventually be gamed.
potency as "principle of change in another or in itself qua other" 1020a
degree of incorruptibility ('resistance' to corruptibility) as mark of actuality
'the memory of the high and perilous'
When someone says they know something, we want to know how, i.e., by what path of middle terms. When someone says they believe something, we want to know why, i.e., by what motive causes for what ends.
All composition is with respect to an active power that can compose or decompose it.
'forgetting the good in the search for the power to effect it'
Concepts are how we orient ourselves to the real.
grandfather time paradox // logical self-defeat
"Like a subsistence farmer, a subsistance farm of ideas is impoverished, has little of the best types of ideas, lacks refinement and variety, and generally requires ten times more work to get one tenth as far. Reasoning is social by nature." James Chastek
The aesthetic plays an important role in survival, because of tis role in interaction with the environment.
The Arthurian Roman War episode (1) allows non-British locations to have Arthurian associations; (2) links Arthur more closely to the Roman mystique.
The Roman War Campaign begins at the York Parliament on the Octave of St. Hilary (January 21st). Meg Roland notes that Constantine was proclaimed emperor at York in 306.
All human victories involve failures.
Every complex rational argument is constructed using a scaffolding of topical maxims, heuristics, loose analogies, parallel arguments, metaphors, handy distinctions or set formalizations, imaginative associations, customs of discourse, and sometimes more.
the sacraments as instrumental parts of the divine missions
Vagueness harms jokes by obscuring incongruities.
It is a perpetual problem in politics that there are always people whose solution to a political disease is a worse form of the same disease.
"The poet produces the beautiful by fixing attention on something real. The same with the act of love." Simone Weil
Simone Weil's method of philosophy as purgatorial
All things fall apart,
even human hearts;
they fragment into shadows
of themselves.
The human mind uses the world as part of itself and also interacts with it as other -- indeed, soemtimes as an other mind.
None are one witht he Crucified who never bear the Cross.
Bureaucracies need to be structured for due process, not process for bureaucracies.
Class is structured by what protects social position.
What we identify as particular colors are a matter of convention. (NB that I do not here say 'kinds of color' but 'particular colors'.)
AI as artificial sophist
the Catholic Church as divine monument
Talk about units or levels of selection is just a roundabout way of talking about evolutionary teleology, no matter how much the person do so are trying to pretend not to be teleological.
'Attention is a functional term, and there is no reason to think it is the same particular cognitive act all the time. Rtaher, it identifies a role known by various effects.
Reason itself demands something higher than itself, from which it can learn.
the concomitance of love anf the fullness of faith
Intelligence without solicitude is not much different from stupidity.
Heaven is abundance of grace blossoming into glory, and Hell is the outer darkness devoid of such glory-blossoming grace.
The future belongs to none but God.
the examplar effect of good marriages
tradition as a form of diachronic cooperation
"No one aims at being a tyrant to keep out of the cold." Aristotle
All counterfactual judgments are indirect causal judgments.
"Recent philosophy has not so much rejected metaphysics as wearied of previous metaphysicians." Austin Farrer
non-normal worlds as worlds of options, some combinations of which are consistent (normal) and some of which are inconsistent (impossible)
"People who have many friends and shout familiarly to everyone appear to be friends to no one." Aristotle (NE 1170c-b)
"One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal." Levinas
"It is possible, for all that A knows, that p" is not the same as "It is possible given what A knows, that p. The latter indicates that A's knowledge base establishes that p is possible; the former that it does nto rule out p being possible.
legal systems as doxastic
Eyewitness testimony's limitations, when not specifically tied to those of memory, are often tied to reliance on resemblances.
music as metaphorical (soundtrack effect: music inherently has the translative capacity to be 'layered over' other things)
Voting factionalizes a population over time.
When physicists talk about causes in experiment, they often mean preconditions; when they talk about causes in theory, they often mean signals.
In 1 Tim. 2:4, Paul is arguably giving content to what it means to pray for all people and for peaceful and quiet lives of holiness. That is, God wills all men to be saved *through our prayer and holiness*, which is why we should pray for all and pray to be holy.
Freedom is a form of authority, either original or derived.
The doctrine of preexistence of souls confuses our intrinsic fromness with prior existence. But by the same token, much of what it says can be rethought in a more nuanced way to shed light on that fromness.
God saves us in a manner involving and not independent of our will.
Consent has remarkably little to do with either desire or preference.
THE SELF
hearth -- private self -- incommunicable heart
workshop -- producing communicable thought and intention
shop/privileged market -- forensic intersection and interface involving external medical, legal, and spiritual mediators
general market -- broader communication with world
An artifact is in part a compliance with a normative principle.
Those who do not recognize their sins as worthy of hell do not truly repent of them.
the pedagogical process of familiarization unto understanding
