Our repentance is an expression of God's love for us.
The art of Christendom is not an incidental adornment but an instrumental part of the Church as liturgical commonwealth, serving the higher ends of mystery and kerygma, but not less valuable for being so transformed.
"Beauty has an infinite amplitude, like being." Maritain
All the forms of fine art are different modes of imitating the actions, passions, and character of human persons. Thus the spectator feels the likeness in himself. For the human being is the most imitative of all animals; we imitate in thought and in deed because it is natural to us, and the realm of imitables is for us vast beyond measure, as vast as the scope of reason itself, so that we imitate not only what is or was but also what can be thought to be and what ought to be.
contrived plausibilities vs. plausible contrivances
The artist, the artisan, and the engineer make a thing and thereby make a new way of seeing and knowing the world.
Faithfulness in imitation should not be conflated with superficial copying.
The poet, the artist, the artisan, makes the world more knowable, more intelligible; he removes obstacles to knowing, gives new illumination, presents things in new ways.
necessity ad melius vs necessity ad esse
word : thing :: signification : composite of word & thing :: form : matter
Every artifact has a double genus, that of its materials and that of its art.
sacraments as intrinsically significant artifacts
The artist and the poet in a sense take the mind to be greater than the world, and represent the world insofar as it is in the mind.
fine art as the creation of cognitive media
One of the ways Scripture teaches is as a literary work, affecting our passions and our initial estimates based on the passions, by delighting, intriguing, horrifying, puzzling, confusing, and awing us so as to lead us to higher things.
the system of all signs in the universe as a sign of the divine mind
What delights in a significant work of art is the object as it is in the work itself.
the thing as object, the object as idea, the object in the work
object: dinosaur; sign: bone; interpretant: paleontological skill
-- this is the structure of all material/instrumental evidence
-- by skill the bone is understood under the description "of a dinosaur" (and perhaps many other such relativities)
"The Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son by the unity and power of the Spirit." Athenagoras
the Father as Father (principle of processions)
the Father as distinguished (ingenerate)
the Father as uniting the Trinity (monarchy)
the Son as Son
the Son as distinguished (only-begotten)
the Son as uniting the Trintiy (mediation)
the Spirit as Spirit
the Spirit as distinguished
the Spirit as unitying the Trinity (nexus)
the Creed identifies effects appropriated to each person of the Trinity (the created world, the Incarnation, the prophets)
three modes of evanglism: manifestation, distinction, ornamentation
Counterfactual theories of causation make more sense with respect to formal and material causation; they only are able to model efficient causes indirectly, insofar as it involves giving of form or disposing of matter.
Counterfactuals depend on causal powers, which both posit possibilities and provide an anchor for reasoning about different possibilities.
Beginning to exist implies nonbeing of being, and thus potential being.
"An excellent workman should proportion his action to his work; he does not accomplish by quite complex means that which he can execute by simpler ones, he does not act without an end, and never makes useless efforts." Malebranche
To be alive is either to be life itself or to be moved ultimately by life itself.
Hume uses similarity or resemblance across experiences where an analytic philosopher would talk of similarity across possible worlds; this is because empirical similarity does the work for him that possibility does for others.
Without virtue it is not easy to bear good fortune well.
It is important to understand that the purpose of apologetics is not to persuade but to answer.
With regard to possibilities, the past is as open as the future.
Sabbath as a symbol of divine love (cp. Cohen)
We do not experience the Church as a spiritual communion, although we do experience signs and witnesses of the its being so.
Logical elaborations are living developments.
For a republic to survive, citizens must be encouraged, trust among citizens must be cultivated, and the first impulse should always be to let the citizens themselves solve the problem, with the state merely assisting and keeping the peace.
Healthy markets are cooperations for general benefit.
the closed door as a horror movie trope
-- potential vulnerability in protection
-- hides as much as protects (who knows what's on the other side)
-- common experience of being startled at banging on door
original justice // infused virtues
The natural law is more like the written law insofar as the latter is related to the whole of society than insofar as it is related to individuals; we are pervaded by it, structured by it.
pedagogical fictions -- physicists are a very good source of these
"The saints must be honored as the friends of Christ, as the sons and heirs of God." Damascene
Morality is the infinite task of man, and can be exceeded.
covenant & the memory (merit) of the fathers (zekhut avot) in Judaism
Sosa: aptness vs. meta-aptness of means (apt is when it manifests competence for attaining end, meta-apt is when it manifests competence for selecting means)
The aim of belief is not truth directly but goodness relevant to truth, and the aim of opinion is practical vicinity of truth.
to learn in order to know & love that which is most to be known and loved
Suffering and death suggest the need for God.
the combination of suspending judgment with suspecting as a major element of many inquiries
Moral obligation is able to have the force it does because there is something higher than it, on which it is founded, and which it participates.
Our acknowledgment or endorsement of a rule is never the source of its authority for us; it is our registering of its authority for motivational purposes.
Human beings go through the world consecrating things to themselves.
"The human person, body and soul, has a fundamental order and finality whose integrity must be respected. Because of this order and finality, neither patients nor physicians nor researchers nor any other persons have unlimited rights over the body; they must respect the order and finality inscribed in the embodied person." USCCB 'Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body'
"The body is not an object, a mere tool at the disposal of the soul, one that each person may dispose of according to his or her own will, but it is a constitutive part of the human subject, a gift to be received, respected, and cared for as something intrinsic to the person."
"The mission of Catholic health care services is nothing less than to carry on the healing ministry of Jesus, to provide healing at every level, physical, mental, and spiritual."
Much of human intelligence in practice consists of our cooperative linguistic capacities.
We do not commemorate those on the calendar of saints because we admire them, although they are in many ways admirable. We commemorate them because they are owed for their contribution and intercession.
the Temple as the hieroglyph of providence
The forms of Church government do not derive from the synagogue, but from the structuring of the band of students around Jesus and their way of handling the complexities of evangelism. The practices of liturgy, however, do seem to take their first form from the practices of both the synagogue and the Temple.
the problem of defective causes (this is what all forms of the argument from evil reduce to)
analogies as sketches of inference
Sean Carroll on cognitive instability & C. S. Lewis's argument against naturalism
Intellectual acts are telic, but the evolution of ideas is not.
imitation-first vs infrastructure-first accounts of social movement origination
reactive link (effect E is caused in response to occasion O)
occasional link (E is caused insofar as it is to have a link with O)
preestablished harmony (O and E are caused so as to have a particular relation)
sustaining link (O's causing of E is caused)
(1) primary cause causes effect in response to subcause (subcause = provoking cause)
(2) primary cause causes effect in response to subcause so as to execuate a relation between them (subcause = occasional cause)
(3) primary cause causes subcausal effect so as to execute a relation of ordering between them (subcause = initial condition of order or as-if cause)
possible responses to skeptical arguments based on disagreement
(1) Disagreement is illusory.
(2) Disagreement is limited
--- (a) in minority
--- (b) in the margins of
--- --- (1) larger overlap
--- --- (2) identifiable convergence
--- (c) in incidental or trivial matter
(3) Disagreement is not ground of doubt
--- (a) because alternatives are explained by biases
--- (b) because alternatives are explained by missing information
--- (c) because solution can explain alternatives as limited approaches to truth (disagreement is evidence for solution)
--- (d) because it is not relevant whether people disagree.
possible responses to skeptical arguments based on infinite regress
(1) The regress actually terminates
--- (a) by necessity
--- (b) by convergence to initial point (state)
--- (c) by direct identification of state
(2) The regress is harmless
--- (a) because trivial
--- (b) because irrelevant
(3) The regress is antiskeptical because each step actually increases the case.
(possible responses to skeptical arguments based on circularity will be similar to those based on infinite regress)
centrality of principles within a web of evident principles
(1) many links to other evident principles
(2) closely linked to other evident principles
(3) plays major role in other principles being linked to each other
(4) linked to especially central principles
(the principle of noncontradiction is the most central principle in all of these ways)
jurisdiction // ritual precinct = templum
-- pomerium is the boundary of the ritual precinct
Most of the attraction of the Copenhagen Interpretation was that it allowed people that the quantum mechanical probabilities were real but nothing but probabilities. Hidden variable / implicate order made probabilities just about the relation between our ignorance and the real (thus in a sense probabilities but not real); many worlds makes the probabilities real in a way more fundamental than being mere probabilities.
Waves of conspiracy-theory thinking are a known pathology of democratic politics; but democratic politics has no safeguards against this pathology.
priests & deacons as curators of ecclesial memory
Platonic Myths as pedagogical fictions
Deely's neologism 'suadisign' is better used for rhetorical syllogisms than syllogisms in general.
Sometimes one must simplify in order to avoid collapse.
Contemplation and worship ache to converge.
The sacrament of reconciliation is a sacramentalizing, an extension into divine mysteries, of the tribunal of conscience.
