This begins the notebook begun in March 2025.
Before you can know the just, you must know the true.
Genuine mercy has a power of achieving good that goes beyond all our planning.
In a democracy, all politics is by group status competition.
The intelligible has two formats: natural (in itself) and intentional (in another).
What happens must be either the only possible thing, or a possibility reached without regard for what it is, or a possibility selected because of what it is.
Everything that exists is either absolutely necessary or is necessarily related to another.
causation vs causativity
Every state of affairs excludes some other state of affairs.
All salvation is both individual and communal.
There are two kinds of explanation: in terms of nature and in terms of cause, or as we might put it, in terms of the nature of the explanandum and in terms of the nature of something else.
In a letter to Bernoulli, Leibniz defines being actual as being the best of possibles (with everything having been compared). Thus, for instance, a vacuum is possible but there is none, because the existence of a vacum is not best-possible with respect to the whole.
the distinction of possible and actual as presupposing a teleology
What is possible is what is implied by the teleology of the actual.
Thought experiments can only work as thought experiments on the basis of either formal necessities or teleologies.
"In short, the object created by the poet, the poem, the painting, the symphony, is like the glory of the poet, and it is in this glory, by means of which he makes himself manifest in the world, that he makes himself manifest also to himself and becomes definitely aware, but in an inevitably imperfect and unsatisfactory manner, of his original experience." Maritain
"True civilization knows the price of human life but makes the imperishable life of man its transcendent supreme value."
immortality of soul as a postulate of civil theology (cp. Maritain)
credentialed nonachievement
Preserve the good and progress will often take care of itself, because good is diffusive of good.
We respect with our bodies and not just with our minds.
Not every kind of play is make-believe.
The argument of Parmenides 135b-c (Parmenides speaking):
If we do not admit that each has a determinate form (idea),
we deny that the idea of each is always the same,
and thus annihilate the power of reasoning (dialegesthai),
so that nothing comes of philosophy.
good by another (useful), good in itself with respect to single power or desire (pleasant), good simply to whole being (honestum)
Value implies principles of attribution.
In one sense, details are important to knowing, but in another sense, there is too much to know to always be picking at details.
Fictional characters are not merely imaginary beings, although one can form imaginary beings into fictional characters.
Trade-offs are only possible against prior standards.
the experience of there being more to experience
Every human body is structured by needs for others.
A human person is the cosmos re-represented in a particular way from a particular perspective.
In drawing, nothing is a mistake until it makes progress in the drawing impossible.
"He is near to all, yet far from all, O Nanak! He Himself remains distinct, while yet pervading all." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 276
"Each and every heart is illuminated by the Perfect Lord God." SGGS 277
We preserve a tradition by being the tradition.
Demonization is generally a sign of envy.
the notion of karma and the sense that we already have 'weight' when we come into the world
People have an aversion to the idea that there are terrible things with no one to blame.
People respect power but are rarely interested in it as such, and we see this in the fact that men and women keep giving away power to get other things.
Part of our glory is always reflection from the glory of others.
the per se prior, the per alio prior, the posterior (which is also per alio)
How we learn and how we live morally are intimately linked.
Due process requires that there be soemthing due; what is appropriate to it unfolds out of its prior obligations.
Imaginary space (and likewise imaginary time) derives from Aristotle Phys 2.4.203b; and from the mathematical character of the thing (one can posit a possible greater container for any container and a possible further element for any series). It is thus a matter of the inherent projectability of place and time (every part is inherently related to the possibility of other parts).
"It is not sufficient that a man give alms; he must also take the trouble to give them in the right way." Antonino
We must cook our experience to get knowledge, and there are many different ways to cook it.
"Institutions are empty forms when no one will sacrifice for them." Benjamin Constant
"Everything serves the intellect in its eternal search. Systems are instruments by which man discovers the truth about details while being mistaken about the whole. When the systems are superseded, truths remain."
"...the intention of the devil is to attach himself to whatever is sublime." Aquinas
Wealth inequality is part of how empires organize themselves.
Smith argues (in LJ) that polygamy harms liberty by weakening the hereditary nobility.
It is first in the hereditary nobility that people begin to understand the elements of civil right and freedom. This then gets expanded outward.
When one looks at how different physical theories handle energy, it becoems clear that in all the physical theories we have, energy is only indirectly and approximately defined.
Wis 2:12-20 as messianic prophecy
ways to handle the notion of 'nothing'
(1) bare exclusion
(2) relative exclusion
(3) contrastive representation of excluded
(4) construct on the model of being, contrasted with being itself
(5) construct on the model of being, as purely rational being
'Can you please pass the salt?' is an example of imperative-softening, in which an imperative is weakened to avoid being rude; turning imperative-form requests into interrogative-form requests is common in rather different languages (e.g., both English and Vietnamese do it), and they tend to work similarly -- the interrogative-form request recognizes that it is in the requestee's power.
Liberal societies are always tempted to treat human rights as grounded in the agreements of liberal socieites; and whenever they do, they become enemies of human rights.
If there are no natural rights, nothing is owed to human beings as such.
Sinott-Armstrong's principle of moral substitutability confuses obligatory, decisive moral reasons and moral reasons generally.
People who cannot treat their own heritage well cannot be trusted with anyone else's.
All the graces in all the Church are refractions of the fullness of grace in Christ.
"The Born Rule does not occur in ordinary classical probability theory because that theory does not include superposition events and the accompanying amplitudes (that come from representing the density matrix of a superposition event as an outer product). When superposition events are introduced into the purely mathematical theory (over the reals), then the probability of outcomes can be computed as the *squares* of the coefficients in teh normalized amplitude vector...associated with the superposition event...." David Ellerman
Asking, 'Why should I be moral?' is like asking 'Why should I be human rather than a duck?' It is nto the actual question being entertained. What is meant is, 'Why cannot I make up what is moral or moral enough, in this or that way?' or 'Why must this be the actual moral thing?' or 'What motivations is there to do this particular moral thing?'
sovereignty as a trust
Smith (Lectures on Jurisprudence) gives the principle of authority and the principle of utility (common/general interest) as the components of allegiance, but there seem others, e.g., the principle of team spirit.
Smith attributes three things to 'police power': cleanliness, security, and plenty.
injury
(1) as a man
--- --- (1a) in body
--- --- --- --- (1a1) harm to bodily integrity
--- --- --- --- (1a2) harm to physical liberty
--- --- (1b) in reputation
--- --- (1c) in estate
--- --- --- --- (1c1) real right
--- --- --- --- (1c2) personal right
(2) as a member of a family
(3) as a member of civil society
(4) as a ember of ecclesial society
Piety to the dead quite clearly extends beyond freshness of memory.
Extensive division of labor requires an already established prosperity beyond subsistence.
Probity and punctuality are essential elements in commerce.
The medievals deliberately and explicitly beat words in order to make obvious connections obvious, but were later attacked for this, because the connections were then so often verbally obvious, as deriving the connections from the words. This is one of the dangers of adapting language to a system of thought or an approach to inquiry.
"The human world is characterized by the opposition of home and alien, by a temporal dimenion and mood coloring." Patocka
"Thought and language are an explanation of human freedom, an expression of the fact taht the world is at our disposal, that we are not purely passively determined by our environment and the tendencies emerging in it, but rather actively appropriate reality and dispose of it."
"All art orders and subjugates matter to human desire, but human desire is either for goods beyond us or goods limited to ourselves, and to 'ourselves' as limited in time, power, resources, etc." James Chastek
Even while engaged in explicit thinking, we all form opinions on things in the world that we do not distinguish from givens unless we find a need to do so.
The greatest achievements of even very skilled soldiers and generals have an element of luck in them; the same is true of artists and artisans. One sign of greatness of skill or training is that the lucky is used well, and crowns the competently good with splendor.
Some things that can be doubted nonetheless cannot be avoided.
The perceiving and the perceived are one, but not one and the same.
Challenge arguments establish a threshold and so depend heavily on teh cogency of the threshold, which sets what counts as success in the challenge. The threshold has to be justifiable by the teleology of inquiry.
'Ceteris paribus' is a causal phrase.
We assess alternate possibilities with respect to a cause -- epistemic possibilities with respect to cognitive power, physical possibilities with respect to physical causes, etc.
The notion that emotion is a better expression of spirituality than ritual is a grave error.
