This opens the notebook begun in June 2025.
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modalities of rights
(1) exercise
(2) support
(3) defense
(4) reparation
(5) shared versions of (1)-(4)
(6) vicarious versions of (1)-(4)
security by haystack
The human body is not merely a physical thing but a symbolic sign; the resurrected body will be not merely a sign of ourselves in the image of God but also a symbol of God's action and glory.
'Unit' is prior to 'one unit'; you must know the relevant unit to know whether there is one of it. In this lies much of importance in the philosophy of measurement.
In principle a language could have up to about 125 distinct tones (based on five levels of relative pitch, in which in a single tone may have up to two shifts); in practice, languages rarely have more than fifteen, and most fewer.
It's pointless to fear being wrong, because somewhere you already are; the wise fear not mistakes, but failure to learn from them.
People generally have significant difficulty making sense of the idea that a person, once existing, cna fail to exist; most cultures generally assume that existing persons just continue to exist in some form, and full rejection of this is not very common. Even the Epicureans thought that it took philosophical discipline and careful reasoning to believe it, arguing that people who claimed to believe it without such discipline and reasoning were equivocating. People even have some difficulty with the idea that a person can begin to exist; since we have features that indicate contingency, this is an easier sell for most people, but people are not always particularly consistent about it.
Any set of rational activities can be modeled; but no finite set of models exhaustively models rational activity.
We often learn that something is necessary by first discovering it is always normative. Necessity is then an obvious candidate for the reason why.
"We judge of the design of a contrivance by its predominant tendencies and effects." Edward Hitchcock
The only way to read Plato, Aristotle, etc., correctly is to reason with them toward that which they sought, namely, truth.
Outside of limited contexts, one does not usually reason directly to whether one should be a realist or anti-realist; this falls instead out of the relation fo the topic to vast regions of life.
It is impossible to know what your metaethics is until you know what your ethics is.
Democracies punish themselves by their own tendency to extremes.
Berekely and accepting the given as a gift
"A people devoid of imitation are incapable of improvement, and must go down; for stagnation of necessity brings with it decay and ruin." Alexander Crummell
"...the idea of God contains, inherently, such transforming power in a nation, that it makes or unmakes, according as it is clear, and right, and grand; or, on the other hand, is low, and rude, and sensual."
"A people are always as high as their idea of God."
"Excellence is first rooted in truths. Preeminence springs from ideas. Elevation is the product and outgrowth of convictions."
Analogical inferences may be modulated by our sense of the 'distance' between analogues.
Sensory perceptions by their nature give candidates for things -- this, which i am seeing, is a candidate for a man. Many -- a great many -- of these candidates check out; others (e.g., stump on a dark night) do not.
testimonium intus spiritus sancti
Note that this phrase in fact gives us an account of sorts: it is a testimony, i.e., witnessing event (one thing indicating another), internal rather than external (not sensory perception of evidence beyond oneself, of spiritual things rather than material things), specifically under the aspect of holiness. We also have a set of analogues in relation: human testimony of the Holy Spirit, external experience of the holy (e.g., burning bush), internal experience of spiritual things (e.g., presential self-knowledge and internal knowledge of otherness), internal experience of the external (e.g., memory & imagination), within the web of which we can locate this classificationally.
the sense of culpability (I would be wrong deliberately to do this) and the sense of piacularity (To do this, even unintentionally, would be a transgression)
free decision & interpretation of ambiguity
Sometimes when people call something 'subjective' all they are actually indicating is that the thing requires coordinating multiple tests & heuristics of different kinds rather than having a single criterial test yielding a single quantiative measurement.
All societies have a problem with political parasitism, in which people try to divert resources of the state, which exists to facilitate citizenship in civil society, into things less and less associated with either citizenship or civil society.
Advanced physics tends to tribalize into competing interpretive camps. This seems to arise because the structure of physics as a field at present is dominated by a concern with what must be done next. To work in this, one must interpret what has been done so far, and in the absence of an interpretation that is currently having an extended run of success experimentally, physicists break up according to their different sense of what is interesting and their different evaluations of what is promising.
the form by which one conforms (form proper) vs the form to which one conforms (exemplar)
One of the checks on each branch of the government is the limit of the workload its core can stand: Congress is restricted by the time it has to pass legislation, the President by the number of things he can directly consider, the Supreme Court by the number of cases it can handle. But this also limits their ability to check other branches.
Traditions should answer less to the opinions of the age than to the truths that are eternal.
The primary problem with the Asherah is that she usurps the place for which God (El) designated Israel.
literal use as having proper, deontic, and fictional modes
-- the latter two sometimes marked in English by 'de jure' and 'de facto'
You begin discovery by observing and by speculating, and then by gradually integrating both into each other.
Local consistency is not good enough for human thought; consistent thought requires a constant end, always working in and with the local consistency.
the Euthyphro problem for the man-loved
the Euthyphro as an a fortiori argument for an anti-sophist conclusion
A Marxist analysis of fictional objects works surprisingly well for a number of obvious cases (perhaps bets precisely for the most famous obvious cases, like Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes).
the novel as "subjective epic" (Goethe)
Good bankruptcy laws facilitate market experimentation.
What counts as a means of production depends on the ideological construction of production; it happens by restructuring the ends of production.
Means of production are always means of production of means.
Every theory of truth presupposes a theory of mind.
The heart of ceremony is memoration.
baptism & eucharist of desire (spiritual communion being a specification of the latter in the presence of the sacrament; but the eucharistic intention is implicit in baptism)
-- ?: Those who die, having been baptized, but before eucharistic communion, die having communed in spiritual intention, either properly or vicariously.
The eucharist is the Person of Christ; this is key.
Someone who lacks visual imagination might well think that "Picture your loved ones" is a figure of speech, a metaphor for just directing one's thought toward them.
Working with others is a good way to learn how to deal with one's own failures.
kinds of holy feasts
(1) vital: nativities, life events, deaths
(2) metonymic: relics (e.g., translations), instruments (e.g., Cross), seats (e.g., St. John Lateran)
(3) titular: titles
cognation, contact, and coincidence
The largest indigenous families of North American are Uto-Aztecan (whose largest extent member is Nahuatl), Na-Dene (whose largest extant member is Navajo), and Algic (whose largest extant members are Cree and Ojibwe). But North America has universal linguistic diversity, with many smaller families and isolates whose relation to each other is uncertain and difficult to assess. The languages tend to be polysynthetic and consonant-heavy, with head-marking agreement, but there are many variations and large numbers of relatively unique features for particular languages. Some have speculated a link between Na-Dene and the Yenisei language of the Ket people in Asia, but the evidence is primarily genetic rather than genuinely linguistic.
Being is most perfected in love.
The universal destination of goods requires the existence of market interactions of some kind, due to the inevitability of uneqal access (we would often have to exchange things in hand, trade 'places' in access networks, etc., all of which must be negotiated).
Your surmises should always reach farther than your own creative will.
Freedom at its foundations can have no other end and aim but good itself.
the things more excellent than the mind itself
"The possibility and intelligibility of things are inferred from their relation to an efficient power which is capable of bringing them to being and from their relation to an intellect that is capable of understanding them." Aquinas
"The unfailing order we observe in things is sign of their being governed."
Every particular perspective implies a God's-eye point of view.
Governance consists in preserving things in goodness and in moving things to the good.
the cause of hypothesizability
Due process is always with respect to an end.
It is dangerous to confuse stupidity and compassion.
Invincible ignorance exculpates from guilt of being outside the Church, but it does not and cannot save. All it means is that, having had no opportunity, one is not guilty of rejecting opportunity, and thus deserving of none of the penalties specifically arising from rejecting the opportunity.
fictional role : prop :: law : title
An umbrella used as an umbrella in a play is both an actual umbrella and a fictional umbrella.
God would be victorious over sin if even only one person were saved; that is the value of each person's salvation.
The Church of charity is itself the juridical Church, for charity gives birth to right.
baptism as kenosis
The divine mysteries are infinite, and there are uncountable vast regions that are hardly explained, so that it is easy to get lost and go wrong. One must therefore always keep an eye on the maps of the prayerful before one, and often check the compass of one's own prayer and the stars of the public liturgy, and one must never let communication with the rest of the Church wholly break. Above all, one must never simply go off on one's own whim or without studious preparation.
Act always in a manner consistent with the reason of the most common authority and with the most common good, i.e., God as source and God as end.
We mark out important things by pageantry.
humanity as one, moral, universal, and familial society
-- all four of these 'notes' are presently in a defective form due to original sin, but the signs of them still shine through everywhere.
People have a tendency to forget that lex orandi is a lex -- it is, in fact, a customary law of the Church, the Church's custom of prayer given force of precept by the people either directly or through the pastors looking out for their spiritual health.
A sincerely sung Credo is better doctrine than the finest homily.
From the Life of Christ and the history of the Church, we begin to understand the infinite riches of grace.
The history of the Church is the extension of the Life of Christ, the life of Christ as moral, juridical, and sacramental person.
Our moral life cannot be elevated to supernatural community unless our rites are elevated to supernatural community.
anointing of the sick as apokatastasis
Liberal theology is all too often merely the ghost of theology, confined to haunting the edges of human life.
One's understanding of eternal life depends on one's understanding of baptism; the two cannot be wholly separated.
In art, realism is constructed, and therefore is never the default.
the real vs. the realistic, the impression vs. the impressionistic, the expression vs. the expressionistic
The hypothesis that is simplest with respect to one kind of inference may not be according to another.
Genuine development of doctrine is never willful.
Division between stimulus and response is determined by causal analysis; it is not given in the experience itself.
Scientific fictions allow for explanation by proxy.
Nothing is luck except in the context of purpose.