Dashed Off XXIX

This ends the notebook that was completed toward the end of July 2024.

******

 The Creed is not a menu; the parts inter-relate.

According to legend, St Endelienta (daughter of King Brychan & sister of St. Nectan & St. Dilas) was King Arthur's goddaughter; while a hermit in Trentinney, she lived on the milk of a cow, which was killed by the Lord of Trentinney when the cow stryed onto his land. King Arthur, learning of this, sent his men to kill Lord Trentinney, but Endelienta restored him back to life.

Catholic doctrine gives new light even to self-evident truths.

"Equality, liberty, and fraternity are principles which mutually suppose each other, and are resolved one in the other, as the human, the political, and the domestic solidarities are dogmas which are resolved in and mutually suppose each other." Donoso Cortes

resemblance, contiguity, and causation as elements in precedent

Philosophical skepticisms are rarely as necessary as skeptics like to pretend.

the sense of soical order as a moral endowment

We only tie sets of actions to traffic lights because they are already conceptualized as traffic lights. Nobody stops on a red light that is not already recognized as the red of a traffic light.

No punishment can be ascribed to an action without a classification that makes the action discernible in a way relevant to the punishment.

The actions associated with institutional facts are not stable and predefined. We are sometimes incentivized to stop at borders and sometimes not, sometimes incentivized to use currency as legal tender and sometimes not, etc., through all the possible actions in myriad complicated ways.

What is defined as 'naturalistic' is often due more to cultural conventions in interpretations of natural things than to what is natural.

No human being is intelligent enough always to outsmart stupidity; stupidity is more constant than human intelligence can ever be.

The sacrament of reconciliation can vary in the ways that confession and satisfaction can.

"We cannot so abstract from Christianity its specific character, as to leave the general idea of religion behind." Nevin

Love is more perfect than duty.

We are none of us writers of our own story, which depends in great measure on an entire universe other than ourselves.

identity of indiscernibles as a principle of classification

Every human being is a germinal philosopher and every Christian a germinal theologian.

Revelation reverberates.

the categories as ways things can contribute to composition and mutability

The possibility of the Incarnation is implicit in the divine idea of humanity.

Sullivan (The Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia)
The Arian Syllogism:
(1) The Word is the subject of the human operations and passions of Christ.
(2) What is predicated of the Word must be predicated of him in his divine nature (kata physin).
Therefore (C) The human operations and passions of Christ are predicated of the divine nature (kata physin).
-- According to Sullivan, Athanasius and the Alexandrines rejected the minor (2); the Antiochenes rejected the major (1).

Phil 2:13: For God is the agent (energon) in you, both the willing and the acting (energein) according to purpose.

Acting for a reason is definitely distinguishable from doing what would make sense.

Every deontic logic can be given a design interpretation.

the intellect as agent intelligibility

Rational good is not unitary but a hierarchy.

Reason itself requires that we choose reason not only for reason's sake but for truth, goodness, beauty, etc.

General principles of classification
(1) contrastive identity: Everything is what it is and is not some other thing.
(2) indiscernibility of identicals: What is the same in what it is, is to that extent classifiable as the same.
(3) identity of indiscernibles: What is classifiable as the same is to that extent the same in what it is.
(4) sufficient reason: What is classifiable as the same or different is classifiable as such for a reason.

Citizenship implies powers of voluntary association.

Factional politics is a dangerous drug.

Conflict is part of how human beings organize.

The reality of the world cannot be bracketed off from the world itself without changing the phenomenon of the world. (Conrad-Martius)

Phenomenology can only get results relative to a reduction.

Wormelow Tump -- burial place according to legend of Arthur's son Amr.

Laws of nature explain as final causes.

Whether or not you can patch together different parts of possible worlds depends on teh possible worlds and the patches.
--> Lewis's argument form recombination is entirely in terms of objects; but possible worlds are not bare collections of objects but propositionally constructed. It is consistency of propositions, not objects of terms, that fundamentally matters.

Every civil society incorporates residues of previous societies.

Commentarial traditions are always a slow process of abstraction. Positions are analogized and then generalized, arguments put into a more general structure of objection and reply, ideas detached and used in new ways, distinctions made so that terms may be defined more precisely and in ways going beyond that which receives comment.

being as contrasted with
(a) not being
(b) being other
(c) appearing to be
(d) failing to be
(e) being like

Every fine art draws out aspects of every other fine art.

energy as mass & momentum with respect to field of effect

Memorialism tends to attribute to the Eucharist the effects of Gospel-reading and preaching.

We do not start with a distinction between natural and supernatural and find revelation appropriate to each; we start with revelation and find a distinction we crudely characterize by 'natural' vs 'supernatural'.

Imitating Christ is not being nice but giving one's body and pouring out one's blood.

Lawmaking is natural to human beings in much teh same way group-forming is.

Doubting does have some of the structure of Cartesianism; but other cognitive acts have other structures.

Creation is a foundational act in ontic, moral, jural, and sacral orders.

Civil society regulates the modalities of rights by customary law, by civil etiquette, by delegation, by negotiation, and by cooperative sanction.

incorporation of rights under due process vs under privileges or immunities (nnote that due process applies to persons and privilieges & immunities to citizens)

The Ninth Amendment direclty implies that there are rights of the people not dependent on the Constitution.

Gabriel as icon of the Incarnation

Christ's human intellect always had the light of glory, and in certain events -- Baptism, Transfiguration, Ascension -- the disciples were granted a foretaste, a slight glimpse, of what Christ always knew and what we shall always know in the order to come.

"But in a being that is absolutely without any plurality, there cannot be excellence, for there can be no such thing as consent or agreement." Jonathan Edwards

Reason inevitably asks how the doctrine of the Trinity can be true, but only fools think reason asks questions in order to avoid seeking answers.

Creation is a discursive space for glory.

Human practice by its very nature produces sufficient kinds or enough-kinds, e.g., straight enough, sufficiently like an animal, etc. What is more, this applies to scientific practice, as well -- frictionless enough, etc.

problems may be ill-posed
(a) as lacking what is required for any solution to be identified (indeterminacy)
(b) as having a surfeit of solutions
(c) as having a surplus of solutions

In popular sovereignty, the juridical person of the People is by legal fiction both lord and subject.

'Business is business', 'Rules are rules', etc., are classificatory statements, not bare identities, and their pragmatic implicatures arise from this classificatory aspect.

Bullying does not create dominance hierarchies; the former is a disruption of social order, the latter a structure of social order.

"The road to norms begins with pride (or with discontent, if something has gone wrong) in craftsmanship; caring about your work, perhaps partly for instrumental reasons, but importantly for intrinsic reasons as well." Sterelny

Hume's account of personal identity is in effect a juridical account of personal identity, and he explicitly puts aspects of it in juridical terms.

No autonomy rights can be inalienable because no one can guarantee taht they will never be in a situation in which they will need others to make decissinos for them -- as children, as elderly, as ill, in an emergency, etc.

Inference to the best explanation has the structure of defeasible disjunctive syllogism; the 'best' indicates that it has to be comparative, eliminating other explanations as (relatively) defective compared to what is concluded to be the best.

People do not lose their value just because they are dead.

Moral law requires a view of persons such that they can be of boundless worth (dignity) --> postulates of freedom, immortality, and God

Virtues determine by reason appropriate choices so as to avoid extremes arisign from the unpleasant and the pleasant.

qualia as residue of classification

rites as artificial habitudes

explanations of occurrences, existences, and endurances

What Goodman's Paradox shows is that every enumerative induction presupposes a classification, not merely incidentally, but in a load-bearing way.

Israel as corporate prophet of God (cp Torrance on mediation)

technobabble as magic (wizard-stuff for science fiction)

In salvation, participation is the ground of imputation.

"Christianity as the absolute religion, *must* in the nature of the case, take up into itself, and exhibit in a perfect form, the fragments and rudiments of truth contained in all relative religions. It is not a doctrine but a divine *fact*, into which all previous religious tendencies and developments are ultimately gathered as their proper end." Nevin

The fullness of justice requires a society adequate to it.

Shannon entropy & spread of probability distribution

Discreteness in QM is behavior like a harmonic oscillator.

A term is an organization of a field of meaning.

In moral matters, human beings have a temptation to dewll on fantasies rather than realities; prudence is necessary to prevent this from corrupting everything else.

Much of human creativity is founded on our ability to see ourselves and others as persons, or in light of persons.

The feeling of obligation is often an offshoot of the feeling of caring.

The amount of boredom in seems sometimes to expand to match the amount of entertainment.

"Social scientists follow their creator, because social science was created by capitalist society." George Grant
"When leisure is open to all, then education must be opened to all."

the five administrative offices of a lord: seneschal, chamberlain, butler, marshal, cupbearer

Consequences are not unified and simple things, but have many facets; the consequences of an action look different from the perspective of our sympathy and sense of compassion than they do from the perspective of our sense of responsibility to others, or our sense of honor and shame, or our sense of humor.

We can talk about finding our meaning in life because life as we know it is essentially probationary.

Four things drive toward civil governance: defect of lordship; religion; trade; discord among powerful families. (These all seem to do so by introducing or strengthening balanced division of powers.)

Arguments from evil are generally arguments from obscurity.

Because positive law is an artifact, it is essentially a part of a broader deontic framework just like every other artifact.

What Hart treats as 'contingent connnection' between law and morality is often merely the contingency of the particular laws themselves, not of their relation to morality as such.

Law is intrinsically a means and therefore ordered to fundamental ends; however, law cannot by its nature be ordered to just any arbitrary end.

Positive law is an externalization of rational principles into contingent circumstances.

All positive legislation has an active and a passive component, the active being contributed by lawmakers and the passive being those to whom it applies (officials, subjects, citizens); all positive legislation is thus a sort of co-legislation. The people are, so to speak, a silent partner.

All laws are put forward as reasons.

"Thus, then, we have three senses in which the expression 'This *is*' might be employed. First, it may imply identity secondly, it may imply that kind of representation which derives its force merely from the effect produced upon the spectator or receiver; thirdly, it may imply that kind of representation which is dependent only upon the intention of the author or giver." R. Wilberforce

All laws of nature have an implicit reference to totality of consistently interacting things.

Deontic seriality is the principle that no possible world is a deontic 'dead end' (Melissa Fusco) -- for any possible world, there is a deontically ideal world for it (which may be itself); no matter how non-ideal the world, a deontic world can be seen from it. (Shift reflexivity is that every deontically ideal world is deontically ideal for itself.)

People deny that there is a human nature in order to avoid responsibility for it.

The key issue in any simulation is relevant simplification, how to ignore things yet still have something relevant.

Presence is a kind of loose unity of being.

update as shifting reference state to another possible world

modus ponens as a product of classification relations (genus, species)

possibilities internal to a history (e.g., even in a deterministic history, if a light switch is sometimes on or sometimes off, both are possibilities for that switch in the history) & possibilities external to a history (if it takes more than one possible history to describe the light switch)
-- note that this is a generalization of diachronic vs synchronic

We often tame the unruliness of figurative language communally, by commonly using figurative expressions in particular ways that then serve as common reference points.

Faced with contradictions, we resolve the matter by rejection of one and acceptance of teh other so that the resolution is:
(a) wholly resolved, wholly secure: by proof
(b) wholly resolved, partly secure: by probable inference
(c) partly resolved, partly secure: by rhetorical persuasion
(d) partly resolved, insecure: by plausible representation.

history of philosophy -> strongly recurrent things -> 'perennial questions'

"There are two general ways of beginning the study of philosophy. One is by chance and the other is by following someone's advice." Ralph McInerny

Philosophical reasoning regularly draws on the testimony of the skilled.

Contradictions cannot be done, simpliciter -- they are not agibile. But God can do things we might think are contradictory because we did not see beforehand a subtle distinction.

Habitude VII

The next questions all depend crucially on two things that have been established about habitudes:

(1) They specify possible actions out of multiple possible actions.

(2) They belong to something only insofar as it is potential in some way.

 Can the intellect have habitudes?

It is clear that there are habitudes associated with the intellect, and this is assumed by St. Thomas's argument, but the question is whether the intellect itself has habitudes. A significant position that St. Thomas wants consistently to argue against is the position that held that we all have one intellect; if you hold this position, it's obvious that intellect-associated habitudes like knowledge vary from person to person, so they would have to be in the sensitive powers. To this Aquinas responds:

But this position, first of all, is against the intention of Aristotle, for it is manifest that sensitive powers are not rational by essence but only by participation, as is said in Ethic. I. And the Philosopher puts intellectual virtues, which are wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, in that which is rational by essence. Thus they are not in sensible powers but in the intellect itself. He also explicitly says, in De Anima III, that the possible intellect when it it made singular, that is, when it is reduced into the act of singulars by intelligible species, then comes to be according to act in the same way that a knower is said to be actual, which indeed happens when someone is able to work through himself, to wit, by considering; and even then it is in some way potential, but not as it was before learning and discovering. Therefore the possible intellect itself is that in which there is a habitude of knowledge by which it can consider even when it does not consider.

And second, this position is against the truth of the thing. For just as the power belongs to that which the working does, so too the habitude belongs to that which the working does. But to understand and to consider is an act proper to the intellect. Therefore the habitude by which one considers is properly in the intellect itself. (ST 2-1.50.4)

A few points are worth noting here.

(1) The first argument, from the mind of Aristotle, especially occurring immediately after the discussion on sensitive powers, indicates that Aquinas does not intend his position on habitudes in the sensitive powers to be a substantive change from Aristotle.

(2) Both arguments here also establish that the intellect is a free power; that is, in and of itself, it is capable of multiple possibilities, since this is a requirement for having a habitude non-derivatively and in the most proper sense.

(3) They both, of course, also imply that the human intellect, contrary to Aquinas's opponents, is not shared but individual.

(4) It follows from this position that habitudes belong to the potential intellect (because it can in some way be potential) and not the agent intellect.

Can the will have habitudes?

I reply that it must be said that every power that can be in diverse ways ordered to acting needs a habitude by which it can be well disposed to its act. But the will, since it is a rational power, can be in diverse ways ordered to acting. And thus it is fitting to put in the will some habitude by which it is well disposed to its act. It is also apparent from the very notion of habitude that it is principally ordered to the will, in that habitude is something one uses when one wills, as said above. (ST 2-1.50.5)

As St. Thomas notes in a reply to an objection (ad 2), this is because the will is more like the potential intellect than the agent intellect, in being both mover and moved. That is to say, the will, while not active, is not a purely active power, but involves a sort of potentiality by its nature.

Can angels have habitudes?

Angels, of course, differ from us in not being physical, so asking whether angels can have habitudes is not mere curiosity about angels, but a way of asking the question of whether having habitudes, even in the intellect and will, depends on the body, or on being physical or material in some way. Do we have habitudes only because we have bodies, so that habitudes are primarily concerned with bodily life? Aquinas holds that what matters for habitudes is not materiality but potentiality, and since angels are not pure act like God, they can have habitudes. From this, of course, it follows that not all habitudes are concerned with corporeal life.

However, with respect to this habitude, angelic intellect has itself differently from human intellect. For human intellect, because it is lowest in the intellectual order, is potential with respect to all intelligibles, just as prime matter with respect to all sensible forms, and therefore it needs some habitude to all understanding. But angelic intellect does not have itself as pure potential in the genus of intelligibles, but as a sort of act, although not as pure act (which is God's alone) but with mixture of some potential, and having less of potentiality the higher it is. (ST 2-1.50.6)

Of the kinds of habitude, the angels do not need habitudes with respect to nature, because they are not material, although it seems that they can have them, but they can have habitudes with respect to operation, and indeed need such habitudes to be united with God (a way of acting well), "by which they are conformed to God." (It follows from this, of course, that it is in principle possible for us also to have such godly habitudes, which will play a significant role in Aquinas's theology of grace.)

The parts that are mutually disposed by angelic habitudes are not physical parts, of course, but intelligible objects and volitional ends.

More Mighty than the Hosts of Mortal Kings

 Beethoven
by Maurice Baring

More mighty than the hosts of mortal kings,
I hear the legions gathering to their goal;
The tramping millions drifting from one pole,
The march, the counter-march, the flank that swings.
I hear the beating of tremendous wings,
The shock of battle and the drums that roll;
And far away the solemn belfries toll,
And in the field the careless shepherd sings. 

There is an end unto the longest day.
The echoes of the fighting die away.
The evening breathes a benediction mild.
The sunset fades. There is no need to weep,
For night has come, and with the night is sleep,
And now the fiercest foes are reconciled.

Habitude VI

 Habitude is qualitative ordering of the nature of some subject either well or badly to some act out of several possibles, through mutually disposing several things. As a quality, it requires a subject, and therefore Aquinas considers a number of questions concerned with the kind of subject for which habitude is an appropriate quality; since accidents are defined in relation to the substances that can have them, doing this clarifies several aspects of the definition. Rather than translate the whole question, as I did for the defining questions, I will make some comments with a few translations of select passages.

Can bodies have habitudes?

Aquinas argues that it depends. Habitudes dispose either to form or to operation. Habitudes always need to distinguish out some act out of several possibilities; bodies on their own are only determined to one operation, so bodies on their own develop no habitudes toward operations. However, habitudes to operation in the soul can be in a body secondarily, "inasmuch as the body is disposed and enabled to devote itself readily to the workings of the soul" (ST 2-1.50.1).

If, however, we speak of the disposition of the subject to form, then habitual disposition can be in body. And in this way health and beauty, and suchlike, are called habitual dispositions. But they do not completely have the notion of habitudes, because their causes are by their nature easily transformable.

In the reply to the second objection he further clarifies this by suggesting that health and beauty are habitudes comparatively -- they are 'difficult to change' relative to most things we consider dispositions -- but habitudes in the soul, like knowledge and virtue, are 'difficult to change' simply. I take it that the point is that bodily habitudes have a greater measure of dependency on things other than themselves than habitudes of the soul; that is, the difficult-to-change and the easy-to-change is a measure of relative independence.

In what way do souls have habitudes?

The soul does not naturally have a habitude to nature, because that would require something to which it is further disposed; this contrasts with the body, which has a habitude-to-nature with respect to the soul.  However, importantly, this also means that under the right conditions, the soul can have a habitude to a higher nature than itself; this can occur by divine grace, for instance, which gives us a habitude to the divine nature. In this way, the habitude takes as its subject the essence of the soul.

The usual way the soul has habitudes is by having habitudes to operations, which are themselves based on powers or capabilities. In this way, the habitude takes as its subject the powers of the soul.

Whether nutritive or sensitive powers of the soul can have habitudes?

Nutritive and sensitive powers are not in and of themselves capable of multiple possibilities because they "work from natural stimulation" (ST 2-1.50.3), ex instinctu naturae. Therefore, simply considered in themselves they do not have habitudes. However, rational powers are capable of multiple possibilities, so we can have habitudes in other powers of the soul insofar as they "work from command of reason".

On the basis of this, Aquinas concludes (ST 2-1.50.3 ad 1) that nutritive powers, which do not obey the command of reason, have no habitudes, but sensitive powers can obey the command of reason, and therefore can have habitudes. This is certainly true of human senstive powers, which are ordered naturally to rational powers; but what about the sensitive powers of animals other than human beings?

To the second it must be said that sensitive powers in brute animals do not work from the command of reason, but if brute animals are left to themselves, they work from natural stimulation, and thus in brute animals there are not any habitudes ordered to workings. There are nevertheless some dispositions in them ordered to nature, such as health and beauty. But because brute animals are through a sort of custom disposed by human reason to some working or another, in this way in brute animals habitude can in a certain way be put; thus Augustine says in the book of eighty-three questions, that we see the most savage beasts being restrained from that in which they have the greatest pleasures by fear of pain, and when this turns into custom for them, we call them tamed and gentled. However, the notion of habitude is incomplete as to voluntary use, because they do not have lordship of using or non-using, which it seems pertains to the notion of habitude. And therefore, properly speaking, in them there cannot be habitudes. (ST 2-1.50.3 ad 2)

'Use' is a technical term for St. Thomas; it is a particular act of will, the application of a thing to an operation; we are doing it when we apply a horse to riding or a stick to hitting by deliberately selecting this end for it. In doing this, our will is acting as a prime mover. In ST 2-1.16.2, he had concluded (also in agreement with Augustine in the Eighty-Three Questions) that it is an act exclusive to rational animals. At no point so far has he actually connected habitude and volitional acts of use; it comes out of left field here, but I think his idea is that properly speaking the brute animal gets the quasi-habitude, or habitude in a loose sense, that we call 'tameness', through use by a human will, and therefore the selection out of multiple possibilities is actually extrinsic to the disposition here.

This is a point on which St. Thomas seems very much to be deviating from Aristotle; but, Aristotle's remarks being somewhat scattered, it's difficult to say how far. I think one can argue that he is not so much differing as to substance as making a terminological adjustment, so that habitude in a strict sense is more closely connected to intellect and will; trained animals have habitudes in an extended sense by their connection to intellect and will, which in their case is outside the actual disposition. This raises a few questions that are not an issue in Aristotle's somewhat looser terminology, such as those with tool-use in other animals. I suspect St. Thomas would give the same answer to such questions that he gave in 2-1.16.2 about beasts using their members, that they do this from natural stimulation (or instinct; the Latin instinctus is not as narrow as the English 'instinct'), and thus not from use in the proper sense. It is very clear that we need to distinguish rational habitudes from other kinds; rational habitudes on every point of the definition of habitude fit the definition more 'tightly' than other habitudes do. But it's at least arguable that we should see Aristotle's looser sense of habitude as a sort of genus, in which they can differ in precisely how the multiple possibilities are involved, and Aquinas as concerned with the primary species of that genus, those that have volitional use as part of how we understand the multiple possibilities. 

While Aquinas flatly denies habitude in nutritive powers, the allowance of a habitude-in-a-broad-sense in the case of tame animals also raises the question of whether there might not be possible something similar in nutritive powers in plants (through horticulture) or in animals (through veterinary medicine).

These sorts of questions arise, I think, from the fact that St. Thomas does not give extensive explanations for some of his reasons, so there are unstated gaps. My guess is also that St. Thomas that, since in context he is building up to a discussion of virtues, the most proper habitudes, that he is really just thinking about virtue in these discussions, and thus not fully following through on the lesser questions of how this relates to the various roles dispositional qualities take in explaining animal behavior.

Intellect and will are in any case the primary and most proper subjects for habitudes, and thus should be kept for their own discussions.

A New Poem Draft

 Holy

the womb
and the tomb
is holy

and holy
the battle-field
of sorrow

the one alone
on the throne
is holy

and holy
rising sun
in the morrow

our deepest fear
drawing near
is holy

and holy
is the hope
beyond merit

the church-light
at midnight
is holy

and holy
the heaven
we inherit

Links of Note

 * Matt Whiteley, His Reason is Love, on Julian of Norwich, at "This Isle is Full of Noises"

* Daniel D. De Haan, Freeing the Will from Neurophilosophy: Voluntary Action in Thomas Aquians and Libet-Style Experiments (PDF)

* The Medieval Purse, at "Medieval Histories"

* Dean Zimmerman, The Metaphysics of Divine Presence and the Appropriateness of Worship (PDF)

* Kitten, College kids can't do math, either, at "Adorable and Harmless"

* Aaron Wells, Arguments for the Continuity of Matter in Kant and Du Chatelet (PDF)

* Amelia McKee, Albert the Great in a Gothic Painting: Teacher, Preacher, and Saint, at "Art for the Liturgical Year"

* Jordan MacKenzie, Just humour me: humour, humourlessness, and mutual recognition (PDF)

* Flame & Light, Speech Acts and Fictions II: The Fictive Use of Language, on Richard Gale's speech act theory of fiction

* Giulia Piredda, What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity (PDF)

* Gregory B. Sadler, Five States of Nature in Hobbes' Leviathan

* Miguel Garcia-Godinez, Easy Social Ontology (PDF)

Morning and Evening

 Now the commemoration of the passion that takes place daily on the altar in the offering of this sacrifice is signified by the perpetual sacrifice that was made at morning and evening. In the morning for the grace of strength, since in this life we require it in the morning that we may merit, but in the evening in dangerous weakness, since then we need the sacrament for viaticum. Both of these are spoken of in Psalm 141.2, "Let my prayer be directed as" -- supply "morning" -- "incense in your sight; the lifting up of my hand" -- supply "in the commendation of [my] soul" -- "as the evening sacrifice." [Eccl 11.6] "In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening let not your hand cease; for you know not which may rather spring up, this or that: and if both together, it shall be better."

[Albert the Great, On the Body of the Lord, Surmanski, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2017.]