Links of Note

 * Daniel Korman & Dustin Locke, On Debunking Color Realism (PDF)

* The most important device in the universe looks at a prop that famously shows up again and again in science fiction shows

* Reginald Mary Chua, Aquinas, Analogy, and the Trinity (PDF)

* Aaron Smuts, The Paradox of Suspense, at the SEP

* Bruce Langtry, Perception and corrigibility (PDF)

* Marcus Berquist, Wonder and Skepticism

* Anne Newstead, Cantor on Infinity in Nature, Number, and the Divine Mind (PDF)

* An interview with Cale Cohoe on spiritual exercises

* Nakul Krishna, Is goodness natural?, discusses Philippa Foot

* Owen Matthews, Where the Russian Gulag once thrived, life remains isolated

* Tristram Shandy, but just the punctuation

* Ethics Finder, a curated search engine for articles on topics relevant to Catholic moral theology (not all from a Catholic perspective)

* Keshav Singh, Sikh ethics sees self-centredness as the source of human evil

* Oldtime.radio has several channels of 24/7 old time radio programs, drawn from the Internet Archive

* Brendan Hodge, Why Catholics leave; why Catholics stay, at "The Pillar"

Abyss & Sea 14

 13

Autumn was wet and winter was very dry. When by winter solstice there had been not even a flake of snow, this touched off a debate among the old-timers. Some said it was an omen of a summer drought. Others said it meant there would be late snow and flooding. Whichever turned out to be right, in the meantime it was good weather for ship repair and made it possible to prepare for an even bigger surge of shipbuilding in the spring. New supplies of jute and canvas were laid in, supplies of sail-silk and pine tar, which had been severely depleted despite continual purchases, were restored. Ships were stocked with their appropriate furnishings, barrels and chests and nets and replacement parts. The great ships that had already come out of the shipyards had been given their first test-sailings and were out on their maiden voyages to give the final seal on their quality. Most of these were to the Chipou tribes to the east, but Disan expanded the routes to many lands with which they had previously only had occasional trade. As they began to return, they carried in their holds furs and metals and woods and spices, all in high demand in the Great Realm, and between that and the first pre-payments from the High King for the ships even before they had been delivered, the Sorean treasury, already impressive, grew very rich at a very fast pace.

Baia, in addition to everything else, devoted her attention to the formation of a foundation for foundlings, but very little came of it. Why she had such difficulties with it, she did not know; she suspected that people were more ashamed to be associated with foundlings than with exposure to children, but why that would be she could not say. Disan continued to have recurring nightmares about past battles, about the sky falling, about many things, some of which he could not remember very clearly when he awoke.

As the snowless winter began to pass and the vernal equinox grew nearer, Baia remarked to Disan, "I find it strange that among all the proposals that have been suggested for the Great Council, the High King has not made one with regard to this shipbuilding venture."

"Yes," said Disan thoughtfully. "It should be the sort of thing brought before the Great Council. I suppose he could be intending to do it by piecemeal approval of the kingdoms, the way the expedition to aid the Chipou was."

"It is a good example of how little we know of the High King's actual intentions."

"Hmm," Disan replied, and said nothing further.

Not long after, there was an important visit from the oldest prince of the kingdom of Ezrym, Prince Adven, son of Envren. When they received notice of it, there was the usual flurry of gathering gifts to give, shining bolts of silk in Sorean black, barrels of the finest rhodomel, a casket of teardrop-shaped pearls, rare pelts from the Chipou trade, a tapestry depicting Maia of the Pearls that Baia had originally intended to hang in her office. To greet the prince, Baia wore a cloak of red silk over a dress of blue silk and a net of pearls on her hair; Disan was in Sorean black with his ceremonial orikhalh armor and a pearl-studded orikhalh circlet on his head. Adven arrived on a lean bay stallion and silk of green beneath his riding cloak, and a small entourage of knights behind him. Adven was a tall man, more handsome than his father, and it was a very striking image.

"You are welcome, O Adven, son of Envren, son of Envren," said Disan, "to all of my hospitality and to all of the hospitality of my queen and of my people."

"I thank you, King Disan, son of Rezan, son of Belan," said Adven with a bow of his head, "and I account myself blessed to receive the hospitality of Your Highnesses."

There was a welcoming feast that night, with shrimp soup and roasted seabass and steaks of lion, with rhodomel and melomel. The next day, they held lunch with Adven in the inner gardens, as they had done before with Envren his father. The meal was a large one, in the Sorean fashion for lunch, with tuna and squid ink rice and pepper-spiced ostrich and dandelion salad, and specially spiced rhodomel to drink. They mostly chatted of weather and family and the like, but as the meal wound down, Adven had a small chest brought and asked to speak to the king and queen of Sorea privately.

"My father sent me here with a very specific set of instructions that he made me swear to follow," said Adven. "This," he said, opening the chest with a silver key, "is a gift he wished you to have." He pulled out of the chest something like a fur cloak made of squirrel-pelts. It was quite old and worn, and Baia received it with some confusion.

"Is there some meaning to this?" she asked.

"It is easier to show it than to say it," said the Ezryman prince. "If you will indulge me, Your Highness, please put it on, as you would an ordinary cloak."

Baia threw it over her shoulders, and Disan involuntary cried out, because there was suddenly no Baia there. Instead, where the queen had been was a black squirrel of the kind that is common in many parts of the Great Realm. The next moment, the squirrel was gone, and Baia was there again, taking off the cloak. Speechless, she handed it to Disan, who put it on and vanished in the same way, replaced by a red squirrel. Baia waved her hand where he had been, but it encountered only air. The red squirrel bounded around a bit, and then the squirrel was gone and Disan was there again, taking off the cloak, a look of complete astonishment on his face. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and finally managed to choke out, "How is this even possible?"

Adven shrugged. "It is something my grandfather brought back from the war against the Court of Night. It is a secret we have guarded closely, and it is a sign of my father's good opinion of you that he gives it to you."

Baia shook her head. "It is remarkable," she said.  "I have never heard of such a thing."

"It was like in a dream, when you are both yourself and something else," said Disan.

Adven smiled at their amazement. Then he grew sober and almost grave. "This is only part of the fulfillment of my promise to my father. I also have a verbal message, which I was told I must repeat word for word. That message is this: 'This is a gift to allow you to see what would otherwise be hidden; keep it secret. Beware the Honey Witch, for she has a power from the Court of Night to bend the mind.'" Adven sighed, and then said, with some hesitation, "I feel honor-bound, in light of this message, to warn Your Highnesses to be wary of anything that my father says. His behavior has become quite erratic over the past few years. He disappears for long periods of time and when he is home, he is obsessed with the idea that someone is attempting to poison him. Given that he has also become obsessed with the doings of the Tavran household, I can well guess who the 'Honey Witch' is supposed to be. But my father is not well. I would not have played the messenger here if he had not demanded my promise. Proceed with caution."

"I thank you," said Disan. "Your father is fortunate to have a son as honorable as yourself."

"You are kind," said Adven. "In any case, I hope I can trust Your Highnesses to discretion in this matter."

"Of course." said Baia.

Universal Doctor

 Today is the feast of St. Albert the Great, Doctor of the Church. From his eucharistic work, On the Body of the Lord, Distinction 1:

This is the sacrament of sacraments, the Eucharist, containing every grace, food giving growth for eternal life, viaticum strengthening us to complete the journey of our exile, and the pledge of eternal salvation, and the communication of all holiness.

I say, therefore, that this sacrament is placed in six genera because of the innumerable graces that it contains. Nor is there one genus that is able to contain so many graces. For it is in the genus of grace, gift, food, communion, sacrifice, and sacrament.

[Albert the Great, On the Body of the Lord, Surmanski, tr.,  The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2017) p. 31.]

Fortnightly Book, November 14

The first American novelist to make a significant splash on the world stage was Charles Brockden Brown. Born in 1771 in Philadelphia, his parents wanted him to be a lawyer, but he found he had no taste for it and spent time instead trying to build a career out of writing. His early worked did not sell particularly well, but Brown's extensive narrative experimentation caught the interest of other authors, so that his novels were the first American novels to be translated into various European languages. He was especially influential on English Romantics -- he was a favorite of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, and was widely recommended by some of the great literary names of the day.

His novel, Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, was published in 1798.  It has sometimes been criticized as a gimmick novel -- spontaneous combustion and ventriloquism (which Brown often calls by the older name 'biloquism', to get the play on words of 'double tongue') both play a significant role. The story of uncanny happenings and murder is often read as a criticism of naive and over-idealized views of democracy, as it focuses on the features of real life that disrupt democratic life: lies, illusions, misrepresentations, superstitions, secrets, religious fanaticisms, utopian zealotries, intellectual obsessions, use of scientific knowledge to manipulate people.

The version I have also has Brown's sequel-fragment, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, so I will be reading that as well.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator" at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end....

Summary: The Bergsons are a Swedish immigrant family in Nebraska; we open with Alexandra Bergson and her little brother Emil. Emil has lost his kitten up a pole, and another boy, Carl Linstrum, helps to retrieve it at Alexandra's request; Emil then plays with the kitten with another girl, Marie Tovesky.

It is a simple beginning, just a few children in the farming communities of Nebraska. But the thing about children is that they grow up, and in ways you could never expect. Alexandra has a head for farming, a natural talent, and she will become very successful in the area while other farming families around her fail. Carl Linstrum, Alexandra's closest friend in youth, is from one such family; he himself will eventually go off to become an engraver, and then later will go with a friend to Alaska to find gold. The middle Bergson children, Lou and Oscar, hardworking, competent, and perpetually malcontented, will do well on Alexandra's coattails, but as the narrator notes, they would have been much happier in a city with their roles all set out for them than they can be on the farming frontier, where all roles have to be improvised by imagination and dogged persistence. Little Emil will grow up, too, and go off to college. It will be clear enough that he and Marie are a little sweet on each other at one point, but nothing will come of it then; Emil will go to Mexico to see the world and Marie will marry a local man, Frank Shabhata, handsome and unruly. 

Marie's marriage will not be exactly a bad one, but as Marie notes at one point to Alexandra, she is the wrong woman for Frank; she loved him genuinely once, but it took being married to him to understand the kind of woman he needed, and that woman was not her. For his part, Frank is gnawed by a vague sense of jealousy, although it's not jealousy that can be directed anything, as Marie is a good Catholic and is determined to make the marriage work in the best way she can despite no longer loving him. But then Emil returns, in full blossom of manhood, and -- well, an old flame colliding with the gasoline of a jealous man is an old story.

Of all the people she had ever known, Carl was really the only friend that Alexandra had; they had toyed with the idea of marriage once, but Carl, who had nothing, had instead gone off to try to make a fortune. He returns eventually and the two will marry and visit Carl's claim in Alaska; but it is clear that Alexandra will return to Nebraska, where she very surely belongs.

A wedding, or at least the promise of one, is traditionally the ending of a happy story, but this work is a sad tale, full of people with profound and distinctive potential that the world somehow never quite accommodates. We live, grow old, and die against a background that goes on quite well without us, and that is the way of things. But for all that our paths never go quite straight, we can and do love, and we can be and are loved, on the crooked paths we walk.

There are books that show most of their power on first reading, and there are books that show most of their power on re-reading, and this, I think, is one of the latter. The tale of those children and that kitten reads much more deeply when you know where they all will end up. 

Favorite Passage:

"You belong to the land," Carl murmured, "as you have always said. Now more than ever." 

 "Yes, now more than ever. You remember what you once said about the graveyard, and the old story writing itself over? Only it is we who write it, with the best we have." 

 They paused on the last ridge of the pasture, overlooking the house and the windmill and the stables that marked the site of John Bergson's homestead. On every side the brown waves of the earth rolled away to meet the sky. 

 "Lou and Oscar can't see those things," said Alexandra suddenly. "Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brothers' children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while."

Recommendation: Highly Recommended. While not a long story, it weaves together slowly, so it is important to have the patience to let all the pieces fall into place.

Abyss & Sea 13

 12

Summer passed and the Midsummer Festival came and went without much that was out of the ordinary. A number of important things happened around the time of Soromir's annual Pearl Festival at the end of summer, however.

First, before the festival, an official decree went out from the Porphyry Mountain officially setting the date for the great meeting of the Great Council of the Ten Kings and Two around the vernal equinox of the next year. The Ten and Two, as it is often called, is one of the most important occasions in all of the Great Realm, when the Twelve Kingdoms meet together. Only a Great Council can issue Decrees of the Twelve Crowns, the highest law beneath the Orikhalh Tablets. The next several months would necessarily see a flurry of correspondence among the royal households of the kingdoms as agreements were formed as to what proposals to sponsor; the finalized proposals would then be sent to the Porphyry Mountain to be placed on the Great Council agenda, and, when that was done, the High King would send out copies of all proposals to all the royal houses. Everyone had known that the Great Council would occur the next year, but doing it at the vernal equinox rather than midsummer set it unusually early, requiring everyone to speed up what had been expected to be a more leisurely process.

"The sands in the hourglass start to run," said Disan to Baia.

"Yes," said Baia; "the only reason for holding the Ten and Two so early, at least when there is no emergency, is if the High King intends to propose a major cooperative project over the summer."

The second important event happened during the Pearl Festival itself. Disan and Baia were in Soromir, after having visited the pearl oyster beds with the traditional gifts for the pearl divers. There were banners everywhere and booths selling foods and trinkets of every kind. There was dancing and music and laughter; there were children running in and out of the crowds; there were jugglers and stage magicians and rhapsodists declaiming poems and stories. And then the earthquake came. 

It began quickly and it hit hard, shaking everything immediately. Disan, who had been buying sweetmeats from a vendor, and was knocked to the ground by it. Booths began collapsing immediately and people started screaming and running. The wall of a nearby building began to crack. Disan pulled himself to his knees, putting his hands on the ground and closing his eyes, feeling for the semblance of life. Then he shouted (for the noise was by this point very great), "Earth, do you uphold the pacts and the covenants?"

The answer, slow and deep, came: "I uphold them, my king."

"Then be still for me!"

The shaking did not stop immediately, for earth is an element that changes slowly, but it began immediately to subside. He remained kneeling, with his hands on the ground, for the pacts and covenants that bound the land itself were the oldest and most distinctive of all, and so rarely invoked that Disan himself did not know how far they extended or how clearly his authority would be recognized under them. When it had subsided to a trembling and he was reasonably sure that he would not have to invoke the pacts and the covenants again, he rose and went to find Baia. Baia had been crouching to pet a child's tame fox when the shaking began, so had no more serious an injury than a bruised elbow. Disan was worse off, with his lower right arm heavily scraped up from his fall, but both of them were very fortunate. As they helped to organize the immediate recovery, and tried to keep people calm in the face of the waves of small aftershocks that followed, it became clear that the damage to Soromir was extensive, and dozens of people had died as walls collapsed or roofs caved in, and injuries both major and minor were common. Soromir was never built for withstanding earthquakes; even the oldest of old timers could not remember even a legendary story in which it had ever had one. Even so, things might have been much worse; because it had been during the Pearl Festival, most people were outside and in the open, so that most injuries were from falls and not from crushing, as might well have been the case on another day.

Soromir was not alone in experiencing the earthquake. By the end of the day it had become clear that everywhere on the Island had experienced it. Over the next several days, it became clear that the entire kingdom had done so. The shipyards all along the coasts were heavily damaged, and perhaps a half dozen of the many ships being built in them, each one worth a small fortune, would have to be scrapped entirely and begun again. And as the weeks went by, it became clear that nowhere in the Great Realm had been free of the shaking. Andra, which lies between the Khalad Mountains and the Golden Shore, was badly hit. Earthquakes in Andra are not unknown, but they are usually mild; no one could remember one so severe. A fissure had opened up on the mountainous end and the fires of the earth had poured out, devastating farmlands, and most of Myrander, the chief city, was badly damaged. The wife of King Zalan, Itta, died when the roof of a wing of the palace collapsed. This should not have happend at all, for the palace was a true neyat, and therefore should have maintained its integrity under any circumstances. Most Soreans on hearing the story attributed it to Andran corner-cutting, muttering the universal saying about making gold wire by giving two Andrans one coin, but Disan was not so sure, and he had the chanters check the chantments running throughout the walls and of Neyat Sor. The Khaljans, who lived in mountain villages and in caverns in the Khalad Mountains themselves, were said to have suffered many deaths due to cave-ins and landslides. But there was no place in the entire realm that was unaffected.

The third important thing that happened was perhaps less striking, and might perhaps not be considered important at all in comparison with the first two, but it affected Baia deeply. A few weeks after the earthquake, Disan was away assessing some of the shipyards, and Baia was visiting in and around Soromir to assess how rebuilding was going and whether there were poor folk who needed assistance in recovering. In doing this, she stopped at a small farmhouse outside the city. The men were away in the fields and the women of several small farms had come together to keep each other company in their various chores and crafts. It was apparently something they often did in the afternoons, helping with the chores and crafts at one of the farms and a few days later doing the same at another, something that they could do because all the farms were small and in close proximity. They were all at least a decade older than Baia, and most were considerably older than that. The old farmwife whose farm it was, was doing her butter-churning as Baia came in; others were sweeping or dusting; others were tying various vegetables in strands of twine so that they could hang and dry; one woman, older than most, was preparing melons for pickling . Baia volunteered herself and Asaia to help, but the women were reluctant to assign them chores; when she insisted, they put Baia and Asaia in charge of keeping an eye on the infant, a boy who was just learning the mysteries of propulsion by crawling and thus required continual supervision.

Baia herself was not much of a conversationalist, but Asaia was of a chatty temperament, and between her talking and Baia's occasional interjections, they learned much of the farms in the area and how they had been affected by the earthquake.

"We were fortunate," said the farmwife. "This house was built sturdy, so we only required a few minor repairs. I have cousins with a farm on the other side of the island who have to rebuild almost everything."

"One of the women from around here, Enna," put in another of the women, "is not here because her son died; he was cutting wood when the earthquake began and hit his head on a stone."

"Very sad," another said. "He was a promising boy."

"It is a terrible thing to lose a child," another said, shaking her head.

"I have no doubt of that," said Baia, holding the little boy up and looking at his big eyes as he smiled at the sudden surge of height and sense of flight. "Whose boy is this?"

"I suppose he would be mine, after a fashion, Your Highness," said the farmwife. "Although all my own boys are grown. I am too old, perhaps, to be raising a child, but when I saw him crying there, my heart almost broke, and I could not bear to think of him being eaten by the ants."

"I do not understand," said Baia as she put the little boy back on her knee.

"She means that the boy was abandoned," said Asaia.

Baia was astounded. "Is this so?"

"It is so, Your Highness," said the farmwife. "He was abandoned on the hillside, with no father and no mother, and I could not leave him be."

The queen looked down at the boy, who was playing with her fingers. "How could anyone do such a thing?"

"It is these young people today," said the woman preparing the pickling. "They are not brought up as they should be."

"Every generation says that," another woman said. "Our mothers said it of us, and their mothers said it of them, and probably their grandmothers said it of their mothers."

"And they were no doubt all correct," the woman at the pickling stubbornly said.

It was apparently an old argument between them, because everyone else made a sudden effort to change the subject, and the conversation went on to more pleasant things. Eventually, Baia handed the little boy off to a woman who had finished up the sweeping and took her leave. Before she did so, she gave a bag of gold to the farmwife and said to her, "You have done a good thing." Then she took off a small ring with a pearl and said, "Keep this, and if you need any additional money for the raising of the boy, send it to Neyat Sor with your request."

As Baia and Asaia went on their way, Baia asked Asaia if she had ever heard of infants being left abandoned.

"While it is not common, in Tavra it does happen," Asaia said. "Does it not happen in Sorea?"

Baia shook her head, replying, "I have not heard of such a thing here. There are peoples on the western continent that do this, but exposure of infants is forbidden by the Orikhalh Tablets. How can a people call itself civilized if they do it?"

"Well," said Asaia diplomatically, "it is sad when it happens, and the Orikhalh Tablets are important, but they are, after all, just rules, and sometimes following rules does not get the best results. No doubt it only happens when they are in a terrible situation."

If Baia had an answer to this, or even heard it, she gave no indication, but was instead lost in thought. Having never had a child despite wanting one, the whole thing bothered her deeply, and over the next several days she would sometimes lapse into brooding for no obvious reason.

Dashed Off XXIV

readiness to appear, either (A) 'created purposely' to appear or (B) continuing to exist when not appearing; note that (A) just moves it back to a cause that is (B)

explanations of the form [disposing cause + particularizing/activating cause]

cooperative vs compulsive measures of government

Brilliance is only as good as its paideia allows.

People seem to find it easier to process and apply normative descriptions than prescriptions.

modalities of personhood: creature, image of God, member of household, citizen/subject

hope & the sense of adventure

All of philosophy, East and West, is filled with altars to the Unknown God.

externality: "the capacity of being taken notice of by more than the perception of one mind" (Shepherd EPEW 35)

evidence for reliability vs evidence for trustworthiness

logical systems as abstract machines

Those who genuinely dare to be wise do not forget the teachings of their fathers and mothers.

Human words are not static; by their nature they flow out.

Love transfigures knowledge to wisdom.

Body transfigured becomes manifestation.

Life turns the physical into sign.
semiosis as living, abstractly considered

Fight scenes in movies are made interesting by story, by choreography, and by the visual context shaping it.

The earliest references suggesting a collection of Paul's letters (2 Pt and 1 Clem) are both from Rome.

In his greetings, Paul substitutes his apostleship for what would usually be identification by household or city, and changes charein (greetings) to charis (grace).

Inspiration works in the manner of a final cause or lure.

Mt 9:36 -- What moves Christ's pity most is not the illness but the lostness.

"For that which we call ourselves, and that which forms any individual mind, is a continued capacity in nature, which yields a liability to sensation in general." (Shepherd EPEU 42)
-- As she notes, this gives us as well the sensations being such as would occur to (possible) other minds like our own.

sensation of passing through different points of space --> extension of space / unresisting medium

'Inordinate' is relative to appropriate end; appropriateness is relative to the nature of the thing.

Psalm 1 on the temptations of the World

The primary difficulty with the problem of the external world is superabundance of information, not paucity. Skepticism gets its results by introducing hypotheses to flatten the evidence arbitrarily; this flattening, like projection from globe to plane, introduces distortions as well. Nonetheless, as map projections, the skeptical flattenings can have use in bringing out features of the globe.

Every positive right is constituted by the remedies that makes it possible.

We do not merely sense; we use our senses.

analogical inference
(1) from bare similarity
(2) from complex of similarities
(3) from system of similarities

light activating a body to activate by light the eye

We know that reality exceeds what we can articulate because we never run out of things to articulate.

gifts as speech acts

developmental delay, medial delay, and resistential delay in causation

Shepherd's analysis of memory: masses of sensible qualities + idea of lapse of time + idea of removed causes
-- thus memory is both a temporal and a causal experience
-- the lapse of time includes the self-ness of memory -- it is the perception of our own continuous existence as able to link the original experience and the remembering

"Self is always considered as a continuity...." (Shepherd, EPEU 139n)

Shepherd's definition of miraculous evidence: "a similarity in the course of nature, with respect to the necessity and action of efficient cause, but a variety from its apparent regularity, in order to be used as a means toward a specific end." (EPEU 145)

power, wisdom, goodness --> fear/respect, trust, love

modalities as modalities of powers

miscibility and immiscibility are 'properties' applying to pairs of chemical substaces

Shankara
The Lord is
(1) cause of origin of the world
-- -- like clay is substance of jar
-- -- like gold is substance of gold ornaments
(2) cause of the substance of the world
-- -- like magician is source of illusion
(3) cause of reabsorption of the world
-- -- like creatures reabsorbed into earth

conscientious humanity, conscientious citizenship, conscientious professionalism

God considered as alethic Diamond : principle of noncontradiction :: God considered as deontic Diamond : first principle of practical reason :: God considered as actual : principle of causality :: God considered as alethic Box : principle of primacy

US Constitution, Article III, Section 2, Clause 1 clearly recognizes the law/equity distinction

"The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself." Kant

q is a natural consequence of p
suppose q is found true
q implies ~(~q)
therefore q rules out rivals of p that imply ~q
therefore p is more likely to be true than before

A very large part of using one's own reason is determining what authorities to trust.

"By denying abstractions, Berkeley denied analysis -- by denying analysis, he truly kept up the associations of the vulgar...." Shepherd (EPEU 304)

In assessing the veracity of men and women, we are not directly assessing the truth and falsehood of what they say, but rather where they stand with respect to temptations related to truth and falsehood. (Do they have incentive to lie, do they have a history showing a susceptibility to temptation?)

No one can take a survey of human argument and reasonably conclude that polemic is not a pervasive mode of human argument on serious matters; indeed, argument wholly devoid of polemic only exists under artificial conditions.

People often retreat to polemic when they feel themselves pressured to be hypocritical, or to argue under assumptions they think inappropriate.

Scripture as prophetic and apostolic presence

Everything holy is dangerous.

three kinds of aesthetic response: formal admiration (to artful presentation), catharsis (in response to tragic events), material admiration (sense of how well artful presentation presents tragic events)

storytelling as classification-facilitating

The Church is both catholic and apostolic, and therefore looks both forward and backward.

Salvation by its nature is something that must be prayed for.

yes/no question as a 'subpossible' modality

to endure evil, to wait prayerfully for Christ, to rejoice in God

What is it in itself?
What is it in respect to another?
from predication of what is wholly in itself to predication of what is wholly to another:
substance | quantity | quality | relation
extrinsic but more in itself: action, place, position
extrinsic but more to another: passion, when, vestment

People treat elections as magic, definite and precise and immediately clear, but in reality every election is more like a cooking or brewing process.

creative ideas as 'potentially valuable improbable constructions' (Fedyk & Xu)

Lauren N. Ross, "Causes with material continuity" (2020)
-- 'material continuity' here means 'reliable movement of material from cause to effect'
-- meets a minimal interventionist criterion, so can be regarded as genuine causes
-- contrasts with contact-interaction causation (dominoes falling series) and also absence/prevention causation
-- useful to consider because they help us differentiate distinct causal systems
-- at least two main categories: (1) manufacturing (material transformed); (2) movement (material flows through)
-- one way to study is to use tracing & tagging techniques (traces are relatively inert in, or at least only minimally interactive with, the relevant system, but are distinctively recognizable so they can be identified and followed -- e.g., dyes or radioactive isotopes or radio tags). Use of these requires prior understanding of the system as causal, so a proper tracer can be identified; the technique is used to get more precise and particular information.

The word is implicit in the person, the person is explicated through the word.

Hirschman argues that there are three categories of conservative argument: futility, perversity, and jeopardy. This is true and valuable but less substantive than it looks because these are also the three categories of progressive argument, as well. When you argue for or against a change, you do so by arguing one can't really stay or go (futility) or that staying or going is actually self-defeating (perversity) or that staying or going harms something valued (jeopardy).

Mary in Luke-Acts as symbol of faith

"Prayer is higher than theology." Maximus the Confessor
"All beings are believed to exist in three modes: in essence, in difference, and in life."
"I think the human being sins according to four ways: by impulse, by deception, by ignorance, and by inclination."

It is good to believe together, and pleasant to hope together, when by charity we dwell together.

The choices of angels are related to each other as circles within circles, as wheels within wheels.

The increase of domestic devotion lays the foundation of evangelism.

debt as the engine of urbanization

	SENTIMENT	REASON
NATURE	temperament	contemplation
ARTIFICE	taste	action

[four aspects of good life, cf. Hume]

Being an expert on something is a functional role, not an oracular vocation.

"If there be no moral Truth, there is no Truth." (Whewell)

Anything with form of any kind is a potential source of knowledge.

Natural religion is familial religion.

the Church as a body, as a community, as a language, as a world

Every jural command posits a moral ground of authority.

One strength of representative government is that diffusion of responsibility provides a partial safeguard against subversion.

Half of willpower is prudence and planning.