Dashed Off XXV

 Every measurement involves a division of possibilities and an exclusion of some of those possibilities as divided.

Parents, having the primary duty to care for children, have the primary responsibility and power to take steps to ensure that they can fulfill that duty.

Every right establishes permissions, exemptions, and responsibilities. Every liberty establishes rights.

Law is an expression of the person and reflects the nature of the person.

The social ontology in which the eucharist is a memorial is a divine social ontology, not merely a human one, or even an ecclesiastical one.

the power of law as one of mhumanity's major survival capabilities

being -- creation -- life
truth -- illumination -- wisdom
goodness -- providence -- love
beauty -- culmination -- blessedness

life as higher-order power; power over powers

There is not a separate pactum for every sacrament, so what the pactum (Old Covenant / New Covenant) undergirds is a general sacramental efficacy, for minor and major sacraments alike, as occurring within the terms of the covenant.

Maintaining a memorial before the Lord is not a matter of reminding God but continuing to connect ourselves to what God remembers.

power -- power over power (life) -- epistemic power (light) -- deontic power (law)

Christ's giving of the keys to the apostles as a moral, jural, and sacral act

restoration of tradition
(1) education (commemoration, re-enactment)
(2) preservation practices
(3) scholarly reconstruction
(4) practical extrapolation
(5) salvage restoration
(6) reversal of destructive practices
(7) reservation for rewilding

Christian life as a study of the good

fraternitarian liberalism

the lay juror as a major contributor to the understanding of 'reasonable person' in law
-- what counts as reasonable under law has to be intelligibly consistent with what jurors take to be reasonable

In anything tha thas a genuine way it ought to be, it is impossible entirely to separate what it is and what it ought to be; this follows from the problem-solving character of 'ought'.

All social phenomena involve moral facts.

Every genuine rule of recognition will require that law be intelligible as law to a rational person, in order to be recognized as valid.

No legal system ever stops being based on custom.

It seems obvious that every legal system in actual use has multiple rules of recognition that are used in different contexts and coordinate only in imprecise and ever-changing ways.

Sovereignty is a matter of offices, and only indirectly of rules or habits.

Etiquette quite clearly contains secondary rules as much as law does.

As laws are for purposes, all laws have a basic dependency on their merit in fulfilling their purposes; law must at least be such that legislatures, executives, and courts regard it as having at least some merit for fulfilling its purposes.

Hart's positivism doesn't actually seem to be able to distinguish law and official etiquette (protocol); the conception his followers have of the latter is obviously defective, and everything Hart actually says about law apply with little modification to etiquette of officials.

Every known legal system has to accommodate legal entities older and more entrenched than itself.

law & the importance of contingent specifications of generic necessities

Rosmini's Theodicy & the desiderata for a legal system

Legal systems are often layers of systems.

knows vs presumptively knows (K -> T applies to first but not strictly to second)
'presumptively knows' as imply K if no defective causes

romantic attachment and the sense of novelty
-- this seems the kernel of truth in the adage 'opposites attract'

The means by which Judaism survived the first century we find already being formed centuries before they were required.

A world in which a rational being can exists is a rational world.

To say that testimony is insufficient to establish something is to say that reason is incapable of assessing it; testimony is communicated reason.

The research university model does not prioritize research but academic product; the connection of this product to research is entirely a matter of custom and social pressure.

Every particular truth is a symbol and sign of what is simple, immutable, and eternal.

Every particular truth expresses a general kind of goodness and beauty.

survivor's guilt as a byproduct of human withness and mutual investment, the co-personality of the human person

Dedication often approximates talent.

laws of nature as principles of natural classification (cp to best systems account)

Kant on freedom & dominion as an expression of the image of God

the basic lordliness of the human person

The power of the pawn is to organize the board.

Sloth often results in destructive repetitions.

King, priest, and prophet as reflecting aspects of the divine: sovereignty, sanctity, and providence.

We get the distinction between miracles & nonmiracles from testimony, not experience.

In philosophical inquiry, the obstacle is often the way.

Arguments using possibilities are always elimination arguments without strict and permanent elimination.

relief as an aesthetic response

stories & esp. movies as means of isolating out (relatively speaking) various combinations of aesthetic responses

A state must recognize the dignity of causality of the citizens it serves.

Our tool use is an extension of our sociality; we bring the physical world into our social circle.

Our power to repent is our power to die, in moral form.

Alas, with Empty Hands

 Sonnet to the Harvest Moon
by William Stanley Roscoe 

Again thou reignest in thy golden hall,
 Rejoicing in thy sway, fair queen of night!
 The ruddy reapers hail thee with delight,
 Theirs is the harvest, theirs the joyous call
 For tasks well ended ere the season's fall.
 Sweet orb, thou smilest from thy starry height,
 But whilst on them thy beams are shedding bright,
 To me thou com'st o'ershadow'd with a pall:
 To me alone the year hath fruitless flown,
 Earth hath fulfill'd her trust thro' all her lands,
 The good man gathereth now where he had sown,
 And the great master in his vineyard stands;
 But I, as if my task were all unknown,
 Come to his gates, alas, with empty hands.

Shiftings

 It's always interesting in a Presidential election year that people treat the Presidency as the most important office, and analyze the U.S. election entirely in terms of it. It's true that the Office of the President is the single most powerful office held by an individual, and that a strong Presidential candidate can boost candidates of the same party (and vice versa), but the most important result of Election Day is the new disposition of Congress. 2024 was a very bad election year for the Democrats, and it was not the election of Trump but the fact that they have certainly lost the Senate  (which was mostly expected) and it is (at this point) very likely that they have lost the House. They had better hope for the as-yet-indeterminate House elections to break unexpectedly Democratic, because that is the only thing that would prevent the night being an entire disaster from them. (Even if the unexpected happen, the best they seem to be able to hope for is an unstable bare majority.) To lose one of the Presidency, the Senate, or the House is a misfortune; to lose all three in a single election is a sign of carelessness.

Here in Texas one of the primary issues, without any doubt, was border control. I noted years ago here that, whatever one's personal preferences on immigration, the actual infrastructure in Texas for providing necessary and useful services to immigrants was already being strained to the breaking point, as, for instance, refugee services were struggling with the problem of what to do when they ran through their entire year's budget in a matter of months. We have long since passed the breaking point, with no repair at all in sight. It has been interesting over the past eight years to see Democratic candidates swing from being fairly negative on border control, to carefully neutral, to this year's continual, desperate attempts to convince people that they would be stricter on border control than the Republicans. Over and over one would see political ads by Democrats highlighting the issue as their primary issue. None of it would move Republicans, of course, but that was very clearly not the purpose of many of the ads; they were attempts to convince independents and Democrats that they would solve the problem. But it was all futile; no one really thought that the candidates had the backing of the White House or the Harris campaign on the point, and there wasn't much reason for thinking that once in office the candidates would break heavily against their own party on it. 

Just from what one hears, it seems like this was a common problem for Democratic candidates across the board; the particular issues would differ from state to state, but one repeatedly gets a sense from their political strategies that many of them felt that they were set up by Biden and Harris to fail, or, at least, that they were struggling to make headway in relative isolation. And again, to lose the Presidency is to lose a very powerful office; to lose Congress is to lose the most powerful political force in the entire world. 

In any case, as people have to keep being reminded, this is only the first phase for the Presidential election; Trump's margin is comfortable enough that he is practically guaranteed to win, but the actual election has just begun. December 11 is the deadline for the states to submit their Certificates of Ascertainment, which establish the Electors; the Electoral College will meet on December 17 actually to elect the President; they will submit their Certificates of Vote by December 25; and then Congress will count and confirm the votes on January 6.

Music on My Mind

 

"Stand by Me," Life in 3D.

Opposite Courses

 But man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. For reason in contingent matters may follow opposite courses, as we see in dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments. Now particular operations are contingent, and therefore in such matters the judgment of reason may follow opposite courses, and is not determinate to one. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will.

[ST 1.83.1] The "dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments" part is interesting. Dialectical syllogisms and rhetorical arguments are probable inferences involving judgments that "may follow opposite courses" and are "not determinate to one" because they involve contingent particulars; therefore reason is to this extent itself a free power, and will, as following on reason as rational desire, therefore must have choice appropriate to this. Thus we have free will.

Logic as a Vector System

 In their paper, "Logic as a Vector System" (Journal of Logic and Computation 2005 15(5): 751-765), Jonathan Westphal and Jim Hardy, describe propositional logic in terms of summed displacements in space. This allows for a fairly clean presentation of some common logical rules.

Modus Ponens

premise/conclusion	p	q
p -> q	-1	1
p	1	0
q	0	1

Modus Tollens

premise/conclusion	p	q
p -> q	-1	1
~q	0	-1
~p	-1	0

Disjunctive Syllogism

premise/conclusion	p	q
p v q	1	1
~p	-1	0
q	0	1

Hypothetical Syllogism

premise/conclusion	p	q	r
p -> q	-1	1	0
q -> r	0	-1	1
p -> r	-1	0	1

Constructive Dilemma

premise/conclusion	p	q	r	s
p -> q	-1	1	0	0
r -> s	0	0	-1	1
p v r	1	0	1	0
q v s	0	1	0	1

And so forth. You will note that you can get the conclusions from the premises by adding the columns. The reason for representing rules like this is that solving logical problems becomes vector addition in mathematics -- the summed displacements represent vectors, and then you can add the vectors. You can represent each of the above tables graphically, and the paper does so. Hypothetical Syllogism, of course, requires three dimensions and Constructive Dilemma four, but this doesn't affect the way the vectors work.

We see a similar structure in Term Functor Logic, in which p -> q is represented as -p+q, etc.  TFL, of course, is mostly used for syllogisms, and can just be extended to propositional logic using analogies that have been known for well over a century and a half now. The pluses and minuses in TFL represent what in old-fashioned logical texts is called 'distribution'. But in any case, the analogies mean that Westphal's and Hardy's vectorization of propositional logic can be extended in the other direction to represent syllogisms. 

Barbara Syllogism

premise/conclusion	S	M	P
All S is M	-1	1	0
All M is P	0	-1	1
All S is P	-1	0	1

Nymph of the Laughing Eye, and Sportive Mien

 Cheerfulness
by Mary F. Johnson  

Nymph of the laughing eye, and sportive mien,
In whose blithe smile exists a potent spell
To charm the spirit of the moody spleen,
And from thy circle the black fiend expel,
Come, Cheerfulness! and in my bosom dwell!
Me from disquieting emotions wean:
Teach me the tones, that, thrilling from thy shell,
Arouse the dormant joys of each dull scene;
The lighter ills of life-a countless train 
That in their bud the blooms of Pleasure blast;
That taint, on Plenty's board, the sweet repast, 
And wither Comfort with corrosive bane; --
These ills-in social scenes so thickly strown --
Where Cheerfulness presides, are ills unknown!