Links of Note

 * Matthew Minerd, The Providential Structuring of Humanity through the Spiritual Soul's Relation to the Body, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Carl Olsen interviews Bishop Erik Varden, at "Catholic World Report"

* Hui-Chieh Loy & Daryl Ooi, Conceptions of Knowledge in Classical Chinese Philosophy (PDF)

* James Ungureanu, Sir Isaac Newton as Religious Prophet, Heretic, and Reformer, "Church Life Journal"

* Ariel Melamedoff, Shepherd's Metaphysics of Emergence (PDF); I'm not sure emergence is the right concept to use here, but it's an interesting argument.

* Edward Feser, Hume's Trojan Horse, reviews Aaron Alexander Zubia's The Political Thought of David Hume, at "Claremont Review of Books"

* Caleb Cohoe, To What Extent Must Creatures Return to the One? (PDF)

* Cheryl Misak, The underground university, at "Aeon"

* Edith Hall, Who can claim Aristotle?, at "Aeon"

* Ben Page, Dis-positioning Euthyphro (PDF)

* Peter Mommsen, Educating for Freedom, at "Plough"

* Ryan Miller, Artifacts: Ontology as Easy as It Gets (PDF)

* Ed Condon, What if the Vatican actually goes broke?, at "The Pillar". At some point I think it has to be recognized that you can't have a globalized version of the kinds of services the Holy See began to provide in the late medieval period and Renaissance while doing it on the budget of a regional grocery store chain; either you need massively greater revenue or you just have to start admitting that you can't provide the services, however nice they might be. But this seems something that people have severe difficulty understanding; they demand that the Holy See do vast numbers of costly things and also that it have no money to do them. But the problem is in some sense baked in, and continues from its beginning -- most of what we think of as corruption of the Church in the Renaissance is a byproduct of people doing the same thing then. If you increase demands and but do not increase revenue concomitantly, you are incentivizing cheating on one or the other or both.

* Benjamin Randolph, ‘When will the wickedness of man have an end?’ The Problem of Divine Providence in Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (PDF)

* Henrik Karlsson, Authenticity as Dialogue, at "Escaping Flatland"

* Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, Is Knowledge a Justified Belief? (PDF)

* David Yaffe, In Love We Disappear, on Leonard Cohen, at "Tablet"

Chrysorroas

 Today is the feast of St. Yanah ibn Sarjun, more commonly known as St. John Damascene, Doctor of the Church, who was sometimes nicknamed Chrysorroas, the Stream of Gold. From the De Fide (Book IV, Chapter 11):

Every action, therefore, and performance of miracles by Christ are most great and divine and marvellous: but the most marvellous of all is His precious Cross. For no other thing has subdued death, expiated the sin of the first parent , despoiled Hades, bestowed the resurrection, granted the power to us of contemning the present and even death itself, prepared the return to our former blessedness, opened the gates of Paradise , given our nature a seat at the right hand of God, and made us the children and heirs of God , save the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. For by the Cross all things have been made right. So many of us, the apostle says, as were baptized into Christ, were baptized into His death, and as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ. Further Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Lo! The death of Christ, that is, the Cross, clothed us with the enhypostatic wisdom and power of God. And the power of God is the Word of the Cross, either because God's might, that is, the victory over death, has been revealed to us by it, or because, just as the four extremities of the Cross are held fast and bound together by the bolt in the middle, so also by God's power the height and the depth, the length and the breadth, that is, every creature visible and invisible, is maintained. 

 This was given to us as a sign on our forehead, just as the circumcision was given to Israel: for by it we believers are separated and distinguished from unbelievers. This is the shield and weapon against, and trophy over, the devil. This is the seal that the destroyer may not touch you, as says the Scripture. This is the resurrection of those lying in death, the support of the standing, the staff of the weak, the rod of the flock, the safe conduct of the earnest, the perfection of those that press forwards, the salvation of soul and body, the aversion of all things evil, the patron of all things good, the taking away of sin, the plant of resurrection, the tree of eternal life.

The Glory of Celestial Mirth

 As Winds That Blow Against a Star
(For Aline)
by Joyce Kilmer 

Now by what whim of wanton chance
 Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance 
 Walk weary and laborious ways? 

 But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
 May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
 The glory of celestial mirth. 

 The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
 Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
 As winds that blow against a star.

Joyce Kilmer is best known for his poem, "Trees" ("I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree...."), perhaps the most extraordinarily popular poem to be intensely (and, I think, understandably but nonetheless unfairly) hated by many poets, but in fact he has a wide and diverse poetic oeuvre, usually characterized by deliberate restraint in the use of poetic devices that gives his work an almost conversational, straight-to-the-point feel even when he is being quite clever. His poetry is often an excellent lesson in just how much you can do with the simple. For about five years -- from the publication of "Trees" to his death by a German sniper's bullet on July 30, 1918 at the age of 31-- he was arguably the most popular Catholic poet writing in English in the entire world, and certainly the most popular in America. During World War I, he was known for volunteering for dangerous military intelligence assignments and was highly respected for his coolness under pressure; he is buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in Picardy, France.

The Disposition to Love Something Apart from Intention to Use It

 A propensity to wanton destruction of what is beautiful in inanimate nature (spiritus destructionis) is opposed to a human being's duty to himself; for it weakens or uproots that feeling in him which, though not of itself moral, is still a disposition of sensibility that greatly promotes morality or at least prepares the way for it: the disposition, namely, to love something (e.g., beautiful crystal formations, the indescribable beauty of plants) even apart from any intention to use it. 

 [Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Book I, Chapter II, Episodic Section, sect. 17, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Gregor, tr. & ed. Cambridge University Press (New York: 1996) p. 564.]

Two Modes of Sacramental Efficacy

 The sacraments work in two ways. One way is by actually being administered. The other way is by being desired. The reason for this is that the sacraments are instruments of God's justifying mercy, and God sees the human heart....Hence, even though natural things have no effect without being presently employed, the sacraments have an effect just by being desired. But they have their fullest effect when the sacraments are actually administered.

[Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet IV, Question 7, Article 1, from Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions, Nevitt & Davies, trs., Oxford University Press (New York: 2020) p. 352. While the immediate topics are baptism and penance, Aquinas explicitly states later that this applies to the other major sacraments.]

In Longest, Darkest Nights Take Rest and Ease

 December
by Helen Hunt Jackson

The lakes of ice gleam bluer than the lakes
Of water 'neath the summer sunshine gleamed:
 Far fairer than when placidly it streamed,
 The brook its frozen architecture makes,
 And under bridges white its swift way takes.
 Snow comes and goes as messenger who dreamed
 Might linger on the road; or one who deemed
 His message hostile gently for their sakes
 Who listened might reveal it by degrees.
 We gird against the cold of winter wind
 Our loins now with mighty bands of sleep,
 In longest, darkest nights take rest and ease,
 And every shortening day, as shadows creep
 O'er the brief noontide, fresh surprises find.

Dashed Off XXVII

This begins the notebook that was begun in September 2023.

***

 You should never discard the teachings of your forebears, although you may find new context that sheds a different light on them and in learning from them you may develop them in different and unexpected directions.

John 8:25 Vulgate: "Dicebant ergo et tu quis es dixit eis Iesus principium quia et loquor vobis."
-- "They therefore said to him, Who are you? Jesus said to them, The beginning, who also speak to you."

"To be at ease is to be unsafe." Newman

Serious dialogue presupposes either extensive experience or study; this is often forgotten in calls for 'dialogue'. 

All in the Church are called to holiness and many in the Church will often be corrupt.

"The infinite of the human mind is its dominion over the totality of abstractible quantity, i.e., whatever quantity is abstractible, is abstractible by mind. This dominion of the human mind is itself embraced in a large, divine intellectual order in which it participates." Chastek

A fact is a feat; establishing a fact involves accomplishing a feat.

facts as things that show truths (sometimes defeasibly or erroneously)
'fact' as rhetorically presupposing a kind of trust
shared facts as elements of common ground of discourse
facts as truths relative to an agent's framing of them by means reliable for discovering truth

To live your authentic self you must first have an authentic self, a self that is genuinely capable of an authenticity appropriate to living.

Ethos is a more powerful persuader than logos.

"Everything that changes does so in some respect, and by something, and into something, and out of something." Aristotle

"Only a being who loves man and desires his happiness is an object of human worship, of religion." Feuerbach --- This is certainly false as an anthropological claim.

In the long run, art is always driven by sex, aggression, or contemplation.

the alchemical laboratory of argument

Much of the work of love consists in mending.

"An eristic argument is a deduction from premises which seem to be endoxa, but are not really, as well as merely apparent deduction from real and apparent endoxa." Aristotle
-- Alexander takes this seeming-but-not endoxa to be an indication of a premise that is in some sense not thought through -- stopping to think about them easily shows them false, whereas real endoxa are not easily rejected even when false.

endoxa as playing a key role in the cooperative nature of reason

The parts of a system are somethings with habitudes or modes of being appropriate to systemic composition, namely, information and materialization.

Counterfactual conditionals as statemetns about systems of causes.

Knowledge is power in teh sense that lack of knowledge undermines power.

Aurvandilsta
-- Aurvandil in the Prose Edda was carried by Thor in a basket out of the north, the sign of which is that one of Aurvandil's toes, sticking out of the basket, froze and was thrown by Thor into the sky.
-- in OE there is a gloss associating earendel with Latin 'jubar' = radiance, heavenly beam
-- one of the few cases in which a star definitely has a mythic role in Norse myth (as opposed to incidental mentions)

Propaganda is more effective with people suspicious of everything, not less.

One point at which aesthetics and ethics converge is the badness of desecration.

Graveness, primarily and simply speaking, depends primarily on intended object, whereas secondary graveness depends primarily on harm; but are to be considered in asssessing sins and their gravity. Both blasphemy and murder are grave, both need punishment, but blasphemy is more grave in itself, and murder causes more actual harm.

the imitation of saints as a form of the imitation of Christ (1 Cor 11:1-2)

The world thinks it is being magnanimous in letting Christians act according to their principles as long as doing so is consistent with the world's principles.

When there is a trade-off, it does not always follow that the trade-off is one-for-one.

"All knowledge of real being is an interpretation of action." W. Norris Clarke

"The world recognizes God only in order to be able to kill him -- and God renders the world even this ultimate service." Marion
"Hell imprisons the soul in itself."

A flaw in many theories of knowledge is that they do not plausibly capture the notion of coming to know something better.

Every profession has active, contemplative, and mixed modes.

"The advantages which are derived from machinery and manufactures seem to arise principally from three sources: *The addition which they make to human power.--The economy they produce of human time.--The conversion of substances apparently common and worthless into valuable products.*" Babbage
"Nothing is more remarkable, and yet less uenxpected, than the perfect identity of things manufactured by the same tool."

In certain matters, like sex and worship, people often have difficulty distinguishing aesthetics and ethics.

language as an instrument for making intelligible

Every kind of apprehension is an apprehension of being.

"Freedom renders possible all that is possible as the horizon of possibilization." Marion
"Only love, 'which bears all' (1 Corinthians 13:7), can bear with its gaze Love's excess."

The purpose of apologetics is not persuasion but provision of argued defense for those who demand an account.

Natural love by its nature yearns for divine love.

All genuine lived experience is of something not itself.

The development of a human person always presupposes other people.

intentionality as the possibility of love

We first learn about others through experiencing them as needed and as necessitating.

the Church as a divine society within which a human society forms

object tracking --> subitizing --> groupings of up to four elements --> sliding counting
object tracking + numerosity estimation --> (by adduction) basic arithmetic

currency : money :: grammar : language :: state : civil society

Free societies cannot be imposed from above; they must be grown and inherited.

person as universal vantage point

the divine image participating in the divine society within the divine providence

communication as the intelligibility of active power

If it's not worth having more like it, more inspired by it, it is not great art.

"Action, by the very fact that we do not originate or control it, but receive it to some degree passively, 'suffer' its influence, and are controlled or determined by it willy-nilly, is the natural sign of the real presence of another-than-self. It then at the same time, because it is structured action, reveals to us the essence or nature of the agent precisely as *this kind of actor on me* (and subsequently on others, as our observation widens)." W. Norris Clarke
"To be is to self-communicate; to know is to pick up within oneself the self-communication of being."

Phenomena can only be conceived as phenomena by being conceived as manifesting something more fundamental.

The key question whenever anyone talks about "loving, committed relationship" is "committed to what?" In general, one should never stop at "commitment"; in the specifics, people too often are committed to very different things.

the desert adorns the cactus with charm

The legal system participates the real world, receiving reality in a partial manner, one that does not capture every aspect of the real but that involves aspects of the real.

The common ground on which legal system meets legal system is reason itself.

Baptism presupposes the charity of Christ and the Church in such a way that through baptism we participate that charity.

In argument as in chess, when you see a good move, look for a better one.

Fatherhood and motherhood are not constituted deontically, although they have deontic implications for us, and are rooted more deeply than the obligations associated with them. Likewise, parental love is not adequately or even primarily characterized by any parental obligations being more fundamental in importance than they are.

Human beings are remarkable in that we are always figthing ourselves.

personation (significance) of another (object) to another (interpretant)
-- personation as a specialized form of sign-relation
-- agency as instrumental (ministerial) causation presupposing personation
-- personation is a case of symbolic delomic legisign

"The true body of Christ, and those things that are done in it, are figures of the mystical body of Christ, and of the things that are done in that." Aquinas (QQ 7.6.2 ad 5)

"The chance occurrence is remarkable, when it appears to happen by design." Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

a tree is a river-country flowing up to the sky

Every word is in a way all of language.

"Genuine mediation is the character of a Sign." Peirce
"Every triadic relationship involves three dyadic relationship and three monadic characters; just as every dyadic action involves two monadic characters."

Corruption of the best being the worst, rule of law corrupts into something very nasty.