Sunday, March 23, 2014

Dashed Off VI

Still very much behind on these; not yet up to the first half of last year.

Inquiry starts from an idea that structures it.

rituals as a way of working through psychological impediment to doing what is right

Kant's disjunctive argument for God as ideal & Aquinas on God as principle of every genus

While the invocational aspect of the Canon/Anaphora is necessary & essential, the institutional is more properly the form, because it is distinctive to the sacrament.
need for invocational aspect: Cyril J Cat XIX.7; XXI.3; XXIII.7, 19. Basil Spir 27ff
need for institutional aspect: Chrysostom Hom 1 de Prod Iud 6; Hom 2 in II Tim 1. Irenaeus Adv haer IV.18.5

natural law : digital mathematics :: prudence : circuit-building :: other virtues : operations of machine

The telos circumscribes the thing so that it may be what it is.

Hegel's critique of physiognomy & phrenology would apply to at least a significant portion of psychology, with very minimal translation.

What makes infinite regress impossible is not infinity but totality of composition.

Private property is part of the self-governance of a people.

Dialectic is nourished by enigma.

Exploring a notation is like learning how a machine works, except you never have to worry about it irreparably breaking.

intuition : analytic philosophy ('intuition-driven romanticism') :: sampling : 'experimental' philosophy ('sampling-driven romanticism')

Every field and discipline has formal, experimental, and interpretive aspects, because all thought does.

three elements of intellectual responsibility
(1) respect the sources of the field
(2) strive for coherence
(3) leave the field more illuminating and less confusing than when you began

Hope is the requirement of progress. (Isidore)

A subjective Bayesian epistemology, based on degrees of belief, is committed to coherence as its primary, and indeed only, serious standard of rationality.

honorific, piacular, and sacramental sacrifices

analytic acuity, synthetic facility, intellectual discipline, intimative taste

Without a proper understanding of practical rationality, no adequate defense of the liberal arts is possible.

According to Isidore, we are bound back to God (religio) by that which binds in itself (dilectio), and thus charity is the pinnacle and summation of religion.

Understanding requires using your head more than once on the same thing.

the implicit philosophy in the poetic capabilities of a language

semper et ubique et ab omnibus as the regulative idea of tradition

the federal (covenantal) destination of language

The incompleteness of our minds is not completed by any finite truth.

The first duty of the Church to the poor is to give them a Church.

Baptism, confirmation, orders, and marriage are sacraments in which one progresses.

beatitude as sight 1 Cor 13:12; 2 Cor 5:7; I Jn 3:2
beatitude as love I Jn 4:16; I Cor 13:13

Jn 20 // Lv 16

"The function of Reason is to promote the art of life." Whitehead

Knowledge, like water, shapes in the long run.

the lot as chance vs the lot as fate

measurement as the discernment of vestiges

Death has meaning only through dying-for.

Unction makes sickness and death something endured for Christ.

The formal proximate object of faith is truth as taught.

'Grounding relations' are indirect ways of talking about abstraction.

motherhood & symbolic species continuity (the tradition of human nature itself)

Experiments constrain or refute, confirm or prove, by being assimilated, not from the outside; it is their implications for a theory as interpreted by that theory that matter.

Pregnancy is not an automatic process; it is as much an activity of intellect and will as it is a thing undergone by the body. The mother is participant in an act; she is not merely an object of it.

pregnancy as an originary element in the education of the child, first nurturance, first natural incorporation into human civilization, preparation for reception into civilized life

Body itself is given to us as meaning; and, what is more, as meaning portagé, meaning shared out.

pleasure as a minimum for good

Enlightenment: rejection of intellectual division of labor; subsistence farming of the mind (not wholly fair, of course, but as found in Kant not without force, either)

infused virtues as the promises of faith imprinted on our hearts

Only through charity can the whole law be understood.

In baptism, promised grace is offered, exhibited, and conferred.

public prayer of the Church as the priestly task of the baptized

2 forms of popularization: biography (the popular form of the history of the field) and pedagogical introduction (the popular form of the field itself)

Hope is raising your foot to move forward.

The theological age of discretion is the ability to distinguish sacrament from nonsacrament.

Understanding is not the feeling of understanding.

The childlike are unwearied by the world, as children are, although in a different way.

topics: strategy - maxim - differentiae - purpose (prove/refute)
maxim : warrant :: differentiae : backing

storytelling as being in three modes: etiology, intersection, teleology
i.e., beginning-story, middle-story, ending-story, although, of course, they need not actually be beginning, middle, and end structurally, and one may have, for instance, a story solely about a beginning

It is perhaps worth remembering that Chekhov's Rule is generally violated for stories, because its point is actually drama, which exists as such wholly by its interlinkage and is impeded, or slowed, or overcomplicated, by the extraneous. Chekhov's Rule would be the death of most genre fiction, and especially something like mystery, because it would make misdirection and camouflage of key elements at least extremely difficult. The more purely the dramatic the fiction, the more the Rule applies; the less drama-like the fiction, the less the Rule applies.

Plot is a concatenation and webbing, not generally a rising action. It can look like such, however, when the concatenation is critical and catastrophic.

Scripture as a source of reasons is distinct from Scripture as canonical standard; they are distinct roles.

Scripture as a rule of faith can only be Scripture as a work of the Holy Spirit in the context of the Church.

The Eucharist is the spiritual preaching of Christ Himself to the hearts of all.

Unction is anointing for presentation in glory; all its effects are related to this.

Confirmation & unction are the militant sacraments.

Scripture as the all-ministering sacramental

The efficacy of the sacramentals is from the nobility of the Church. (William of Paris)
They have their efficacy as vital activities of the Church-as-general-sacrament.

sacramentals
(1) consecrations (incl. blessings)
(2) sacramental administrations
(3) holy leavenings

family as subconscious legal order

Measurement is an exploration of the external world.

pity as a protection against temptation

psalter as the organon of the Church

two kinds of martyr (Isidore)
(1) by manifest passion
(2) by hidden valor of soul

poetry as the speech required for a rational way of life

Measures are based on limits.

penance : baptism :: unction : confirmation :: eucharist : Passion (the root of all sacraments)

Indulgences require explicit intent not in the sense of thinking of it as an indulgence but in the sense of deliberately doing what an indulgence is, namely a penitential practice approved by the Church for the purpose of restoring self and the world around one from the harm and detriment of sin.

Tax and tribute are themselves the structure of government power.

liturgy as heavenly propriety (li)

the self-diffusion of goodness -> subsidiarity

Materialism presupposes a theory of causation, and a robust one, at that.

Who can come to transcend without burdens to transcend?

To achieve virtue under difficult conditions is the beginning of restoring the world.

As philosophy begins in wonder, miracles are the beginning of inquiry; they are not the end, but neither are they things to shrug at, even in report.

The most important lesson from Hume's essay on miracles is that it is not enough to accept or reject testimony for an event; one must inquire into the why of it.

The efficacy of baptism is not limited to the time of its administration; through it the Holy Spirit draws, with it the Holy Spirit seals.

Because the intelligible is found in the sensible, and mystery in the intelligible, mystery spills over into the sensible, and this is the icon.

logic in motion: association, transformation, construction

What counts as parsimony depends on the ends in view.

the unity of consciousness as a moral postulate

All the secondary forms of baptism (blood, desire, vicarious desire) are forms of death; nor is this surprising, because baptism is sacramental death.

to consider: Naturalism requires rationalism (empiricism too weak to underwrite needed explanatory relations).

Note that Neurath explicitly allows internal-sense information about the world.

Generalization of paradigmatic cases for a theory only approximates portions of the theory. (Cf. confusion of Newtonian physics w/ "billiard ball universes".)

All arguments for compatibilism imply corresponding arguments for the compatibility of teleology and determinism.

the study of classical languages as a formal exercise of mind in noticing & expressing subtle gradations & distinctions (Schelling)

Exclusivity in relationships arises more from justice than from love.

Hegel's lord & bondslave, & the Exodus-consciousness of the Jewish people

Concepts cannot merely be constructions of the mind; they must somewhere and sometimes identify the real.

Measurement is thoroughly teleological: the adequation of measurement to measured is adequation of means to end.

relics as memorials; relics as traditionary blessings

A military is structured by a theory of obligation, a theory of virtue, a theory of utility, and the interaction of these. This is because all practical skills are persons using means to ends whose requirements are fulfilled by skillful action.

the seven churches as the facets of the Church in every age

In matters of war, discretion weighs more heavily than secrecy or deception.

The stronger the methodic skepticism, the stronger the principles required to establish anything. (Cf. Descartes)

Sea power is commercial before military.

air power as sustained projection of land and sea power (super-artillery)
-- it could potentially become more than this by skyhooking or by 'floating base'

blood brotherhood & the Eucharist

marriage as primal covenant
motherhood as culmination of creation

Happiness is a mind fixed on good.

By indelible character we are deputed to acts of grace.

"The soul of Christ is not essentially divine; thus it is appropriate to it to be divine by participation, which is by grace." Aquinas ST 3.7.1ad1

transcendence -> presence
the presence is the transcendent present
but the presence does not exhaust the transcendence
the transcendence is God beyond accessibility
the presence is God beyond inaccessibility

timelike (serial) and spacelike (array) logical relations (propositional logical connections are spacelike; inference is timelike)

Markets presuppose shipping, i.e., organized movement to market or transfer to market availability.

If the creation of concepts occurs as a function of a problem, it occurs under deontic constraints.

analytic philosophy as circuit board philosophy

vague universes of discourse as defined by a degree of fit (like a typology)

Knowing is not a form of domination.

Palamas's synonymy argument comes from Basil (Adv Eun 1.8)

Causation as such is not expressible in mathematics.

One can imagine a Cartesian response to Kant: all arguments presuppose the ontological argument.