Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

Even as my flute sings, I am thinking that Levi is not really proud or arrogant but is merely very serious about his new duties and is sorrowing that the world does not love the Lord Most High as he does.

No one knew when the custom began or why - it was another thing that was the way it had always been - but it was an excuse to sing and dance, and nobody in the Two Rivers needed much excuse for that.

Not all French waiters have red hair. (Not all men are bad)

I will tell you this about women. They are superior to men in this, that they have an unfeigned, objective, candid admiration for good looks in other women - a real pleasure in their beauty.

For a man to turn down a crown, he’d have to be either a fool or a saint. And my cousin of Gloucester, I can assure you, be neither!

…he’d begun to believe that a King who was respected and feared was better off than the one who was loved.

Always a deeply pious woman, she found as she aged that her greatest contentment came in denying herself the pleasures that once meant much to her and now meant little.

The art of governing, Dickon, is that of making use of talent wherever you do find it. Trust is too rare an attribute to make it your prime prerequisite for holding office.

Elizabeth was a poor judge of people, for she was not curious enough to speculate upon the needs and wants that motivated others.

The Debate of the Body and the Soul (poem)

The Duke of York had not been a man to strike passion in his followers, to evoke any emotion more intense than admiration. However upright his nature, or perhaps because of it, he had not the force of personality to captivate city…

While memories could comfort, they could also rend without pity.

She sought refuge in hate and then in prayer, and at last, recognized that her grief was not going to heal… she lost forever the ability to sympathize with the weakness of others, would never again find patience for those who broke under pressure.

She was moved, but not surprised, to find Edward had thought to write to the children as well. Edmund had been the more responsible of the two boys, but it was Edward who’d always found the time for his little brothers and sisters. In that, she’d never faulted him, knew how deep his family loyalties ran.

Edmund concurred heartily in his father’s decision; to him, a puppet King was even more dangerous than a boy King, and Scriptures spoke clearly enough on that subject: “Woe unto thee, O Land, when thy King is a child! [Ecclesiastes 10:16]

The beliefs or disbeliefs of the learned eventually filter down and exert an influence upon the lives and conduct of their fellow men... the image that we hold of man cannot fail to affect attitudes that influence our behavior in the world of action, and beliefs that determine our commitments in the world of thought.

For those who understand free choice in terms of an immaterial mode of causality, the falsification of the immaterialist hypothesis about man must lead to the denial that man has the power of free choice.

[For those Catholics and Protestants,] who are fideists. The falsification of the immaterialist hypothesis would have little effect on them. For the Catholics "who not only are orthodox in their dogmatic commitments but who also try to be philosophical in their understanding of dogmas that they hold by religious faith." such a falsification would be devastating.

"How is it possible for us to withhold satisfaction from an instinct? What power in us enables us to do so?" - even Freud says its the intellect, and an immaterial one at that.

More than the power of conceptual thought is thus involved in the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of choice is also involved, and with it, a radical difference in kind between men and other animals that have no moral problems, no moral rights, and no moral responsibility.

the affirmation of free choice presupposes the truth of the immaterialist hypothesis, which posits in man the operation of a non-physical factor, needed not only to explain his power of conceptual thought, but also to explain his contra-causal freedom of choice.

If man only differs superficially in kind -> no free will -> (according to Kant) no moral rights and responsibilities

Combining this fact with the policy that men have pursued in their treatment of animals, we can discern the normative principle underlying the action. It is that an inferior kind ought to be ordered to a superior kind as a means to an end.

The negative edge of Occam's razor cuts away the grounds for attributing to non-linguistic animals anything beyond the power of perceptual [as opposed to conceptual] thought, in order to explain their behavior. (b) Its positive edge supplies the justification for attributing the power of conceptual thought to man and man alone...

causa cognoscendi -> causes something to be known to be the case
causa essendi -> causes something to be the case

"With animals," Dewey writes, "an experience perishes at it happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone."

sentence-making, toolmaking and history-making -> the three big differences in kind exhibited by man

With respect to any statement about some performance that man and man alone exhibits... an apparently similar performance by another species of animal does not constitute an infirmative negative instance if the latter is instinctive or species-predictable, while the human performance is acquired or learned by its nonubiquitous distribution and by its wide range of variability within the human species

Those nations who seek a greater degree of cooperation with their neighbors around the world had better take a more active interest in what their children are being taught in school about nature and nurture… To move further toward genuine peace at any social level at any social level requires something more than pragmatic agreement about the purposes of human life.