Among the curious consequences of the digital paradigm is the allowance for small and self-sufficient organizations not only to thrive independently, but, simultaneously, to work cooperatively. This digital cross-pollination creates new and unexpected intellectual fruits. By building a network of like-minded institutions, we are better enabled to share insights, resources, and opportunities. If you wish to have your organization join our network, please contact us here.
The Catherine Project
We provide substantive, high-quality, person-to-person teaching to adults 16 years or older at no fixed cost to them. We also host peer-led reading groups and lectures.
We seek to cultivate free and independent learners who study on their own initiative, driven by their own fundamental questions. To do so, we follow the tried-and-true practice of liberation through person-to-person conversation about great books. Such reading and conversation has long been a refuge for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized, and it enriches people from all walks of life.
The Catherine Project offers no credits or degrees. We do not grade the efforts of our participants. We charge no tuition. We encourage donations from our readers in accordance with their ability to pay, as well as from benefactors interested in our mission. We believe that no one’s inability to pay should be an obstacle to their opportunities to learn. [Discover the Catherine Project]
Albertus Magnus Institute
The Albertus Magnus Institute is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the promotion of education that is truly liberating. Our namesake, St. Albert the Great, is known as the Universal Doctor. A renaissance man before the Renaissance, he mastered and taught each of the arts and sciences in a way that has echoed throughout time, preserving, strengthening, and conveying the great Western Tradition. He understood that authentic human freedom is accessible only through another sort of learning, one that is universal. He understood that these arts are called liberal because they alone can liberate.
Sadly, this notion has become totally foreign to modern ears. The place once occupied in the Tradition by authentic liberal education has been usurped by an imposter calling itself by the same name. The fruits of this modern counterfeit are manifold: students are given over to a lifetime of indentured servitude through debt, and the culture is disintegrating. Schools have ceased to be places of education and become places of manipulation. In short, we seek to disrupt this system and ransom the captives. We seek to offer an education that is at once free and freeing: to bring all men to the truth. Omnes ad Veritatem. [Discover the Albertus Magnus Institute]
Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos
The IEF supports and stimulates — invariably in accordance with the fields of expertise of its integrated members and in line with the institutional framework of the higher-education institutions they belong to — a variety of graduate and advanced training options, in the latter instance post-graduate programs (master’s and doctorates) and post-doctoral or scientific specialization activities.
With a view to graduate studies, particularly in philosophy, the IEF supports the organization of activities, most of which are carried out by its very own student members, among them the colloquium of doctoral candidates (in Lisbon and Coimbra) and the Philosophical Circles. Given its international vocation and profile, the IEF also opens its doors to all those students from foreign institutions wishing to carry out or deepen their studies within the scientific framework of the research proposals of the members of the unit.
While its theoretical core is articulated around philosophy, the IEF aims at fostering inter- and multidisciplinary training activities with a scientific horizon capable of adding value to the fields of inquiry of all its members.
The IEF further pursues programs of research and publication. [Visit the IEF website]
Reality: A Journal for Philosophical Discourse
Reality is a new kind of philosophy journal—to the digital age, seeking philosophical discussion of truth rather than fitting articles into narrow historical or otherwise ideological paradigms, and, moreover, which operates outside the institutional paradigms of traditional academic publishing. In other words, publication in Reality does not aim at being a means to prestige. The goal for every published submission to Reality is not a high citation rate or improving one’s CV, but participation in genuine philosophical discourse. While such participation requires scholarly background—a deep understanding of the history and commentary of philosophy—improvement to scholarship is only a by-product of the submissions published. The only restrictive parameter as to school of thought is a commitment, broadly speaking, to realism: i.e., that human knowledge is not a fiction of the mind or mere description of experience, but the true grasp of what has an intelligible existence irreducible to the mind’s contributions. [See what Reality has to offer]
