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John Henry Newman in Four Books

It has often been suggested, and not without ample reason and evidence, that the importance of a great thinker never finds itself as potently realized during the thinker’s own lifetime. The significance of truly great thoughts, that is, take not only decades but centuries to unfold. Thus, when it is claimed that John Henry Newman will be seen as the transitional figure between the modern and post-modern ages, much as Augustine was between antiquity and the medieval, it should be recognized that this claim points not to a past recognition but one dawning at this very hour. Certainly, Newman’s work carried weight in his own time, as did Augustine’s. Will Newman’s name grow to the same greatness?

Augustine’s Confessions, like Newman’s Apologia; his City of God, like Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine; and his On Christian Teaching, like Newman’s Idea of a University, all show striking parallels between the writings of the two saints. But it is in their most systematic works that we find an even more remarkable parallel. Living a life contemporaneous with the early definitions of nature and person in theology, in On the Trinity, Augustine trained his genius on the ultimate mystery of the Triune God, easily the most challenging and the most fertile of all Christian doctrines.

Newman, living amidst the modern world’s storms of doubt and confusion, along with its celebrated, and risky “turn to the subject,” directed his attention instead to a meticulous study of the very act of faith – that movement of the human intellect that enables it to assent to such teachings in the first place. What he discovered were insights of such uncommon luminosity that not only theology, but all knowledge – of whatever type – found itself newly vindicated. By showing the role that pre-rational belief plays in every venture of human knowing, and the complexities of assent in consolidating our opinions and certitudes, he seemed to be turning epistemology on its head. The result was easily his most demanding and in retrospect his most revolutionary book: The Grammar of Assent. To this book the seminar will direct a more focused attention. Also Newman’s oft misunderstood celebration of conscience can only be grasped from within the perspectives laid open by this book.

These initial comparisons between the two saints are being made only in the interest of portraying Newman as a kind of modern Augustine. It will be suggested that what Augustine meant for the subsequent medieval centuries, Newman represents for late modernity and post-modernity. It will be his four books that will be the focus of our study. Augustine’s thought has already been folded into the fields of Christian reflection during the long 15 centuries that separate the two men’s lives. Newman’s ideas, on the other hand, are just beginning to be fully appreciated. For most of our readings, we shall follow selections chosen from each of the four works in sequence: from the Apologia, the Essay, the Idea, and the Grammar. Access to the seminar, taught by Fr. Scott Randall Paine, PhD, begins on 1 April 2023. View the syllabus here.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

10:15am ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


April
15
Lecture 1: Overview of the Life, Work and Legacy of John Henry Newman
Readings:
» [Primary] Sheridan Gilley. “Life and Writings”.
» [Secondary] Afterword to Ian Ker’s biography of JHN.
April
22
Lecture 2: Apologia Pro Vita Sua“The Story of a Mind”
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Apologia.
» [Secondary] Ian Ker. John Henry Newman: A Biography.
» [Secondary] Robert C. Christie. The Logic of Conversion: The Harmony of Heart, Will, Mind, and Imagination in John Henry Newman.
April
29
Lecture 3: Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine – From Seed to Fruit
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Essay.
» [Secondary] Bogdan Dolenc. “Newman’s Essay… Its Genesis and Enduring Relevance”.
May
6
Lecture 4: The Idea of a UniversityNewman’s Vision of Liberal Education
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Idea.
» [Secondary] Mark van Doren. “Liberal Education,” from Liberal Education.
» [Secondary] Jarislav Pelikan. The Idea of a University: a Reexamination.
May
13

BREAK
May
20
Lecture 5: Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent I Notional and Real Assent
Reading:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Grammar, Part 1: “Assent and Apprehension.”
» [Secondary] Michael Polanyi. “The Logic of Affirmation”, in Personal Knowledge.
May
 27
Lecture 6: Grammar of Assent II – The Illative Sense
Reading:
» [Primary] Further selected excerpts from the Grammar, Part 2: “Assent and Inference.”
» [Secondary] John Deely. “Knowledge” from Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine.
» L.M. Régis. “Assent or Value Judgment About the Truth of First Principles,” in Epistemology.
June
3
Lecture 7: Newman and the Conscience
Readings:
» [Primary] Selected excerpts from the Grammar and other works.
» [Secondary] Gerard J. Hughes. “Conscience,” in Cambridge Companion to JHN.
» Bernard Dive. “Introduction” to John Henry Newman and the Imagination.
June
10
Lecture 8: Newman Today – A Church Doctor for the 21st Century
Readings:
» [Primary] Discourse and Homily for the Beatification of John Henry Newman, Pope Benedict XVI, 2010
» [Primary] Newman’s “Biglietto Speech,” 1879.
» [Secondary] Erich Przywara. A Newman Synthesis, selections.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

[2023 Spring] Newman in Four Books – Public Participant

Recommended for those who are currently students or with part-time employment.

$60.00

[2023 Spring] Newman in Four Books – Public Patron

Recommended for those in professions that do not pay as well as they ought and for whom continued education is especially important (including professors and clergy).

$135.00

[2023 Spring] Newman in Four Books – Public Benefactor

Recommended for those with fulltime employment in well-paying professions and sufficient resources to provide a little more.

$200.00

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

Aquinas: De Veritate [Part I]

Quid est veritas? A question, doubtless, familiar to many: “What is truth?” Today, whether put into those exact words or others like them, we witness a similar disdain for beliefs that there exists a truth and that we may know it. Seldom, however does this scorn rise from genuine intellectual conviction in the posit of radical relativism or of an intellectual nihilism—such conviction warring against what it proposes to uphold. Rather, for many, the rejection of truth is born from despair mingled with vice: sloth, pride, and lust. Truth gives rise to norms, and accepting norms requires that we evaluate the quality of our actions.

Yet… all human beings, as Aristotle rightly tells us at the outset of his Metaphysics, desire to know. The despair over truth’s attainment, and the lostness to vice, are not insurmountable obstacles. While recovery from vice takes many acts of will—opting for the arduous good rather than the facile but shallow pleasure—we need truth to discern what goods are genuine, and which are false. Here, as in so many other places, we find Thomas Aquinas to be a guiding light.

Thomas Aquinas held his first series of “disputed questions”, De veritate, over the course of the three years of his first regency at the University of Paris, 1256-1259. He was then in his early thirties. The structure of the “disputation” – both live and in its published form – reflects the continual raising of questions and resolution of difficulties between teacher and students engaged together in common, probing inquiry.  This particular series of disputations, according to Aquinas’s biographer J.-P. Torrell, shows us “the genius of the young master… a genius in motion, perpetually in the act of discovery”.

Though we know this work as De veritate (On Truth), in fact Thomas and his students were occupied with two great themes: the true and the good. These two have a transcendental character: that is, each is a name for being itself, albeit under the aspect of a relation to mind (the true) or to appetite (the good). These two great themes yielded a total of 253 discussions (“articles”) ranged under a total of 29 areas of inquiry (“questions”). Access to the seminar, taught by Kirk Kanzelberger, PhD, begins on 1 April 2023.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

11:30am ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


April
15
Week 1: Being and the True I
Lecture: “Truth as communication of being and mind”
Readings:
» De Veritate (DV) 1, aa. 1-3, 5.
April
22
Week 2: Being and the True II
Lecture: “Truth and mutability, truth and falsity”
Reading:
» DV 1, aa. 6, 8-12.
April
29
Week 3: Divine Knowledge I
Lecture: “Divine knowledge as divine perfection”
Reading:
» DV 2, aa. 1-5, 8, 12.
May
6
Week 4: The Idea of a UniversityNewman’s Vision of Liberal Education
Lecture: “Divine knowledge as cause of the creature”
Reading:
» DV 2, aa. 13-15.
» DV 3, aa. 1-3.
May
13

BREAK
May
20
Week 5: Human Cognition I
Lecture: “The understanding animal”
Reading:
» DV 10, aa. 1-6.
May
 27
Week 6: Human Cognition II
Lecture: “The understanding animal understanding itself”
Reading:
» DV 10, aa. 8-9.
» DV 11, aa. 1-2.
June
3
Week 7: Faith
Lecture: “Knowledge beyond nature”
Readings:
» DV 10, aa. 11-13.
» DV 14, aa. 1-3.
June
10
Week 8: Practical Knowledge
Lecture: “Synderesis and conscience”
Readings:
» DV 16, aa. 1-3.
» DV 17, aa. 1-3.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

[2023 Spring] Aquinas: De Veritate I – Public Participant

Recommended for those who are currently students or with part-time employment.

$60.00

[2023 Spring] Aquinas: De Veritate I – Public Patron

Recommended for those in professions that do not pay as well as they ought and for whom continued education is especially important (including professors and clergy).

$135.00

[2023 Spring] Aquinas: De Veritate I – Public Benefactor

Recommended for those with fulltime employment in well-paying professions and sufficient resources to provide a little more.

$200.00

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

Semiotics: The Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot

What is a sign? It is a deceptively difficult question—deceptive because we think we know when we have never bothered truly to ask the question. We believe that we see and hear signs everywhere: guiding our use of streets, telling us where to exit, the location of the bathroom, what dangers might lie ahead, and so on. But in truth, though we experience signification in these instances, the things we identify as the “signs”—the on the street corner, the glowing plastic “EXIT” over a fire door, the nondescript white silhouette of a representatively feminine shape over one door, the print of a large clawed mammal in soft dirt—are only a part of the signs that we experience. The truth hides in a reality far more complex and far more interesting. Discovery and understanding of this hidden reality impacts our understanding of the whole universe, and of ourselves not least of all.

We name this a seminar in “semiotics”, and so one might expect that it concerns thinkers and issues raised no earlier than the late 19th or early 20th centuries, at which time Charles Sanders Peirce (10 September 1839—1914 April 19) retrieved the term from its neglected proposal in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But—while certainly we will be concerned with many of the issues that preoccupied Peirce and his successors—we find their genesis not in the twilight of modernity, but the twilight instead of the Latin Age. For Peirce was inspired in much of his thinking by the Conimbricenses, a 16th-17th century semi-anonymous group of Jesuit scholars who wrote extensively and profoundly on signs. These same Conimbricenses were, moreover, the teachers of João Poinsot, variously known also as Juan de S. Thoma, Joannes a Sancto Thoma, John of St. Thomas, or, in our usage here, John Poinsot (9 July 1589—1644 June 15).

Poinsot, who took the religious name Joannes a Sancto Thoma upon entering the Dominican Order in 1610 to signify his fidelity to the great saint’s thought, died just six years before René Descartes (31 March 1596–1650 February 11) and yet, despite a much greater profundity of thought and insight, has remained relatively unknown (at least when compared to his French counterpart). Indeed, where Descartes began in earnest the Modern Age of philosophy, with its characteristic Way of Ideas, Poinsot brought to a close the Latin Age. Their relative fame and obscurity to history follow from complex causes. One of these, no doubt, is that while Descartes wrote short and accessible texts, Poinsot crafted both a Cursus Philosophicus and an (incomplete) Cursus Theologicus—each many thousands of pages.

Within this Cursus Philosophicus we find a textually-dispersed but nevertheless conceptually-united Tractatus de Signis, a Treatise on Signs [required]. This treatise has been extracted, arranged, translated, and editorialized in an edition by John Deely (26 April 1942—2017 January 7), first published in 1985 and again in 2013. A careful examination of this text reveals that, while Poinsot may have been the “evening star” of the Latin Age, he proves also the “morning star” of the new, genuinely post-modern era, the Age of Relation. In this seminar, we will study this Tractatus de Signis with close attention. Access to the seminar begins on 18 March 2023.

Schedule

Discussion Sessions

2:15pm ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings


(required in bold)
Copy of the Tractatus de Signis is required. Available from St. Augustine’s Press or other booksellers (1st edition acceptable).
18 March—April 8Preparatory Phase:
All participants are expected to read widely from a selection of articles and texts—including reading required texts in advance—while joining in communal textual discussion.

No discussions are scheduled during this phase, but it is pivotal for entering correctly into the active discussion phase (15 April—June 10).
April
15
Week 1: Preliminaries: Entry into the Tractatus
Lecture: An Abbreviated History of Semiotics
Readings:
» Poinsot 1632: Tractatus de Signis (TDS) 4–39.
» Deely 1994: “A Morning and Evening Star”
» Deely 2009: Augustine & Poinsot, 3–59.
» Kemple 2022: “Augustine: Instituting the Given Sign” and “Aquinas: The Metaphysics behind Semiosis”.
April
22
Week 2: Cognition-Dependent Being
Lecture: Entia Rationis and the Constitutive Acts of the Mind
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 40–76.
» Maritain 1959: Degrees of Knowledge, 118–44.
» Doyle 1994: “Poinsot on the Knowability of Beings of Reason”.
April
29
Week 3: Relational Being
Lecture: The Nature and Kinds of Relation
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 78–112.
» Deely 1985: “Editorial Afterword” in TDS, 472–89.
May
6
Week 4: Sign-Relations
Lecture: The Being Proper to Signs
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 114–52.
» Deely 1990: “Signs: The Medium of Semiosis” in Basics of Semiotics.
» Kemple 2022: “Poinsot: The Essence of the Sign”.
May
13

BREAK
May
20
Week 5: Triadic Elements of the Sign-Relation
Lecture: Cognitive Powers and Objects
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 153–92.
» Deely 2009: Purely Objective Reality, 14–37.
May
 27
Week 6: The Causality and Extension of Signs
Lecture: The Degrees of Specifying Causality
Reading:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 193–219.
» Deely 1994: New Beginnings, 151–82.
June
3
Week 7: Division of Signs, Part I
Lecture: Toward an Understanding of Concepts
Readings:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 220–61.
» Beuchot 1994: “Intentionality in John Poinsot”.
June
10
Week 8: Division of Signs, Part II
Lecture: Toward an Understanding of Language
Readings:
» Poinsot 1632: TDS, 262–83.
» Maritain 1957: “Language and the Theory of Sign”.
10 June—July 2Writing Phase:
All participants in the seminar are not only encouraged but expected to submit an essay of no less than 3000 words pertaining to the Tractatus de Signis of Poinsot.

The essay may be evaluated for publication in Reality.

Registration

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

This is an advanced seminar, tantamount to a graduate course in difficulty and intensity. Students should be familiar with the Scholastic and especially Thomistic traditions, or at the very least, with the semiotic work of John Deely.

[2023 Spring] Semiotics: Poinsot – Public Participant

Recommended for those who are currently students or with part-time employment.

$60.00

[2023 Spring] Semiotics: Poinsot – Public Patron

Recommended for those in professions that do not pay as well as they ought and for whom continued education is especially important (including professors and clergy).

$135.00

[2023 Spring] Semiotics: Poinsot – Public Benefactor

Recommended for those with fulltime employment in well-paying professions and sufficient resources to provide a little more.

$200.00

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

The Practice of Philosophy in a Time of Loneliness

Brian Jones (PhD candidate, University of St. Thomas, TX) delivers a thoughtful lecture on how the practice of philosophy in our time of loneliness can sustain and elevate us throughout the present crisis and the threat it poses to the world. Jones draws on the thought of Alexis De Tocqueville, Byung-Chul Han, James V. Schall, and many others. You may now listen to the full lecture below—and if you enjoy, please consider donating to the Lyceum! Your donations allow us to continue supporting academics like Mr. Jones in their pursuit and promulgation of the good and true.

You can download the lecture using the three-dot menu at the right! – Brian Jones on the Practice of Philosophy in a Time of Loneliness.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic and the destructive mitigation responses to it have certainly placed a heavy existential weight on democratic citizens. The social, political, and economic chaos of the past two years has profoundly disorienting. In the midst of such an unprecedented response, we are right to wonder about the very endurance of our modern liberal democratic regimes. The current crisis, however, is not the result of the pandemic. Rather, the general Western response to the pandemic has exacerbated certain social and political conditions present prior to the arrival of the virus. The pandemic has merely escalated an already existing form of disintegration. While there are many features of this present crisis, one that is most acutely felt and witnessed is a cultural condition which tends to incline citizens towards thoughtlessness.

Ravaisson on the Formation of Second Nature

As soon as the soul arrives at self-consciousness, it is no longer merely the form, the end or even the principle of organization; a world opens within it that increasingly separates and detaches itself from the life of the body, and in which the soul has its own life, its own destiny, and its own end to accomplish. It is this superior life that the incessant progress of life and nature seems – without being able to attain it – to aspire, as if to its perfection, to its good. This higher life, in contrast, has its own good within itself; and it knows this, looks for it, embraces it, at once as its own good and as good itself, as absolute perfection. But pleasure and pain have their grounds in good and evil; they are the sensible signs of good and evil. Here, therefore, in this world of the soul, the truest good is accompanied by the truest form of sensibility; such are the passions of the soul – that is, feeling. Feeling is distinct from the spiritual and moral activity that pursues good and evil, though it gathers their impressions.

Continuity or repetition must therefore gradually weaken feeling, just as it weakens sensation; it gradually extinguishes pleasure and pain in feeling, as it does in sensation. Similarly, it changes into a need the very feeling that it destroys, making its absence more and more unbearable for the soul. At the same time, repetition or continuity makes moral activity easier and more assured. It develops within the soul not only the disposition, but also the inclination and the tendency to act, just as in the organs it develops the inclination for movement. In the end, it gradually brings the pleasure of action to replace the more transient pleasure of passive sensibility.

In this way, as habit destroys the passive emotions of pity, the helpful activity and the inner joys of charity develop more and more int he heart of the one who does good. In this way, love is augmented by its own expressions; in this way, it reanimates with its penetrating flame the impressions that have been extinguished, and at each instant reignites the exhausted sources of passion.

Ultimately, in the activity of the soul, as in that of movement, habit gradually transforms the will proper to action in an involuntary inclination. Mores and morality are formed in this manner. Virtue is first of all an effort and wearisome; it becomes something attractive and a pleasure only through practice, as a desire that forgets itself or that is unaware of itself, and gradually it draws near to the holiness of innocence. Such is the very secret of education: its art consists in attracting someone towards the good by action, thus fixing the inclination for it. In this way a second nature is formed.

Félix Ravaisson 1838: De l’habitude in the English translation by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair, Of Habit, 67-69.

Félix Ravaisson (23 October 1813—1900 May 18) was a French philosopher influential in the latter half of the 19th century, particularly in the school of French Spiritualism and particularly as a “spiritual realist”. He exhibits in Of Habit, his most influential and enduring work, a familiarity with Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition. He is also known for his influence on Henri Bergson, whose theory of the élan vital would likely not have been without Ravaisson.

Seminar Catalog for 2023

The year 2022 saw the Lyceum offer a spate of diverse and fascinating seminars. so how can we top this wonderful past year of seminars? Why, with a new year of wonderful seminars, of course! We are covering a broad range of thinkers and ideas this year: Aristotle, Aquinas, John Henry Newman, John Poinsot, Yves Simon, Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy—and more. Introducing our seminar catalog for 2023:

2023 Seminar Catalog

W I N T E R (JANUARY—APRIL)Instructors
» Ethics: Virtue» Dr. Brian Kemple
» Aquinas’ Cosmological Vision» Dr. Brian Kemple
S P R I N G (APRIL—JUNE)
» Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate – Part I» Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger
» John Henry Newman in Four Books» Dr. Scott Randall Paine
» Semiotics: The Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot» Dr. Brian Kemple
S U M M E R (JUNE—SEPTEMBER)
» Phenomenology: an Introduction» Drs. Daniel Wagner and Brian Kemple
» Politics: A Thomistic Defense of Democracy» Dr. Francisco Plaza
» Ethics: The Moral Noetic of the Natural Law» Dr. Matthew Minerd
» Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate – Part II» Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger
F A L L (SEPTEMBER—NOVEMBER)
» Thomistic Psychology: Habits and World» Dr. Brian Kemple
» Phenomenology: The Contribution of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy» Dr. Scott Randall Paine
» Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Method – Part I» Dr. Brian Kemple

These seminars are open to the public, but enrolled members of the Lyceum Institute are offered discounted fees. Each lasts 8 weeks and includes the opportunity for an in-depth engagement with important philosophical questions. Anyone with a serious commitment to the truth is welcome. Our instructors are among the very best and bring decades of insight, wisdom, and experience in teaching. Download the Seminar Catalog for full descriptions of each seminar.

Details (dates, times, syllabi, required books, and in-depth descriptions) and registration for each seminar will be posted approximately one month before they begin. Keep your eyes here for news about Ethics: Virtue and Aquinas’ Cosmological Vision this weekend—and consider enrolling!

Standard priceBasic Lyceum
Enrollment
Advanced Lyceum EnrollmentPremium Lyceum Enrollment
Benefactor$200 per seminar$903 seminars included
$90 after
8 seminars included
$90 after
Patron$135 per seminar$653 seminars included
$65 after
8 seminars included
$65 after
Participant$80 per seminar$403 seminars included
$40 after
8 seminars included
$40 after

Latin Courses for 2023

If you have ever wanted to learn Latin, or to improve your already-existing abilities with the language, we have lots of options for you in 2023! We have set the calendar for our Latin Courses in 2023. This includes three Foundations Elementary courses (comprising a total of 36 weeks), which teach the basics and three Selected Readings courses, which comprise a variety of selections in prose and poetry, Scholastic writings, and the Moral Epistles of Seneca the Younger. Our wide range of Latin offerings enables students to grow in understanding and confidence of the language.

CourseDatesTime
Elementary Latin I10 January – April 18 (Tuesdays)6:00–7:00pm ET (New York)
Elementary Latin II10 January – April 18 (Tuesdays)7:30–8:30pm ET
Elementary Latin III9 May – July 25 (Tuesdays)7:30–8:30pm ET
Seneca’s Epistles13 April – June 22 (Thursdays)6:00–7:00pm ET
Scholastic Latin29 August – November 21 (Tuesdays) 10:30–11:30am ET
Prose & Poetry14 September – November 16 (Thursdays)6:00–7:00pm ET

All of our class sessions are recorded, so if a student must miss a session or two, they can still review the material. However, because language requires practice, attendance at classes is required. This policy also helps students keep pace with one another and builds community among participants.

Participation in all three Elementary courses and in Scholastic Latin is included at every level of enrollment, while a nominal fee is required for Seneca’s Epistles and Prose & Poetry. Elementary courses are offered annually, and can be re-taken as often as desired. One cannot enroll for these courses without being a member of the Lyceum Institute.

If you are interested in Latin, you can learn more about our approach here (and contact our Director of Languages, Richard Sharpe). We hope you will consider enrolling and studying with us in 2023!

Trivium Courses for 2023

January is just around the corner and we are getting ready for the new year! We have set the calendar for our Trivium Courses in 2023. These courses are treated as foundational at the Lyceum Institute. To be human is to use language. Should we not strive to understand that which makes us human and to master its use? Building habits of thoughtful engagement with and through language enables us to discern the truth more clearly; to see through lies, manipulations, and obfuscations; and to articulate the true good more persuasively.

Each course will meet twice weekly: Mondays at 6:00pm ET (New York) and Thursdays at 12:00pm ET. Discussion sessions are recorded, but live participation is strongly recommended. Schedules are as follows:

Though many are either ignorant of the Trivium or consider it to be an outdated pedagogical approach, we at the Lyceum consider the Trivium to be the cornerstone of a truly “liberal” education. It is not exaggerative to suggest that, without a proper study of these arts, one cannot make a legitimate claim to be able to think and communicate well.

CourseDatesBreak
Grammar9 January – April 6 (M/Th)(break on February 20/23)
Logic8 May – August 3 (M/Th)(break on June 19/22)
Rhetoric28 August – November 20 (M/Th)(break on October 9/12 – no final Th class).

We will begin in 2023 with a course in Grammar—the recommended first course in our series—as the foundation of any successful understanding and use of language. The study of grammar is not simply about learning rules for arbitrary “correctness”, but about learning to think and understand the world in an orderly manner. The grammarian does not master rules for rules’ sake, but discovers the structures of meaning and brings them to intelligent articulation. This approach to grammar is carried out through our textbook as well as through a reading of Virgil’s Aeneid.

Learn more about each course below and enroll today! Participation in the Trivium is included at every level of enrollment. We hope you will join us for the Trivium Courses in 2023.

John Deely on Semiotics and Logocentrism

Within current philosophy, David Clarke has made a belated attempted to define semiotic itself in the restrictive terms already established as proper to semiology: an “attempt to extend analogically features initially arrived at by examining language use to more primitive signs, with logical features of language becoming the archetype on which analysis of these latter signs is developed”. It is simply a misnomer to title a book based on such a thesis Principles of Semiotic. To try to reduce semiotic to the status of a subalternate discipline within the dimensions of current linguistic philosophy already evinces adherence to the modern perspectives of idealism which semiotics points beyond.

Among modern philosophers, the one who struggled most against the coils of idealism and in the direction of a semiotic, was Martin Heidegger. His failure to free himself from the modern logocentrism is, to be sure, a testimony to its pervasiveness in modern culture, and to the scale of the task semiotic in its fullest possibilities has to face. Yet in the debate between realism and idealism, he is the one who perhaps most clearly brough tot he fore the fact that, whatever its drawbacks and “no matter how contrary and untenable it may be in its results”, idealism “has an advantage in principle” over realism. That advantage lies in the simple fact that whenever we observe anything that observation already presupposes and rests within a semiosis whereby the object observed came to exist as object—that is to say, as perceived, experienced, or known—in the first place.

No one, including Heidegger, realizes this fact better than the semiotician. Indeed, at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs. So it is perhaps not surprising that much of the original semiotic development in our time has taken place along the tracks and lines of a classical idealism in the modern sense, an environment and climate of thought within which the structuralist analysis of texts and narratives is particularly comfortable.

Yet we are entitled to wonder if such a perspective is enough to allow for the full development of the possibilities inherent in the notion of a doctrine of signs—to wonder if the “way of signs” does not lead outside of and well beyond the classical “way of ideas” of which Locke also spoke. We are entitled to wonder if what we need is not rather, as the recent collaborative monograph by Anderson et al. calls for, “a semiotics which provides the human sciences with a context for reconceptualizing foundations and for moving along a path which, demonstrably, avoids crashing headlong into the philosophical roadblock thrown up by forced choices between realism and idealism, as though this exclusive dichotomy were also exhaustive of the possibilities of interpreting human experience”.

Such a development seems to be what is taking place in the tradition of semiotic. This tradition, in fact, given its name by Locke, had reached the level of explicit thematic consciousness and systematically unified expression only very late—as far as we currently know, not before the Tractatus de Signis essay in 1632 by the Iberian philosophy of Portuguese birth, John Poinsot.

John Deely 1990: Basics of Semiotics [8th edition], 5-6.

For much more on John Deely, see the Wikipedia entry, a lengthy bibliography [1965-1998] [1999-2010], an obituary written by Christopher Morrissey, and the many presentations at the International Open Seminar on Semiotics: A Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing.

Marshall McLuhan on the History of the Trivium

…the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among them for ascendancy.  Ancient grammar was at odds with the dialectics of Plato and, especially, of Aristotle, as the art of interpreting phenomena.  As the method of patristic theology, grammar enjoyed uninterrupted ascendancy until the revival of dialectics by Gerbert, Roscellinus, and Abelard in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  With the decadence of dialectical or scholastic theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both grammarians and rhetoricians surge forward again, finally triumphing in the work and influence of Erasmus, the restorer of patristic theology and of the grammatical humanistic discipline on which it rests.  On the other hand, the war between the dialecticians and rhetoricians began as soon as the Sophists attempted to make dialectics subordinate to the art of persuasion.  Plato and Aristotle were the greatest enemies of the rhetoricians, not so much in rejecting rhetoric, as in asserting that as an art it had no power to control dialectics.  The Stoics, however, are the main defenders of dialectics against rhetoric after Aristotle.

Marshall McLuhan, 1943: The Classical Trivium, 42.

A point which will be focused on in the present unnamed Lyceum trivium project (being constituted by a series of lectures and discussion sessions which will result either in a video, text, or other public-facing production: see more on our approach to the Trivium here), the conflict of “ascendancy” among the arts of the trivium is a subtle point to which few have drawn attention as well as McLuhan. One difficulty I see emergent from the history of their rivalry is a certain blindness to their unity. What makes something one? An indication hinted at here—whether intentionally or not—is the point of “decadence” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among the scholastics. This decadence itself is a point in need of exploration and exposition, for, certainly, while those under the influence of Ockham and other nominalistic theories were undoubtedly decadent in their dialectical practice, given that they had abandoned the essential principle of unity between thought and things, it is also true that other scholastics were not so decadent, though they may have been quite elaborate in their use of dialectic nonetheless. (See, for instance, the great work being done on the thought of the Conimbricenses.)

The opposition of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric, that is, has never rendered robust intellectual fruit when one attempts entirely the suppression of the others. Each must be understood as an integral part of a whole. What remains a question—which we will explore explicitly in the second of our lectures and discussions—is how these parts are united and oriented as a whole. This question requires also, antecedently, a consideration of what the trivium aims at; for every unity is governed, in some way or another, by the end for the sake of which it exists. This question was the focus of our first session, wherein it was discussed that the arts of the trivium, as tools of reflection upon thought, are tools whereby we manifest in language what is true. This truth is not merely factual (i.e., of the literal and measurable), but revelatory of being.

And so the question becomes: through which of the arts do we best orient ourselves towards what is true, without leaving behind the others?