Brian Kemple

  • …Finishing Our Sentences?

    …Finishing Our Sentences? Language and the Habits of Thought in the Age of Generative AI Most discussion about artificial intelligence today tends toward either hype or panic.  Optimists see in it a miraculous tool, the future of scientific advancement, and a development not only to rival the industrial revolution in its transformative power, but—perhaps—one that…

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  • Technology’s Effects on Nature

    Commonly, we presume an opposition between the “natural” and the “artificial”.  Usually, we assume the “natural” to be everything untouched by human hands, whereas the “artificial” is that which we have ourselves brought into being.  But this division not only ends up positing as irreconcilable the objects of our experience, it reinforces a false anthropological…

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  • On Our Need for Truth

    A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the nature and definition of truth, and its necessity for our living good lives. Do we need truth to live good lives?  Do all human beings?  And if so—what is the truth?  How do we know it?  Who “has” it?  Where do we find it?  What do we really mean…

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  • Psychological Effects of Technology

    That technology use has effects on our psychological well-being has become, by this point, well-known and widely recognized.  But the concern is ordinarily limited to the distraction, anxiety, addiction, overstimulation, or other faults in control that appear downstream of specific technological devices or frameworks, such as smartphones, social media, or LLMs.  These are real problems,…

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  • On Testimony: Rhetoric, Witnesses, and the Problem of Trust

    A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the rhetorical use and fittingness of witness testimony in efforts at persuasion. Very little of what we know—or believe ourselves to know—comes directly from our own experience.  That is, someone might have a kind of local familiarity with things, but he has never seen Africa or Asia, never observed distant…

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  • Second Plenary Speaker – Human Formation in the Digital Age

    From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our…

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  • First Plenary Speaker – Human Formation in the Digital Age

    From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our…

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  • The Problem with Solving Technology

    Everyone knows that technology troubles our lives in the twenty-first century.  It distracts us, surveils us, accelerates us, isolates us, weakens our habits of attention, alters the demands and means of education, and increasingly mediates in our relations to both one another and to reality itself.  The natural response is to ask: how do we…

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  • Retrospect: Fate and Freedom

    A retrospective reflection on the recent Philosophical Happy Hour concerning fate, providence, and the limits of human free choice. A few brief reflections derived from our recent Philosophical Happy Hour on Fate: 1. Many people use the term to avoid responsibility for not only their own actions, but even for having to think about the…

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  • Felicitates de Quodlibet, III.4

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on… whatever! The fourth installment in our Felictates de Quodlibet series for 2026, in which we talk about whatever we want, so long as it is interesting, and for as long as we are interested. Or, to put this otherwise: do you have a philosophical question—any question whatsoever—you want seriously to…

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