Brian Kemple
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Humanitas Technica – Update
Our on-going project of publishing the results and developments of the Humanitas Technica Project continues: today, adding a new theoretical paper by Adam Pugen (Faculty Fellow) and two more of our first white paper series. Reclaiming Communication Reclaiming Communication from Information: Knowing in the Digital Age — This paper argues that digital media reduces communication…
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On the Necessity of Friendship for Discovering the Good
A Philosophical Happy Hour focused on the question of friendship: its nature, deepening, and the necessity of others with whom we share the search for the good. I have spent much of my life alone. The youngest in my family, I began homeschooling in fourth grade, and continued until I started community college, before transitioning…
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Disarming the Presuppositions against Faith
A Preface to a Long Conversation—on the relationship between faith and reason—begun by addressing the presuppositions which have made the conversation unnecessarily difficult. “There are not one hundred people in the United States”, once said Fulton Sheen, “who hate the Catholic Church; but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church…
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On the Univocal and the Analogical
A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the principles and aims of language through univocal and analogical predication. What is the meaning or the significance of a word? This question may operate on two levels: first, concerning a specific word’s meaning—“tree” or “justice”, “fruit” or “truth”; or, second, concerning the relationship between meaning in general and words…
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Reading Circle: Pierre Manent [2026-27]
Description Democracy without Nations?: The Fate of Self-Government in Europe (4 weeks) [March–April]This work, now over twenty years old, retains clear relevance today in light of the current crisis of the nation-state as a political form. The book is an extended essay on some of the consequences of late–twentieth-century changes in European governance. As an…
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Rhetorica ad Herennium [English]
Among the tasks of the Lyceum Institute is a restoration of forgotten traditions and texts. Newly produced within this initiative is our republication of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a classic work in Roman oratory, in the English translation by Harry Caplan. This text, from roughly 80BC, informed the study of rhetoric in the days of…
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Reframing Our Understanding of Technology
Technology is often discussed and conceived in extreme terms: triumphant progress, mastering nature; or self-inflicted catastrophic destruction. But rarely is the question asked—and even more rarely answered well—what is technology? How are we affected in ourselves by our technologies? The 2024 Difficulties of Technology seminar, conducted within the multiyear Humanitas Technica project, asked these and…
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What Classical Education Needs
In this conversation, Geoffrey Meadows (Head of Upper School, Tulsa Classical Academy) discusses being a “hunter of causes” and the need to translate enthusiasm into hard work in classical education. Together with Dr. Kemple, he discusses the importance of philosophy, the impact of technology on education, and the necessity of moral formation in students. Geoffrey…