A Philosophical Happy Hour on the act of will, and the question: what does it mean to say that our will is free? What makes a will good? A common staple of western philosophical anthropology is arguing or asserting there is such a thing as a human will, a driving force or the part of […]

Today we conclude our first white paper series, derived from the 2024 Difficulties of Technology seminar, with Modules 8 – Technology and the Whole Person and 9 – Consensus on Artificial Intelligence. These papers address the principal and characteristic harm of poorly designed, developed, and implemented technology—namely, its fragmentation of the human person—and the specific […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Description Our guiding questions: Is the act of faith or belief in revelation distinct in kind from the operations of reason?  Can reason prove faith?  Can reason disprove faith?  Can reason show faith as compatible with reason? | How is the faith to be made known?  Sacred texts, whether the Bible, Qur’an, or Torah, have […]

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 […]

Description To understand and affect this maturation into postmodernity, we will turn our attention in this seminar to the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely: the proto-semiotic history, an expanded doctrine of causality,  the retrieved and clarified notion of relation, the concept of physiosemiosis, the continuity of culture and nature, the notion of purely objective reality, and the real interdisciplinarity which semiotics fosters. This is […]

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 […]