Peripatetic Periodical
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Hidden Hours
This post presents a quick reflection on rediscovering the hidden hours—the hours that we lose in each day. Who among us has not found him- or herself wishing for an extra hour or two in the day? For many, there seems so much to get done, and so little time in which to do it.…
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On Analogy
A Brief Primer on the Doctrine’s Confusion Few topics have brought as much consternation to Thomists than that of analogy; not only those living and writing in the contemporary period (subsequent, that is, to the Leonine revival initiated in 1879), but stretching back to the first fluorescence of Thomism begun in the late fourteenth century,…
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A Meditation on Exile
But exile—like that faced by Aeneas—more rapidly ages any man or woman, and, today, we are all today wandering in exile. We want for a home… many seem not to possess even the sense of what “home” is. This deprivation seems especially true of my own generation (millennials) and younger. Not only are we geographically…
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What Is Wrong with the World?
“What’s wrong with the world?” Countless thinkers have asked this question, especially over the past century-plus, and they have asked it over and over again; to the point that few in recent years seem to ask it any longer, even for the purpose of adopting the thinnest veneer of rhetorical posturing. No. Today, almost everyone…
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Re-Thinking Education
I have, relative to my own age and experience, long been a critic of academia. Just the other week, a friend reminded me of a late-night frustrated rant delivered in graduate school about the seeming hopeless prospects laid before us. Not only our chances to find meaningful employment, I claimed, but the whole structure is…
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No Freedom without Purpose
Musings derived from recent Lyceum Institute conversations concerning language. It is an oft-stated distinction, and with good cause, that “freedom” may be said in two ways: either a kind of negative freedom, that is, a freedom belonging to self-determining agents in the absence of restraint (“freedom from”); or a kind of positive freedom, namely, the…
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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…
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A Vision of the Good
The following is a summary of key points raised in our weekly Philosophical Happy Hour discussion of 9 November 2022 during which we discussed the lacking vision of the good in our contemporary society. Ideologies and False Idols Why do left-leaning progressive politics seem ascendant in the Western world? One does not need to dig…
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Why “Epistemology” is not a Science
In a certain way, writing this title and essay pains me: I first fell in love with philosophy in an undergraduate course titled “epistemology”. It was a difficult course to take in my sophomore year. We spent the first half of it reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, on which we had to write…
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Musings on Extrinsic Formal Causality and Practical Signs
This is not quite how I envisioned this first blog post turning out… Originally, I had considered writing something on the issue of the political common good, focusing on the plurality of common goods in relation to the political exercise of social justice in its original and true sense (namely, the right ordering of various…