The colloquium lecture delivered in May 2022 by James Capehart, PhD, “The Problem of Christian Philosophy” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below (full lecture at the bottom). If you enjoy the lecture, please consider supporting our Summer fundraising campaign! Your donations allow us to support the work of philosophers like Dr. Capehart.
The Problem of Christian Philosophy
Dr. James Capehart
The Problem of Christian Philosophy – Preview
How in fact is Christian philosophy a problem? The wording itself has proven to be the most problematic. Can there be a philosophy that is truly Christian? Does “Christian” specifically differentiate “philosophy”? Does that turn it into a theology? Given the existence of numerous volumes of Christian works of theology, can we say that any of their contents should be called philosophical? Is any of that content unique to Christian thinkers?
Here, Dr. Capehart explores not only an important tradition but an essential question for all Christians and philosophers alike: the relationship between the study of revelation and the truths contained therein and the role of natural reason in discerning and discovering meaning.
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.
ABSTRACT: “Husserl insisted that I should study Kierkegaard.” So recounts the Russian existential philosopher, Lev Shestov, in his posthumously published 1939 essay, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl.” Why would Husserl have said such a thing? As soon as one begins attempting to trace the conceptual lineage of phenomenology back to Kierkegaard, a number of philosophical connections worthy of attention emerge. Above all, it is the phenomenon of conscience that constitutes the cornerstone of such an analysis. For, just as conscience lies at the heart of the human experience, so too it lies at the heart of the attempt to exhibit that experience in philosophical thought. By emphasizing that life (and thought) is lived before God, a Kierkegaardian phenomenology of conscience illuminates what is most at stake, both methodologically and existentially, in doing phenomenology, and realizes phenomenology’s longstanding ambition to make sense of what it means to be the kind of beings we are, or, as Kierkegaard would put the matter, to be a single individual. Focusing on the phenomenon of conscience, this lecture develops an account of doing phenomenology in a Kierkegaardian way, that is, doing phenomenology before God.
Presenting our first Colloquium for 2023: Dr. Steven DeLay (Tutorial Fellow, Ambrose College, Woolf University; Research Fellow, Global Centre for Advanced Studies College Dublin, and an accomplished researcher and author) gives us a lecture and Q&A on “Hearing the Word of God: A Kierkegaardian Phenomenology of Conscience”. This lecture investigates the question of whether phenomenological method is congenial to the discussion of God, or whether it necessarily brackets or excludes God from its inquiries, through the question of conscience.
Dr. DeLay undertakes this investigation through tracing the lineage of phenomenological inquiry expressed in Edmund Husserl’s life and thoughts into Kierkegaard’s understanding of “being a single individual”, and in contrast with the phenomenological approach and consideration of Martin Heidegger. Thereby are raised the questions of language’s meaningfulness and our responsibility for it, both in our speaking and in our hearing. Listeners will be challenged to reconsider the purposiveness of life’s experience as reflected in his or her consciousness of being one who has a conscience.
In the second of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia in 2022, we present Dr. James Capehart, who brings us discussion of Christian Philosophy as it has been viewed in the Christian Middle Ages as well as transmitted through the debates of the 20th century.
How in fact is Christian philosophy a problem? The wording itself has proven to be the most problematic. Can there be a philosophy that is truly Christian? Does “Christian” specifically differentiate “philosophy”? Does that turn it into a theology? Given the existence of numerous volumes of Christian works of theology, can we say that any of their contents should be called philosophical? Is any of that content unique to Christian thinkers?
The Problem of Christian Philosophy – Preview
Dr. Capehart’s lecture is now available at the Lyceum Institute. The live question and answer session will be held on 14 May 2022 (Saturday) at 6:00pm ET. Colloquia lectures are released the year after publication at the Lyceum, and Q&A sessions are reserved for members. For information on signing up for the Lyceum, see here.
In the first Lyceum Institute Colloquia of 2022, we present Brian Jones, PhD Candidate at the University of St. Thomas, TX, who brings us a challenging, interesting, and thought-provoking discussion of what it means to practice philosophy in a time of loneliness and political turmoil.
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.
Mr. Jones’ lecture is now available at the Lyceum Institute. The live question and answer session will be held on 4 March 2022 (Friday) at 6:00pm ET. Colloquia lectures are released the year after publication at the Lyceum, and Q&A sessions are reserved for members. For information on signing up for the Lyceum, see here.
The colloquium lecture delivered in December 2020 by Kirk Kanzelberger, PhD “Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below (full lecture at the bottom). Please consider supporting the Lyceum Instituteif you enjoy this lecture! The Lyceum Institute is currently fundraising for 2022 to support the pursuit of philosophy and dedicated thinkers like Dr. Kanzelberger in their research, teaching, and publications.
Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human
Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger
Preview – Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger: Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human
“Our view of the world, which we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically incoherent,” argues Walker Percy in “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.” The dualism of Descartes — the rift between man as psyche and man as organism — continues to pervade our inherited view of the world and scientific practice. And yet it was a century ago and more that Charles Sanders Peirce indicated the road to a more coherent anthropology based upon the crucial datum of the triadic sign-relation that unites “mental” and “physical” in one single natural event.
This lecture explores Percy’s argument and its background in the thought of Descartes and Peirce, and provides an assessment of this final public articulation by Percy concerning the issues that preoccupied him as a writer: the contemporary predicament of the human being, lost in the cosmos that it understands more and more, while understanding itself less and less.
The colloquium lecture delivered in November 2020 by Adam Pugen, PhD “How to be a Contemporary Thomist: The Case of Marshall McLuhan” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below (full lecture at the bottom). Please consider supporting the Lyceum Instituteif you enjoy this lecture! The Lyceum Institute is currently fundraising for 2022 to support the pursuit of philosophy and dedicated thinkers like Dr. Pugen in their research, teaching, and publications.
How to be a Contemporary Thomist: The Case of Marshall McLuhan
Dr. Adam Pugen
Preview – Dr. Adam Pugen: How to be a Contemporary Thomist: The Case of Marshall McLuahn
In the fifth of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia, we present our own Adam Pugen, PhD, who brings us a discussion of Marshall McLuhan–who, despite his popularity as a “media guru”, was more fundamentally and consciously a Thomist–a discussion ranging through the influences of Chesterton, New Criticism, Jacques Maritain, analogy and metaphor, the Trivium (especially the deepening and expansion of grammar), and all this aimed at the meaning of what it is to truly be a Thomist in our own times. Not merely incidental but integral to true contemporary Thomism is the wrestling with our techno-media environments–and conversely, to understand in depth McLuhan’s own “medium is the message”, we must understand the Thomistic roots of his thinking.
The colloquium lecture delivered in September 2020 by Dr. Michel Accad, MD, “Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy and the Form of Health” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below (full lecture at the bottom). Please consider supporting the Lyceum Instituteif you enjoy this lecture! Your donations allow us to support the pursuit of philosophy and dedicated thinkers like Dr. Accad in their research, teaching, and publications.
Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy and the Form of Health
Michel Accad, MD
Preview – Michel Accad, MD: Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy and the Form of Health
In the fourth of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia, we present Dr. Michel Accad, MD, a cardiologist and practitioner of internal medicine (see Dr. Accad’s site here), who presents for us some of his thoughts on the insights that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy brings to an understanding of health and the practice of medicine. This lecture lights upon the history of philosophy and the human body and challenges the commonly-accepted mechanicist and reductionistic views of the human body as a mere machine–grown out of a Cartesian view–in contrast to the classical Hippocratic theory, which encourages an approach to the body as a whole.
The colloquium lecture delivered in July 2020 by Prof. Francisco Plaza, PhD Candidate (UST, Houston TX), “The Breakdown of Secular Democracy and the Need for a Christian Order” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below. Please consider supporting the Lyceum Instituteif you enjoy this lecture! Your donations allow us to support talented academics like Prof. in their research, teaching, and publications.
The Breakdown of Secular Democracy and the Need for a Christian Order
Francisco Plaza, PhD Candidate
The question has been raised as to whether or not secular liberalism can sustain itself, especially as it seems to be breaking down in our present time, both from the perspective of anti-modernists who uphold tradition, but also from modernists themselves who have fallen into totalitarian ideologies, Marxism being the most common among them.
In this lecture, we shall begin by addressing the current state of culture, considering the nature of modernity and its crisis of meaning. For our purposes, we shall focus mostly on its political dimension. After providing a summary account of modernism and its crisis, we shall consider two responses from Catholic political thought that look to creating a truly post-modern order. The first of these is that of integralism, a revivalist type movement that looks to the past before modernity as the way beyond the modern problem. We shall consider the integralist response to modern politics, then consider where it is correct and where it may fall short. Finally, we shall conclude by considering Maritain’s defense of a “Christian Democracy” and “integral humanism” as the true way beyond modernity.
Preview – Prof. Francisco Plaza: The Breakdown of Secular Democracy and the Need for a Christian Order
The colloquium lecture delivered in June 2020 by Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill, “On Predestination and the Doctrine of Sufficient and Efficacious Grace in St. Thomas Aquinas” is now available to the public. You can listen or download below. Please consider supporting the Lyceum Instituteif you enjoy this lecture! Your donations allow us to support talented academics like Dr. O’Neill in their research, teaching, and publications.
On Predestination and the Doctrine of Sufficient and Efficacious Grace in St. Thomas Aquinas
Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill
Full lecture – Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill – On Predestination and the Doctrine of Sufficient and Efficacious Grace in St. Thomas Aquinas
In this lecture, Taylor Patrick O’Neill gives a brief introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of predestination with a special focus on how it relates to human freedom. Principles of a Thomistic understanding of providence provide a necessary backdrop for understanding election and reprobation while principles of a Thomistic understanding of grace provide a foundation for exploring the differences between election and reprobation, as well as a defense of contingency and authentic human freedom.
Additional attention is paid to the distinction of sufficient and efficacious grace in the Thomistic tradition.
Preview – Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill: On Predestination and the Doctrine of Sufficient and Efficacious Grace
