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 […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on… whatever! Revisiting our Felictates de Quodlibet series, in which we talk about whatever we want, so long as it is interesting, and for as long as we are interested. In the Scholastic university, renowned thinkers would regularly engage in open debate on questions posed by other scholars or students at […]

This Giving Tuesday, join the Lyceum Institute in preserving the timeless pursuit of wisdom and securing its future for generations to come. Your contribution supports an enduring mission: cultivating intellectual formation, preserving classical traditions, and fostering a community dedicated to the love of truth. Our theme this year is “Lighting the Path to Wisdom”. The […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour discussing how personal relations affect our reception and transmission of tradition, especially intellectual tradition. Intellectual Tradition Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend, along with a number of colleagues and friends, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.  This year’s president was Dr. Mary-Catherine Sommers, Director of the […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the habit of artistic judgment and both the means and importance of its formation. Why do we care about art? (We will bypass the question of why we care about anything.) It provides us no corporeal benefits, except perhaps an opportunity or excuse for rest and relaxation. Were this the […]

As part of the Humanitas Technica project, the Lyceum Institute is hosting a discussion panel at the American Catholic Philosophical Association’s Annual Meeting, in Chicago, Illinois, this weekend (November 15 at 11am CT) on “Digital identity and the Disintegration of the Human Soul”. A description of this panel is below: lyceum institute acpa satellite session […]

In 1970, Marshall McLuhan stated that “World War III is a guerrilla war of information with no division distinction between military and civilian participation” (Culture is Our Business, 66). Two things here deserve our notice. The first is that this war has already begun; the second is that many people have been unwittingly conscripted into […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the allure of secret knowledge—as found in esotericism, gnosticism, the occult, and secret societies. of every kind Spend enough time on the internet—and “enough” is not very long—and you will encounter either an individual or a group proposing to know something that you do not.  They will intimate that this […]

The problem of authenticity—which we might also name as the struggle for authenticity—appears “upstream” of our current situation… but not far. For, in speaking of what is “authentic”, we most of all mean persons. Today, by contrast, our skepticism concerns the authenticity of events and of their presentation (especially events remote in time and space […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on propaganda’s causes, consequences, and cures. The advent of mass communication—beginning with the national newspaper but greatly accelerated first through radio and second, with great totalization, through television—ushered in a new paradigm for shaping the actions of human beings: propaganda.  It has been used to impose faux cultural homogeneity, to establish […]