News and Announcements
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Felicitates de Quodlibet, I.4
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…
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Lighting the Path to Wisdom: Giving Tuesday 2024
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…
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On the Personal Reception of Tradition
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…
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On Artistic Judgment
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…
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Digital Identity and the Disintegration of the Human Soul
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…
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On Unwitting Conscripts
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…
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On the Allure of Secret Knowledge
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…
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On Authenticity
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…
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On Propaganda
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…
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Jefferson, Natural Rights, and the Sources of the Declaration of Independence
Presenting the fifth in our Colloquium series for the year 2024, Dr. John Pinheiro (PhD in History, Director of Research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty), challenges the common narrative that reduces Thomas Jefferson’s thought in writing the Declaration to the philosophy of John Locke. Dr. Pinheiro was previously professor…
