Beginning in August, the Lyceum Institute will hold a three-week Symposium discussion titled “A Dilemma of Ideology and Faith”, on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This symposium is open to all enrolled members but we are also accepting applications (see below) for a limited number of spots available to the public. We strongly recommend the […]

Tuis ergo obsequiis, lector, si quis veritatis, non novitatis amator occurreris, haec quaecumque sunt, offerimus tuoque iudicio mancipamus, certi, quod si quid boni repereris, non nostrum esse, facile poteris apprehendere. Vale. John Poinsot, Cursus Philosophicus – “Lectori”, Quarta Pars Philosophiae Naturalis The study of Scholastic Latin—by which specifically we mean the Latin which emerged from […]

Today’s Philosophical Happy Hour concerns the issue of “tolerance”. As Geoffrey Meadows, who will be leading the discussion, writes: Tonight I thought we might discuss the definition, limit, and moral status of “tolerance,” since our discussion on kindness uncovered this underlying sensibility of our age. Perhaps a series of guided questions can get us started […]

Cursus Theologicus The work of John Poinsot, also known as Joannes a Sancto Thoma (though as John Deely noted, his name has often been given in many other variations, across English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, and Latin), has long been the victim of great neglect. His Cursus Philosophicus was critically-edited and published in the 1930s under the […]

Among the diverse ways in which people today live unreflectively, prominent is the attachment to kindness. Frequent are the admonitions to be kind—and, indeed, often it is used as a defense for one’s moral righteousness when caught out in immoral actions: “I’m not a bad person, I am kind…” (as though being kind covered up […]

Common sense. “Practical.” “She has a good head on her shoulders.” “You’re being irrational!” Sayings uttered with frequency—but are they said with understanding? What do we mean by “being rational”? We contrast reason with feeling or emotion. We contrast reason or the rational, also, with the “irrational”. Does this mean that feelings or emotions are […]

We, as a society, are not well. Reports on “mental health” in the United States of America, in particular, estimate at least 25% of adult Americans meet the criteria for one or another mental illness. This number has only been increasing in recent decades, despite the large number of professionals who have entered in the […]

One could argue—and I have myself many a time—that never before in human history has there been greater need for the presence of philosophical habit and the realization of philosophical wisdom. We find ourselves engaged in constant communication. Therefore, we find ourselves also immersed ever more in ideas. A theoretical grasp of those ideas seems […]

Law: the word, to many, conjures images of the courtroom or a legislature—ponderous tomes of tediously-written jargon rendering a complex web of oft-arbitrary-seeming stipulations and impingements.  So prevalent is this imagery that to speak of the “natural law” sounds often like a mere metaphor.  Exacerbating this “metaphorical” tenor of the phrase has been its use […]

I recently joined John Johnson and Larissa Bianco over at the Albertus Magnus Institute to talk about all things (or, at least, a lot of things) related to knowledge and the specifically human difference in how that knowledge unfolds in our experience. Be sure to check out the AMI website, especially the two summer courses […]