Peripatetic Periodical
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Why Education Still Needs Institutions
From Experiment to Institution: a reflection on the Lyceum’s Journey and Future. Recent years have seen a rapid decline amongst Americans in the perceived value of a college education. Earlier this month, Gallup reported that, compared to 70 percent in 2013, now only 31 percent of Americans consider a college education “very important”. Does this…
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Initial Retrospect: Human Formation in the Digital Age
Last week, on 16-17 September 2026, we held our first ever in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age. The conference was an unqualified success. I do not mean it could not be improved—there are always things that can be done better. But I mean that it accomplished its purposes better than I could have…
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Retrospect: On Questioning
Our Philosophical Happy Hour (2 September 2026) focused on the art of questioning—and precisely how we have come, wrongly, to expect answers today. Here is a reflection on what was discussed. These brief reflections are structured principally around four questions asked: first, concerning the evaluation of propositions the content of which are not immediately evident…
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Retrospect: the Nature of Culture
Our Philosophical Happy Hour (26 August 2026) inquired into the nature of culture. Here is a brief retrospective survey of our discussion. The word “culture” remains laden with confused significations. Sorting out its meaning, organizing the uses of it, and identifying the proper phenomenon it names proves no easy task. Yet even a relatively short…
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Culture as a Technology
“Culture”. We hear the word all the time: the culture is in decline, we are losing our culture, we are fighting a culture war. But ask someone to define culture, and you will likely receive many different answers—answers which consist primarily in listing what kinds of thing belong to culture: language, art, movies, music, politics,…
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Technologizing Our Bodies
Commonly, we find the human body today treated as a possession, a something-other which is distinct from the self. This opposition of the “self” to the body may result in various forms of neglect or abuse of the latter. But it may also, in recognizing the importance of the body for life even as it…
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…Finishing Our Sentences?
…Finishing Our Sentences? Language and the Habits of Thought in the Age of Generative AI Most discussion about artificial intelligence today tends toward either hype or panic. Optimists see in it a miraculous tool, the future of scientific advancement, and a development not only to rival the industrial revolution in its transformative power, but—perhaps—one that…
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Technology’s Effects on Nature
Commonly, we presume an opposition between the “natural” and the “artificial”. Usually, we assume the “natural” to be everything untouched by human hands, whereas the “artificial” is that which we have ourselves brought into being. But this division not only ends up positing as irreconcilable the objects of our experience, it reinforces a false anthropological…
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Psychological Effects of Technology
That technology use has effects on our psychological well-being has become, by this point, well-known and widely recognized. But the concern is ordinarily limited to the distraction, anxiety, addiction, overstimulation, or other faults in control that appear downstream of specific technological devices or frameworks, such as smartphones, social media, or LLMs. These are real problems,…
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The Problem with Solving Technology
Everyone knows that technology troubles our lives in the twenty-first century. It distracts us, surveils us, accelerates us, isolates us, weakens our habits of attention, alters the demands and means of education, and increasingly mediates in our relations to both one another and to reality itself. The natural response is to ask: how do we…
