A Philosophical Happy Hour on… whatever! In the Scholastic university, renowned thinkers would regularly engage in open debate on questions posed by other scholars or students at the institution. Most often, these questions would concern a specific, pre-determined topic. From this we derive works such as Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate and Quaestiones disputatae […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on persons and personalism. If someone came up to you—someone you know, perhaps not very well, but with whom you have had association for enough time to reasonably say, “Yes, I know him [or her]”—and said any of the following to you, how would you react? Most of us, I suspect, […]

On 13 July 2024, when a 20-year-old kid attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally—only inches away from doing so and taking the life of a rally-goer—it raised serious questions about the security around the former president.   How could such a young man surveil the area with a drone, get into such an […]

ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ Heraclitus Today when we hear the word “diversity”, our minds may well go towards the oft-discussed issue of political controversy.  Without entering into that controversy itself, allow me to use it, nevertheless, to establish the topic for this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour.  That is, underlying the […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating ideology, the habits of interpretation, and the right manner of confidence in our beliefs. An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality – that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself. […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on better habits of order. Ours is a mentally broken society.  This brokenness has been unveiled, in many ways, by the internet: operating under a premise of anonymity (at the very least of distance from personal judgment), there is less fear to inhibit many from sharing their brokenness.  Such sharing may […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the Past, Present, and Future of Thomism and its philosophy: must it change? Can it? Is it “relevant”? Not including the works of St. Thomas himself, nor of his Latin Age commentators and followers, I have four full shelves of books that one might consider “Thomistic”. These books, written as […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the merits of immersion in the poetic arts. Ποίησις: poiesis, the Greeks named it, the making of something which did not previously exist. The Greek conception extended far beyond the modern notion of “poetry”—but from the most ancient to the latest modern, every successful form of the “poietic” resounds by […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on basic questions of our noetic experience. In our conversation, we will examine these different approaches of foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, ask about their merits, demerits, whether they rest upon certain presuppositions, whether these presuppositions have justification—and what is the meaning of belief. In what follows, we provide brief descriptions of the […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the role of semiotics in consensus and community. Across many fields, industries, and academia, it has become a popular claim that we must “build consensus”.  The Harvard Law Program on Negotiation states: “Consensus building is a process involving a good-faith effort to meet the interests of all stakeholders and seek a unanimous […]