These colloquia, comprising a pre-recorded lecture and a live question and answer session, invite respected academics and intellectuals to challenge our thinking through their own hard-earned expertise, reflections, and insights. We try to schedule as many per year as we can, depending upon availability and interest.
This series aims, year-by-year, to build the offerings of the Lyceum Institute and to expose its members to thinking they might not encounter otherwise, as well as to provide yet another opportunity to practice that fundamental habit of inquirere—of asking good, thoughtful questions. Further, these lectures and discussion sessions, being recorded, are retained indefinitely in the Lyceum Institute archives, being accessible to revisit by present and future members with a few clicks of a mouse (or taps of a phone screen).
Colloquia lectures will be released to the public and posted both here and on YouTube one calendar year after they have been presented. Question and answer sessions are available only through the Lyceum Institute.
Defending and Meditating on First Principles
Wisdom and Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
Dr. Matthew Minerd
From an Aristotelian perspective, domains of discursive knowledge which are called “science,” or epistêmê, are concerned above all with the drawing of per se conclusions in light of first principles. Though such knowledge is concerned with its first principles, its bent is turned toward the conclusions that those principles illuminate. By contrast, wisdom, sophia, sapientia, takes up a loftier task still: defending and meditating upon its very principles, as well as all other things in light of those principles. This lecture will briefly present this theme in the work of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., discussing how sapiential meditation on first principles undergirded much of his philosophical and theological work, imbuing it with a deceptive simplicity which, in fact, is quite illuminating.
On Predestination and the Doctrine of Sufficient and Efficacious Grace
in st. thomas aquinas
Dr. taylor patrick o’neill
In this lecture, Taylor Patrick O’Neill gives a brief introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of predestination with a special focus on how it relates to human freedom. Principles of a Thomistic understanding of providence provide a necessary backdrop for understanding election and reprobation while principles of a Thomistic understanding of grace provide a foundation for exploring the differences between election and reprobation, as well as a defense of contingency and authentic human freedom.
Additional attention is paid to the distinction of sufficient and efficacious grace in the Thomistic tradition.
The Breakdown of Secular Democracy
and the Need for a Christian Order
Dr. francisco plaza
The question has been raised as to whether or not secular liberalism can sustain itself, especially as it seems to be breaking down in our present time, both from the perspective of anti-modernists who uphold tradition, but also from modernists themselves who have fallen into totalitarian ideologies, Marxism being the most common among them.
In this lecture, we shall begin by addressing the current state of culture, considering the nature of modernity and its crisis of meaning. For our purposes, we shall focus mostly on its political dimension. After providing a summary account of modernism and its crisis, we shall consider two responses from Catholic political thought that look to creating a truly post-modern order. The first of these is that of integralism, a revivalist type movement that looks to the past before modernity as the way beyond the modern problem. We shall consider the integralist response to modern politics, then consider where it is correct and where it may fall short. Finally, we shall conclude by considering Maritain’s defense of a “Christian Democracy” and “integral humanism” as the true way beyond modernity.
Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy and the Form of Health
Dr. michel accad, md
In the fourth of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia, we present Dr. Michel Accad, MD, a cardiologist and practitioner of internal medicine (see Dr. Accad’s site here), who presents for us some of his thoughts on the insights that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy brings to an understanding of health and the practice of medicine. This lecture lights upon the history of philosophy and the human body and challenges the commonly-accepted mechanicist and reductionistic views of the human body as a mere machine–grown out of a Cartesian view–in contrast to the classical Hippocratic theory, which encourages an approach to the body as a whole.
Mending the Cartesian Rift
Walker Percy on Being Human
Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger
“Our view of the world, which we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically incoherent,” argues Walker Percy in “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind.” The dualism of Descartes — the rift between man as psyche and man as organism — continues to pervade our inherited view of the world and scientific practice. And yet it was a century ago and more that Charles Sanders Peirce indicated the road to a more coherent anthropology based upon the crucial datum of the triadic sign-relation that unites “mental” and “physical” in one single natural event.
This lecture explores Percy’s argument and its background in the thought of Descartes and Peirce, and provides an assessment of this final public articulation by Percy concerning the issues that preoccupied him as a writer: the contemporary predicament of the human being, lost in the cosmos that it understands more and more, while understanding itself less and less.
How to be a Contemporary Thomist
The Case of Marshall McLuhan
Dr. Adam Pugen
In the fifth of the Lyceum Institute Colloquia, we present our own Adam Pugen, PhD, who brings us a discussion of Marshall McLuhan–who, despite his popularity as a “media guru”, was more fundamentally and consciously a Thomist–a discussion ranging through the influences of Chesterton, New Criticism, Jacques Maritain, analogy and metaphor, the Trivium (especially the deepening and expansion of grammar), and all this aimed at the meaning of what it is to truly be a Thomist in our own times. Not merely incidental but integral to true contemporary Thomism is the wrestling with our techno-media environments–and conversely, to understand in depth McLuhan’s own “medium is the message”, we must understand the Thomistic roots of his thinking.
Wholes and Parts: A Thomistic Refutation of Brain Death
Dr. MIchel Accad, MD
I propose a refutation of the two major arguments that support the concept of “brain death” as an ontological equivalent to death of the human organism. I begin with a critique of the notion that a body part, such as the brain, could act as “integrator” of a whole body. I then proceed with a rebuttal of the argument that destruction of a body part essential for rational operations—such as the brain—necessarily entails that the remaining whole is indisposed to accrue a rational soul. Next, I point to the equivocal use of the terms “alive” or “living” as being at the root of conceptual errors about brain death. I appeal to the Thomistic definition of life and to the hylomorphic concept of “virtual presence” to clarify this confusion. Finally, I show how the Thomistic definition of life supports the traditional criterion for the determination of death.
Lay summary: By the mid-1960s, medical technology became available that could keep “alive” the bodies of patients who had sustained complete and irreversible brain injury. The concept of “brain death” emerged to describe such states. Physicians, philosophers, and ethicists then proposed that the state of brain death is equivalent to the state of death traditionally identified by the absence of spontaneous pulse and respiration. This article challenges the major philosophical arguments that have been advanced to draw this equivalence.
The Practice of Philosophy
in a Time of Loneliness
Brian Jones, PhD Candidate
The COVID-19 pandemic and the destructive mitigation responses to it have certainly placed a heavy existential weight on democratic citizens. The social, political, and economic chaos of the past two years has profoundly disorienting. In the midst of such an unprecedented response, we are right to wonder about the very endurance of our modern liberal democratic regimes. The current crisis, however, is not the result of the pandemic. Rather, the general Western response to the pandemic has exacerbated certain social and political conditions present prior to the arrival of the virus. The pandemic has merely escalated an already existing form of disintegration. While there are many features of this present crisis, one that is most acutely felt and witnessed is a cultural condition which tends to incline citizens towards thoughtlessness.
The Problem of Christian Philosophy
Dr. James Capehart
What is “Christian Philosophy”? Is there such a thing? What does it mean? These questions have been considered by thinkers like Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Pope Saint John Paul II amidst controversies in the 20th century, as well as occasioning various debates in the Christian Middle Ages. How is this a problem—and why? Does the verbiage introduce a specific difference and thereby make it theological, or sectarian? Dr. Jim Capehart will guide us in asking, and answering, these questions.
How in fact is Christian philosophy a problem? The wording itself has proven to be the most problematic. Can there be a philosophy that is truly Christian? Does “Christian” specifically differentiate “philosophy”? Does that turn it into a theology? Given the existence of numerous volumes of Christian works of theology, can we say that any of their contents should be called philosophical? Is any of that content unique to Christian thinkers?
Signs of Meaning
The Need for Semiotics
Dr. Brian Kemple
It is difficult to give an introduction to semiotics of any length for two reasons. The first, and perhaps more obvious reason, is that few people know what it really is, despite the wide diffusion of the term throughout academia over the last century. I suspect that, like many terms, it is adopted precisely because few people know what it really is: this ambiguity hides many sins of incoherent use. The second reason for our difficulty, very much related to the first, is that semiotics is at once a relatively new doctrine and yet it subsumes and incorporates and even elevates disciplines very ancient. It brings us face to face with something unknown and yet nevertheless deeply familiar; and perhaps, even, unknown because it is so familiar.
And so, although the temptation in a presentation such as this is to pass a considerable amount of time traversing the meandering inquiry of what semiotics is—wending through the particularities of its doctrines, its terminologies, its histories—I will spend relatively little time re-treading those already well-worn steps. Rather, I wish to head in a different direction, and I hope that you all will walk this perhaps even-more meandering path alongside me.
How Truthful is the “Proof of the Truthful”?
Avicenna and Averroes on the Existence of God
Dr. Catherine Peters
The “Proof of the Truthful” is Avicenna’s most famous argument for the existence of God. Beginning with the essential possibility of creatures, he argues that there must be a first, necessary, cause: God. This argument came to be known as the “Proof of the Truthful” because it proposes an argument which is, in theory, accessible to any rational being (not just to the “wise” or religiously affiliated). In this way, it is the “most truthful.” Though compelling, Avicenna’s proof has not escaped criticism, most notably from Averroes, who rejected Avicenna’s conception of “possibility” and “necessity.” Rejecting these concepts can have far-reaching consequences, not only for the cogency of Avicennian metaphysics, but for any natural theology that seeks to employ these concepts. The present study, therefore, will first defends “necessary” and “possible” as formulated in the metaphysics of Avicenna. It will then show how these concepts serve as premises in the “Proof of the Truthful.” Third, it will address and refute Averroes’ criticisms.
Hearing the Word of God
A Kierkegaardian Phenomenology of Conscience
Dr. Steven DeLay
“Husserl insisted that I should study Kierkegaard.” So recounts the Russian existential philosopher, Lev Shestov, in his posthumously published 1939 essay, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl.” Why would Husserl have said such a thing? As soon as one begins attempting to trace the conceptual lineage of phenomenology back to Kierkegaard, a number of philosophical connections worthy of attention emerge. Above all, it is the phenomenon of conscience that constitutes the cornerstone of such an analysis. For, just as conscience lies at the heart of the human experience, so too it lies at the heart of the attempt to exhibit that experience in philosophical thought. By emphasizing that life (and thought) is lived before God, a Kierkegaardian phenomenology of conscience illuminates what is most at stake, both methodologically and existentially, in doing phenomenology, and realizes phenomenology’s longstanding ambition to make sense of what it means to be the kind of beings we are, or, as Kierkegaard would put the matter, to be a single individual. Focusing on the phenomenon of conscience, this lecture develops an account of doing phenomenology in a Kierkegaardian way, that is, doing phenomenology before God.
The text of this lecture has been recently published in a collection of essays from Rowman & Littlefield, Kierkegaardian Phenomenologies. Steven DeLay is a philosopher, author, thinker, and speaker. You can learn more about him and his work here and follow him on X.com.
The Centrality of noble Goods
Bona honesta in Human Flourishing
Dr. Daniel D. De haan
In this talk I present an account of noble goods (bona honesta) which situates them within a broadly Thomistic account of the natural law, human flourishing, and the virtues. This account of noble goods is elaborated within a developmental and phronetic approach to the natural law. We need to understand human flourishing as developmental consisting of distinct forms of flourishing within different developmental phases of human life (toddler, juvenile, adolescent, young adult, senescence, etc), which require developmentally inflected ways of identifying the precepts of the natural law, virtues, and noble goods. This approach to the natural law also differs from classical and new natural law, by maintaining that we practically receive culturally mediated moral endoxa of rules, goods, and virtues, which are thick concepts. Our practical and even theoretical reflection on why one’s moral inheritance is or is not true in various respects engenders the aspiration to practical wisdom, the virtue for discerning the natural law. Among the moral endoxa tested by this aspiration to practical wisdom are those concerning what goods are worthwhile in themselves, i.e., which are truly noble goods? In this talk I set out some criteria for answering this question and showing how noble goods partially constitute human flourishing.
You ARe Not Your Own
Another Look at the Body, Flesh, and the Henry-Falque Debate
Dr. Steven DeLay
The problem of the body has been a central preoccupation of phenomenology since its inception. At the same time, it is also a theological problem. After briefly surveying the understanding of the body found in classical phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty), this paper presents Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life in terms of the philosophy of flesh that he formulates in response to historical phenomenology’s conception of the body. It then concludes by examining Emmanuel Falque’s objections to Henry’s account of embodiment, with an eye to drawing some general conclusions about the role of the phenomenon of the body in philosophical and theological discourse about being.
The Analogous Use of Words
Identifying Sameness without reduction
Dr. Domenic D’Ettore
The questions concerning analogical predication—so essential in the Thomistic tradition—are often confused. Often and rightly situated between equivocation and univocation, analogy is used to argue for meaningful predication of God, of metaphor, and—indeed upon reflection—in making clear our meaning in all sorts of linguistic use. But using analogical language carries many pitfalls. In this lecture, Dr. D’Ettore gives us a clear explanation with many useful examples to both understand what analogy is and to see how it may be preserved in speaking meaningfully about God and other such topics.
Self-Sufficiency of Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics
St. Thomas’ Commentary as an Aid to a Contemporary Dilemma
Joseph Cherny, PhD Candidate
W. F. R. Hardie’s 1965 article “The Final Good in Aristotle’s Ethics,” launched a debate about how much Aristotle meant to include in happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics. Hardie argues that some parts of the work suggest that happiness will turn out to be a collection of goods, no one of which is the end of the others—an “inclusive end”—but ultimately in Book X, Aristotle restricts perfect happiness to contemplation alone—a “dominant end.” In this paper I will discuss some of the apparently contradictory texts in the Nicomachean Ethics motivating this dispute, as well as some problems for each view. I will focus on one text at greater length—the Book I passage on the self-sufficiency of happiness—and attempt to correct a misinterpretation of this text in light of St. Thomas’s Commentary. I will then discuss what I take to be St. Thomas’s account of Aristotelian or connatural happiness—an account that is more nuanced than the extreme dominant and inclusive accounts.
