Continuing Intellectual Tradition
In addition to our reprints, the Lyceum Institute also publishes original works intended to continue and advance the intellectual inheritance of the tradition. These works will grow to comprise a wide range of studies, with focus on the trivium, philosophy, and more.
Linguistic Signification
A Classical and Semiotic Course in Grammar & Composition
This book intends to serve one principal end: instructing students, of sufficiently mature mind, how to compose thoughtful and insightful essays in the English language. Accomplishing this rather specific end, however, requires a broad range of study: a study much broader than that comprised by a simple question of “how to write”. That is, we cannot write well unless we understand the instruments whereby writing is accomplished; or, to employ one of those instruments—the metaphor—the fruits of composition are nourished best through growing deep the roots of grammar. As we will see, this linguistic growth requires some knowledge also of logic and rhetoric: for although this book intends an introduction into the first study of the liberal arts, all three belonging to the Trivium are nevertheless convergent and indeed inseparable from the pursuit of linguistic flourishing.
Language appears literally everywhere in human experience. We think of the body’s own signals and responses, for instance (such as blushing, jittering, avoiding eye-contact) as a “body language”. We understand the interactions of animals as though they are “talking” to one another ,even though they have no language, properly speaking. We hear about the “language” of music or of mathematics. We think of the order of the cosmos and its creation in terms of poetry—or even as the result of the Λόγος, the Word itself.
This is not to reduce signification to the linguistic, or to claim that only linguistic signification truly counts as a sign; but rather, it is to say that, however imperfectly, linguistic signs alone possess the capacity to stand-in for the signification of all other kinds. Language is the most universal of signs. If we would enlarge our minds, we must do so through language.
