Theoretical Paper Index

Theoretical Insights

The Soul and the Machine 
A primer in Thomistic faculty psychology, this essay explains habits as ways the human being holds itself toward objects, cognitively and cathectically, over time. Against reductionist accounts of addiction and behavior, it interprets technology as an extension of psychic faculties, and proposes that technological environments shape moral and intellectual self-determination.

Disintegrating Sensation
This paper diagnoses contemporary fragmentation of sensibility produced by electric and digital media, where sight and sound detach from reality and culminate in AI-generated simulacra. Drawing on McLuhan and Thomistic accounts of inner sense, it distinguishes sensation from perception, and argues for recovering proportional integration as a condition for truth.

Reclaiming Communication from Information: Knowing in the Digital Age
This paper argues that digital media reduces communication to data transmission, obscuring meaning as a relational act. Tracing this model through modern science and cybernetics, it critiques informational speed and pattern-recognition culture, proposing instead that communication constitutes environments of real intelligibility essential for human survival in the digital age.

The Art of Digital Memory: Media Environments and the Mind
This paper examines digital media as a new environment of memory, arguing that its powers of storage, association, retrieval, and recombination intensify older tensions between embodied recollection, symbolic order, and technological externalization. Against both mechanical information storage and immersive media fantasy, it proposes a renewed art of memory: one ordered not to data extraction or psychic distraction, but to the disciplined recollection of the person toward reality.

Semiosis in the Machine: Lost Natures and Artificial Intelligence
This article asks whether contemporary AI can truly interpret and therefore participate in semiosis at all. Using a Deelyan-Peircean account of signs and a distinction between autopoietic nature and artificial mechanism, it argues that machines simulate intelligence through degenerate triads and external constraints, warning against uncritical integration into human cognition.


Beyond the University

Beyond the University exists because the modern university, even where it succeeds, has become inadequate to the true tasks of education.  Education is not the transmission of information or preparation for employment, but the formation of good intellectual habits.  These aims no longer fit comfortably within institutions ordered primarily toward efficiency, expansion, and measurable outcomes.  The Lyceum Institute was founded to provide a genuinely different institutional form—one ordered toward education as an integral part of life rather than as a credentialing process.

The Lyceum cultivates enduring intellectual habits of inquiry, order, and memory through rigorous seminars, focused studies of the Trivium, classical languages, guided reading, and sustained inquisitive conversation.  By supporting the Lyceum Institute, you help sustain an independent public institution devoted to education ordered toward truth, continuity, and long-term intellectual formation.  Your gift ensures that this alternative remains available—not only for today’s students, but for generations to come.

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