Unfortunately, our world does not make the development of an operative habit of inquiry easy: for every operative habit, as Maritain goes on, “is stable and permanent… precisely because of the object which specifies it”. To have a habit of inquiry requires that we learn truly to question for understanding, not merely to query a search engine for information. Against this anti-inquisitive suppression characteristic of the contemporary world, philosophical reflection and the habit of inquiry stand at the center of the Lyceum Institute’s mission: not only so that we may learn to inquire well, but that we may order and remember both the discoveries of our inquiry as well as the process itself.
Philosophy therefore informs everything we do: not only in the explicitly philosophical study carried out in seminars, but also in our daily conversations, our study of languages, and our discussions of history, science, politics, and literature.