aesthetics

  • Retrospect: On the Question of Beauty

    On 3 June 2026, we engaged in a nearly 2-hour conversation concerning beauty. A few highlights, conclusions, and elaborations: 1. Beauty is necessarily encountered first through the senses. It is also, in our experience as human, always connected somehow to a sensory experience, even if the object greatly exceeds what sense alone can provide. Mathematics,…

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  • On the Question of Beauty

    A Philosophical Happy Hour inquiring after the nature, perception, and intelligible of beauty and the beautiful. “What is beauty?”  If you have spent any time of your life at all around centers of philosophical inquiry, or persons who enjoy questions of deep and abiding human significance, no doubt you have heard this asked.  Quite probably,…

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  • Spring Seminars [2025 Q2]

    Announcing enrollment for our two Spring Seminars: Culture: More than Aesthetics and Thomistic Psychology: The Life of Thought. Culture: More than Aesthetics Thinking of art, we tend to think of the beautiful—and rightly so, for this, in some way, is to what all art aspires: if not directly, then indirectly, inasmuch as even the simple…

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  • On the Purposes of Art

    What is the purpose of art?  It is not a new question.  To the contrary, it resides among the oldest of questions.  Some may despair of a meaningful answer, given the ancient age of a question yet still be asked—and, at times, asked as though nothing said in the millennia before us has given satisfaction. …

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  • Fall Seminars

    Fall Seminars Open for Enrollment: More than Aesthetics, The Meaning of Evil, and Metaphysics: God.

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  • [2021 Fall] More than Aesthetics: Ens Artificiale and the Philosophy of Art

    Exploring its topic from a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective, this course will use the work of Jacques Maritain to probe the broader set of philosophical issues involved in the “philosophy of art”: ens artificiale, the nature of practical reason, the metaphysics of art-craft, and topics pertaining to philosophical aesthetics, considered primarily from the perspective of this…

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  • Lyceum Schedule [8/15-8/21]

    Weekly Schedule of Events 8/16 Monday Exercitium Linguae Latinae (2:00-2:30pm ET). Legemus ex Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata ut melioremus nostrum locutionem et augeamus familiaritatem vocabulis. 8/17 Tuesday Ex Sancto Thoma Legimus (9:30-10:00am ET).  Legemus ex Sancto Thoma et convertit in linguam Anglicam; practicum bonum et utile est! Philosophical Happy Hour (5:30-7:00pm ET). Join us for drinks, conversation, lively debates, and get to know the…

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  • Lyceum Schedule [8/8-8/14]

    A Latin-filled week, with seminars and Quaestiones Disputatae on the horizon! Read on for more.

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