Aristotle
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Retrospect: Retrieving Dialectic in a “Rhetorical” Age
Recapitulating our Philosophical Happy Hour on the history, nature, meaning, and importance of dialectic. A few key insights derived from our Happy Hour: First, outside rare situations, Aristotelian dialectic has become almost impossible in the US (and many other countries as well). This near-impossibility has rendered many persons not only unfamiliar with the practice, but…
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On Dialectic: Its History and Importance
A Philosophical Happy Hour discussing the history, nature, meaning, and importance of dialectic—including its relation to logic, demonstration, and rhetoric. Old words of long and widespread use often suffer many interpretations: idea, object, concept, form. One word which has suffered greatly is “dialectic”. The word’s Greek etymology indicates “speaking across”, that is, a conversational speaking. …
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On Reading the Great Books
A Philosophical Happy Hour inquiring after the merits of reading the Great Books and understanding the environment of the reader. The recovery of classical education, much in vogue today, has often been identified with the recovery of the Great Books. This is understandable: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Newman, Dostoevsky, and others do…
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Ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from Hearing [Summer 2026]
Description Through careful attention to Aristotle’s own argument—against the backdrop of the Pre-Socratics and of Plato—the seminar will examine how the human good possesses universality and necessity without becoming disconnected from the concrete realities of human life. The good is neither imposed upon human nature by extrinsic causes nor fabricated by social agreement. Rather, it…
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On the Necessity of Friendship for Discovering the Good
A Philosophical Happy Hour focused on the question of friendship: its nature, deepening, and the necessity of others with whom we share the search for the good. I have spent much of my life alone. The youngest in my family, I began homeschooling in fourth grade, and continued until I started community college, before transitioning…
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What Makes a Thinker Worth Exploring?
A Philosophical Happy Hour asking why (or whether) we should read some thinkers over others, explore some ideas before the rest, and take some philosophers more seriously than others. A question surfaces again and again in philosophical discussion, sometimes with impatience: why do certain thinkers keep returning? Why are Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas,…