art

  • The Essence of Tragedy

    What is the essence of tragedy?  How is it a phenomenon of life, a genre of art?  In what actions, characters, and thoughts is it most clearly represented?  Join our Philosophical Happy Hour as we take up a central question of artistic signification. “That dinner party was a complete tragedy.”  “Her outfit is, like, totally…

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  • Culture as a Technology

    “Culture”.  We hear the word all the time: the culture is in decline, we are losing our culture, we are fighting a culture war.  But ask someone to define culture, and you will likely receive many different answers—answers which consist primarily in listing what kinds of thing belong to culture: language, art, movies, music, politics,…

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  • 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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  • Face to Face with Everything: How Philosophy Looks at the World and What It Sees

    The Lyceum Institute is delighted to announce the first text in our series with St. Augustine’s Press, Philosophical Habit: New Paradigms for the Digital Age, has been published. This text was developed from a seminar taught at the Lyceum Institute. Face to Face with Everything: How Philosophy Looks at the World and What It Sees…

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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 Artistic Judgment

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on the habit of artistic judgment and both the means and importance of its formation. Why do we care about art? (We will bypass the question of why we care about anything.) It provides us no corporeal benefits, except perhaps an opportunity or excuse for rest and relaxation. Were this the…

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  • Art to What End

    For this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour, we are discussing the proper attitude towards art. What is art’s end? To how should we comport ourselves with respect to art? A Lyceum Member writes: What is the proper relation that one should have toward art? It is common today for people to speak about art as a…

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  • On the Death of the Artist

    A Lyceum Member proposes, as a topic for our 29 November 2023 Happy Hour: “How much does the artist’s intention factor into the meaning of his art? How can semiotic Thomism help us to answer this question? Can there be a more fitting interpretation of the art he makes than the one he intended? Is…

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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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