beauty

  • 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. โ€œWhat is beauty?โ€ย  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.ย  Quite probably,…

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  • Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

    In this conversation, Francisco Plaza shares his journey into the intellectual life, influenced by his experiences moving from the US to Venezuela. He discusses the current state of education, the importance of classical education, and the role of political philosophy in understanding justice and order. Plaza emphasizes the need for a hierarchy of values in…

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  • On the Experience of Evil in Our Souls

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on the question: do we (some of us, all of us) need to experience evilโ€”even sin, that experience of our own moral faultโ€”in order to discover and know the good? Drawing upon some of the works of the great tradition, a member asks the question: โ€œto what extent is it important…

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  • On Listening

    What immediate irony!  Reading about listening.  Indeed, we all tend to do far more reading, I suspect, than we do listening.  That often we read poorly does not take away from the fact that we read continually.  For a great many of us, the nature of work, study, and even distraction often involves a discernment…

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  • Is Beauty a Transcendental?

    Perhaps you have heard of Bryan Johnson, the wealthy man spending millions of dollars per year on a routine designed to reverse his age.  This routine requires absolute conformity: every day of his life is controlled by the program titled โ€œBlueprintโ€, which comprises routine measurement and treatment of: heart, brain, lung, the gastrointestinal tract, his…

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  • Trauma, Sorrow, and Beauty: Maritain and Rouault on Art

    On 13 April 2023 at 7pm ET, Dr. Thomas Hibbs (see event times around the world) will present the Annual John Deely / Jacques Maritain Lecture for the Deely Project at Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe, PA: โ€œTrauma, Sorrow, and Beauty: Maritain and Rouault on Artโ€ (Zoom link). In his work on the crisis of…

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