Last year, the Lyceum Instituted hosted Dr. Domenic D’Ettore (Dean, Division of Liberal Studies and professor of Philosophy with the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, TX), a careful and insight scholar of the Latin Thomist tradition and an expert on analogy. Drawing on his great expertise, Dr. D’Ettore presents for […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the role of paradox in carrying out investigations of nature, humanity, and being. “A paradox”, writes the Thomist philosopher Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “is the tension existing between two apparently opposed propositions which cross one another and thus find themselves at peace.”[1]  Wilhelmsen contrasts the paradoxical with the dialectical—understood in the […]

Continuing our Colloquium series for the year 2024, we are delighted to host Dr. Domenic D’Ettore (Dean, Division of Liberal Studies and professor of Philosophy with the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, TX), a careful and insight scholar of the Latin Thomist tradition and an expert on analogy. Drawing on […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the Past, Present, and Future of Thomism and its philosophy: must it change? Can it? Is it “relevant”? Not including the works of St. Thomas himself, nor of his Latin Age commentators and followers, I have four full shelves of books that one might consider “Thomistic”. These books, written as […]

“Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the world ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being.” With these words, published in 1927, Martin Heidegger reignited a question—tamped down by modern thought for […]

Phenomenology, a term rich with various meanings through history, is now commonly recognized as a collection of intellectual pathways pioneered by Edmund Husserl in his seminal work, Logische Untersuchungen or Logical Investigations (1900, revised in 1913 to coincide with the more-developed Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy). These philosophical explorations, all grounded […]

A Brief Primer on the Doctrine’s Confusion Few topics have brought as much consternation to Thomists than that of analogy; not only those living and writing in the contemporary period (subsequent, that is, to the Leonine revival initiated in 1879), but stretching back to the first fluorescence of Thomism begun in the late fourteenth century, […]

All of us, it seems, today bear a heavy burden of being. Increasingly, we may find it difficult to rise from our beds and confront the day: indeed, even for those who persevere, it is a perseverance, it is a confrontation. The world challenges our fortitude. But why? We might assign, and justly, many different […]

“In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could perceive no sign in the sea.  But suddenly […]

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, styled by certain parties as the "Sacred Monster of Thomism," taught at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the "Angelicum") in Rome for a long career of over fifty years.  Although he is normally understood to be a conservative Roman theologian of his period, an honest assessment of his work shows...