being

  • On the Effects of Curiosity

    Do you want to know “what is happening”? Cannot resist peeking behind that curtain, over that fence, clicking that link?  Join our Philosophical Happy Hour in this member-led discussion of curiosity. Curiosity Aristotle starts his Metaphysics with the claim that “All men naturally desire knowledge.” (1.1.1.980a21-2, Tredenick Translation). To modern eyes he seems to be…

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  • We All Dress Like the Emperor

    I would dare to say that everyone raised in the Western world has taken “privacy” for granted as a natural right: such that, aside from voluntary participation in the public, each of us is protected from our activities being known.  Is this a fairy tale?  Join our Philosophical Happy Hour as we pry back the…

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  • What is “Reality”?

    We often say that things are or are not real.  But what does this really mean?  Though a common conception upon which we all rely, “reality” proves rather slippery to describe.  Join our Philosophical Happy Hour as we try to grasp it. What do we mean when we call something “real”?  It sounds simple—almost embarrassingly…

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  • Lecture: The Analogous Use of Words

    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…

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  • On Paradox

    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…

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  • The Analogous Use of Words

    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…

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  • Does Thomism have a Future?

    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…

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  • 2024 Spring: Metaphysics – Discovery of Ens inquantum Ens

    “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…

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  • Fall 2023: Heidegger’s Phenomenological Method – Part I

    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…

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  • On Analogy

    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,…

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