Seminar: Steps toward Dialectical Logic [Fall 2025]
Announcement of our Fall 2025 seminar, “What Kind of Certainty?: Steps Toward Dialectical Logic”—have we overlooked an important Aristotelian text and tradition in our understanding of reasoning? Description Details All Lyceum Institute seminars include weekly readings, lectures, and live discussion sessions. The discussion sessions are recorded. This seminar includes extensive readings, but does not require […]
Seminar: The Opportunities of Technology [Fall 2025]
Announcement of our Fall 2025 seminar, “The Opportunities of Technology”—how can we redeem the technological from its current abused status? Description Details All Lyceum Institute seminars include weekly readings, lectures, and live discussion sessions. The discussion sessions are recorded. This seminar includes extensive readings, but does not require advanced philosophical knowledge (nor does it have […]
On the Renaissance and Human Dignity
A Philosophical Happy Hour on the notion of human dignity as conveyed through thinkers of the Renaissance. The philosophy of the Renaissance—a somewhat deceptive but now inescapably common name for the movement, occurring roughly (with some notable outliers) between 1350–1650, to retrieve Platonic thinking, emphasize the arts of grammar and rhetoric over that of logic, […]
On Contemporary Atheism
A Philosophical Happy Hour centered around a reading of Jacques Maritain’s essay, “The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism”. Included in a collection of essays under the title, The Range of Reason, we find Jacques Maritain’s, “The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism”. We will gather this Wednesday (2/26/25) to discuss this essay’s primary intention—explaining what it means and […]
On Habits of Speaking Well
A Philosophical Happy Hour on the use of language to convey thinking: from daily conversation, to professional presentation, let us ask after the habits of speaking well. How does one learn to speak well? Many courses are offered with proposed solutions—from the WikiHow to MasterClasses and entire college majors. Yet it seems, upon brief reflection, […]
On Propaganda
A Philosophical Happy Hour on propaganda’s causes, consequences, and cures. The advent of mass communication—beginning with the national newspaper but greatly accelerated first through radio and second, with great totalization, through television—ushered in a new paradigm for shaping the actions of human beings: propaganda. It has been used to impose faux cultural homogeneity, to establish […]
Language, Non-Existent Objects, and Semiotics
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a fever for scientific explanation of all phenomena gripped many an intellectual. Language, however, has proved resistant to the methods of modern science. Too many aspects of our experience prove irreducible to the empiriometric approach successful in disciplines such as chemistry or biology. This resistance vexes the reductionist’s mind. […]
Reclaiming Culture in the Digital Age
The provincial attitude is limited in time but not in space. When the regional man, in his ignorance, often an intensive and creative ignorance, extends his own immediate necessities into the world, and assumes that the present moment is unique, he becomes the provincial man. He cuts himself off from the past, and without benefit […]
⚘ Victoria Lady Welby, a Significian of our Times | Susan Petrilli
On 4 January 2023 at 11am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here) Susan Petrilli will present on “Victory Lady Welby, a Significian of our Times”. Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of […]
A Vision of the Good
The following is a summary of key points raised in our weekly Philosophical Happy Hour discussion of 9 November 2022 during which we discussed the lacking vision of the good in our contemporary society. Ideologies and False Idols Why do left-leaning progressive politics seem ascendant in the Western world? One does not need to dig […]
