The Lyceum continues to grow: in 2019, a single instructor gave 4 philosophy seminars. In 2026, twelve Faculty plan to offer no fewer than 20 distinct courses, across the Trivium, Latin, Greek, Philosophy Seminars, and Reading Circles. We plan to offer several studies in Literature and Colloquia, as well. The concrete planned offerings are as […]

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, […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the nature of a leader, the act of leading, and the concept of leadership in society. Entering into this Happy Hour post, I saw two paths before me: the first and more immediately attractive was the literary road—to think of Hector and Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Virgil in Dante or Satan […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on why the study of signs constitutes the recovery of genuine philosophy and may result in the infusion of philosophical habits into culture. Few words common in modern “intellectual” environments sound as sophisticated or are used as carelessly as “semiotics”.  Given that it is often associated with French structuralism or deconstructionism, […]

Description To understand and affect this maturation into postmodernity, we will turn our attention in this seminar to the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely: the proto-semiotic history, an expanded doctrine of causality,  the retrieved and clarified notion of relation, the concept of physiosemiosis, the continuity of culture and nature, the notion of purely objective reality, and the real interdisciplinarity which semiotics fosters. This is […]

The following is an excerpt from the lectures for the Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely seminar offered at the Lyceum Institute. This seminar will be offered again in January (Q1) of 2025. Sign up for our Newsletter to be notified of when to register! Few truths elude our awareness, let alone our full […]

The past is prologue to the present as the present is prologue to the future. But these terms need defining, not so much the term “prologue” as the terms “past”, “present”, and “future”, for they represent the divisions of time as a framework or measure for the pinpointing of events, and so have no fixity […]

An extract from Deely 2006: “Semiotics, History of” in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition (London: Elsevier) v.11: 216–29. The thinkers of the Latin Age, inspired by Aristotle, liked to distinguish between remote and proximate potentialities. Thus, awareness or knowledge of the action of signs was no more than a remote possibility the long […]

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. […]

I apologize to the folks at the Lyceum for my long absence!  A new project that I’m beginning with my friend Fr. Cajetan Cuddy will hopefully help me to spin off some of this kind of content as I write on various Thomistic topics online.  But… I realize, also, that I’m not much of a “blogger.”  This is […]