education

  • Retrospect: the Nature of Culture

    Our Philosophical Happy Hour (26 August 2026) inquired into the nature of culture.ย  Here is a brief retrospective survey of our discussion. The word โ€œcultureโ€ remains laden with confused significations.ย  Sorting out its meaning, organizing the uses of it, and identifying the proper phenomenon it names proves no easy task.ย  Yet even a relatively short…

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  • On the Nature of Culture

    The title might seem like a paradox.ย  Are not โ€œnatureโ€ and โ€œcultureโ€ radically distinct, even opposed to each other?ย  To answer this we must ask: what do we mean by โ€œnatureโ€ and what do we mean by โ€œcultureโ€?ย  Our Philosophical Happy Hour takes up these questions. I have often said, with only a part of…

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  • Culture as a Technology

    โ€œCultureโ€.ย  We hear the word all the time: the culture is in decline, we are losing our culture, we are fighting a culture war.ย  But ask someone to define culture, and you will likely receive many different answersโ€”answers which consist primarily in listing what kinds of thing belong to culture: language, art, movies, music, politics,…

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  • What Does AI Use Do To Us?

    As AI use becomes increasingly widespread in the world, it becomes a pressing question to ask not only what effects it might produce in the world, but what consequences it has for users and their habitsโ€”and for the environment of thinking as a whole. Introducing SEPPUAI: A Semioethical Framework for Artificial Intelligence The Lyceum Institute…

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  • On Reading the Great Books

    A Philosophical Happy Hour inquiring after the merits of reading the Great Books and understanding the environment of the reader. The recovery of classical education, much in vogue today, has often been identified with the recovery of the Great Books. ย This is understandable: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Newman, Dostoevsky, and others do…

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  • A Preface to Metaphysics – Jacques Maritain

    Among the tasks of the Lyceum Institute is a preservation and accessibility of great texts in the tradition. Our latest work in this initiative is the republication of Jacques Maritain’s Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being. Though it has remained available in public domain reprint editions for some time, these have been unreliable and…

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  • Quodlibet de Disciplina, III.2

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on… anything pertaining to learning (disciplina)! The second installment in our Felictates de Quodlibet series for 2026, with a specific topic but an open field of questioning. Or, to put this otherwise: do you have any question whatsoever, or any idea of weight, so long as it pertains to learning that…

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  • Rhetorica ad Herennium [English]

    Among the tasks of the Lyceum Institute is a restoration of forgotten traditions and texts. Newly produced within this initiative is our republication of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a classic work in Roman oratory, in the English translation by Harry Caplan. This text, from roughly 80BC, informed the study of rhetoric in the days of…

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  • What Classical Education Needs

    In this conversation, Geoffrey Meadows (Head of Upper School, Tulsa Classical Academy) discusses being a โ€œhunter of causesโ€ and the need to translate enthusiasm into hard work in classical education. Together with Dr. Kemple, he discusses the importance of philosophy, the impact of technology on education, and the necessity of moral formation in students. Geoffrey…

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