ethics

  • Technology’s Effects on Nature

    Commonly, we presume an opposition between the “natural” and the “artificial”.  Usually, we assume the “natural” to be everything untouched by human hands, whereas the “artificial” is that which we have ourselves brought into being.  But this division not only ends up positing as irreconcilable the objects of our experience, it reinforces a false anthropological…

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  • On Our Need for Truth

    A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the nature and definition of truth, and its necessity for our living good lives. Do we need truth to live good lives?  Do all human beings?  And if so—what is the truth?  How do we know it?  Who “has” it?  Where do we find it?  What do we really mean…

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  • Psychological Effects of Technology

    That technology use has effects on our psychological well-being has become, by this point, well-known and widely recognized.  But the concern is ordinarily limited to the distraction, anxiety, addiction, overstimulation, or other faults in control that appear downstream of specific technological devices or frameworks, such as smartphones, social media, or LLMs.  These are real problems,…

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  • Second Plenary Speaker – Human Formation in the Digital Age

    From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our…

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  • First Plenary Speaker – Human Formation in the Digital Age

    From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our…

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  • The Problem with Solving Technology

    Everyone knows that technology troubles our lives in the twenty-first century.  It distracts us, surveils us, accelerates us, isolates us, weakens our habits of attention, alters the demands and means of education, and increasingly mediates in our relations to both one another and to reality itself.  The natural response is to ask: how do we…

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  • Ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from Hearing [Summer 2026]

    Description Through careful attention to Aristotle’s own argument—against the backdrop of the Pre-Socratics and of Plato—the seminar will examine how the human good possesses universality and necessity without becoming disconnected from the concrete realities of human life. The good is neither imposed upon human nature by extrinsic causes nor fabricated by social agreement. Rather, it…

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  • Face to Face with Everything: How Philosophy Looks at the World and What It Sees

    The Lyceum Institute is delighted to announce the first text in our series with St. Augustine’s Press, Philosophical Habit: New Paradigms for the Digital Age, has been published. This text was developed from a seminar taught at the Lyceum Institute. Face to Face with Everything: How Philosophy Looks at the World and What It Sees…

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  • Is Democracy Viable?

    A Philosophical Happy Hour inquiring into the long-term institutional viability of democratic governance. Why is democracy the favored form of governance in the modern world?  The modern forms of democratic government emerged alongside an emphasis on individual rights, autonomy, and equality.  Therefore it seems, at the root of such emergence, we find beliefs both about…

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  • On Informal Language and the Dissolution of Community

    A Philosophical Happy Hour questioning whether informal language has erosive effects on community—and how formal articulation might aid our relations. How do we acquire language?  We perhaps first need to understand what language is—and we might presume falsely that we do.  But we may think, nonetheless, about how young children learn to speak, to communicate. …

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