What Is Wrong with the World?
“What’s wrong with the world?” Countless thinkers have asked this question, especially over the past century-plus, and they have asked it over and over again; to the point that few in recent years seem to ask it any longer, even for the purpose of adopting the thinnest veneer of rhetorical posturing. No. Today, almost everyone […]
[2023 Winter] Ethics: Virtue
What does it mean to be good as a human being? Modernity, all too often, has treated this as a problem to be solved. That is, we tend to view moral failings as simply in need of the right solution, the right education, the right program. Morality, however, is something that belongs to the individual. […]
Seminar Catalog for 2023
The year 2022 saw the Lyceum offer a spate of diverse and fascinating seminars. so how can we top this wonderful past year of seminars? Why, with a new year of wonderful seminars, of course! We are covering a broad range of thinkers and ideas this year: Aristotle, Aquinas, John Henry Newman, John Poinsot, Yves […]
No Freedom without Purpose
Musings derived from recent Lyceum Institute conversations concerning language. It is an oft-stated distinction, and with good cause, that “freedom” may be said in two ways: either a kind of negative freedom, that is, a freedom belonging to self-determining agents in the absence of restraint (“freedom from”); or a kind of positive freedom, namely, the […]
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 […]
Reclaiming Wisdom – Summer Fundraising Campaign
Reclaiming Wisdom – Perennial Truths for the Digital Age Once the center of Western culture, the University has lost its way. For centuries, it was a force both stabilizing and civilizing, training young minds to discover the perennial truths by which they were elevated above the merely material concerns of our baser nature. The University […]
[Summer 2022] Philosophical Thought of Garrigou-Lagrange
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, styled by certain parties as the "Sacred Monster of Thomism," taught at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the "Angelicum") in Rome for a long career of over fifty years. Although he is normally understood to be a conservative Roman theologian of his period, an honest assessment of his work shows...
[2022 Spring] Thomistic Psychology: A Retreival
In 2017, an article was published in the Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock, highlighting how pervasive mental health issues have become in our world. Depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and psychosis all appear, according to the authors (Veronica Tucci and Nidal Moukaddam), to be rapidly on the rise. Why? Is it a matter, merely, of […]
The Practice of Philosophy in a Time of Loneliness
In the first Lyceum Institute Colloquia of 2022, we present Brian Jones, PhD Candidate at the University of St. Thomas, TX, who brings us a challenging, interesting, and thought-provoking discussion of what it means to practice philosophy in a time of loneliness and political turmoil. ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic and the destructive mitigation responses to […]
IO2S Deely – Daydreams and Dark Magic: Semiotics and the Meaning of Evil
On 19 February 2022, at 2pm ET (check event times around the world here), our own Kirk Kanzelberger will present on “Daydreams and Dark Magic: Semiotics and the Meaning of Evil”. Dr. Kanzelberger holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University (New York), an M.A. in Philosophical and Systematic Theology from the Dominican School of […]
