happy hour
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Felicitates de Quodlibet, I.2
A Philosophical Happy Hour on… whatever! Continuing our Felictates de Quodlibet series, in which we talk about whatever we want, so long as it is interesting. In the Scholastic university, renowned thinkers would regularly engage in open debate on questions posed by other scholars or students at the institution. Most often, these questions would concern…
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Felicitates de Quodlibet
A Philosophical Happy Hour on… whatever! In the Scholastic university, renowned thinkers would regularly engage in open debate on questions posed by other scholars or students at the institution. Most often, these questions would concern a specific, pre-determined topic. From this we derive works such as Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate and Quaestiones disputatae…
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Foundationalism, Anti-Foundationalism, and the Justification of Belief
A Philosophical Happy Hour on basic questions of our noetic experience. In our conversation, we will examine these different approaches of foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, ask about their merits, demerits, whether they rest upon certain presuppositions, whether these presuppositions have justification—and what is the meaning of belief. In what follows, we provide brief descriptions of the…
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Discussing Certitude and Intuition
A Lyceum Member writes, proposing a Philosophical Happy Hour topic: What is certitude? What role do signs play in achieving certitude? What role do signs play in intuition? Can I be certain about my mother’s love – is it intuited through signs, or through some other means? The notions of certitude and intuition have played…
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Questions of Tolerance
Today’s Philosophical Happy Hour concerns the issue of “tolerance”. As Geoffrey Meadows, who will be leading the discussion, writes: Tonight I thought we might discuss the definition, limit, and moral status of “tolerance,” since our discussion on kindness uncovered this underlying sensibility of our age. Perhaps a series of guided questions can get us started…
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Love and Kindness
Among the diverse ways in which people today live unreflectively, prominent is the attachment to kindness. Frequent are the admonitions to be kind—and, indeed, often it is used as a defense for one’s moral righteousness when caught out in immoral actions: “I’m not a bad person, I am kind…” (as though being kind covered up…
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On “Mental Health”
We, as a society, are not well. Reports on “mental health” in the United States of America, in particular, estimate at least 25% of adult Americans meet the criteria for one or another mental illness. This number has only been increasing in recent decades, despite the large number of professionals who have entered in the…
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Time and the Ordering of Self-Motion
What is time? Many a philosopher has wrestled with this question, resulting in rather diverse results. Famous is Aristotle’s definition, which can be stated most simply as, “the measure of motion” (though, in truth, his claims are more complex than this). Famous also are the struggles to understand time in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions…
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The Habit of Conversation
Distracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentration-T.S. Eliot 1935: “Burnt Norton” (first of the Four Quartets), III. Few poets ever have and likely ever will attain the prescience of T.S. Eliot. I find myself repeating, with increasing frequency, the lines quoted above: not only so that I…