A Philosophical Happy Hour on theories of perception and their influence on our understanding of reality. What if the world you believe yourself to see, to hear, and to touch isn’t the world at all, but only a clever illusion fabricated by your brain?  The familiar colors, sounds, and textures that feel so immediate—it has […]

On 13 July 2024, when a 20-year-old kid attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally—only inches away from doing so and taking the life of a rally-goer—it raised serious questions about the security around the former president.   How could such a young man surveil the area with a drone, get into such an […]

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 […]

Often we have been told that the universe revealed to us by our eyes and ears, our taste and touch, gives a false presentation to the underlying reality: that, beneath the sensory lies a reality discerned through specialized instrumentation and intelligible only at the mathematical level. Sir Arthur Eddington quite famously proposed that there is […]

The first step on the realist path is to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that, however hard one tries to think differently, one will never manage to; the third is to realize that those who claim they think differently, think as realists as soon as they forget […]

“Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the world ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being.” With these words, published in 1927, Martin Heidegger reignited a question—tamped down by modern thought for […]

We have completed our 2024 catalog and preliminary schedule for all seminars and courses!  While these are, of course, always subject to change (life being ever-unpredictable), I am happy to announce this very exciting slate of philosophy seminars for the upcoming year: Seminar Catalog 2024 Winter (Q1) Introduction to Philosophical Thinking – Brian Kemple Phenomenology: […]

“Religion is anti-science.”  Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, once wrote the following: I’ll construe “science” as the set of tools we use to find truth about the universe, with the understanding that these truths are provisional rather than absolute.  These tools include observing nature, framing and testing […]

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 […]

Banzelão Teixeira presents “A Semiotic Perspective of Cognition: John Deely on the Role of Signs in Human Knowing” for the IO2S & Closing Ceremonies.