Posts about literature

On Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Beginning in August, the Lyceum Institute will hold a three-week Symposium discussion titled “A Dilemma of Ideology and Faith”, on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This symposium is open to all enrolled members but we are also accepting applications (see below) for a limited number of spots available to the public. We strongly recommend the […]

Solzhenitsyn on Ideology

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918—2008 August 3) was a prolific author, primarily of fiction, whose account of suppression, corruption, and evil in the USSR’s prison system—the Gulag, through which uncountable millions were moved over the decades—exposed the deep rot at the core of socialist thinking. Here we present an excerpt from the first of three […]

A Meditation on Exile

But exile—like that faced by Aeneas—more rapidly ages any man or woman, and, today, we are all today wandering in exile. We want for a home... many seem not to possess even the sense of what “home” is. This deprivation seems especially true of my own generation (millennials) and younger. Not only are we geographically uprooted, but culturally and spiritually, too.

The Challenge of Chivalry

Written by an anonymous author in the late 14th century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight continues to entice the human spirit: drawing us toward something grand, mysterious, and—perhaps most of all—towards the betterment of our own virtue. The titular hero, captured in poetic verse, exemplifies chivalry. Sir Gawain demonstrates courage, piety, courtesy, honesty, honor, […]

⚘ The Semiosis of Boethius’s Prosimetric Style in “De consolatione philosophiae” | Wesley C. Yu

On 24 September 2022 at 2pm ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here) Wesley Chihyung Yu will present on “The Semiosi of Boethius’s Prosimetric Style in De consolatione philosophiae“. Wesley Chihyung Yu is Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His interdisciplinary research on medieval poetics concentrates […]

[2022 Summer] An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture

As the world grew into and through modernity, and technology shrank the distances between centers of civilization, the very nature of culture itself became an explicit philosophical question: most especially when technology produced in the wider reaches of communication something akin to a “global consciousness”: an awareness of people and their cultures all across the […]

[2022 Summer] Seven Interfaces of Philosophy

Traditional philosophical disciplines crystallized over time into a list that goes something like this: logic, cosmology, phil. anthropology, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and aesthetics—and, in the modern age, the hybrid and rather imperialistic enquiry known as epistemology.  Still, additional attention was demanded by issues lying both between or beyond these well-defined areas.  Thus was generated […]

IO2S Deely – Reading and Teaching Literature Digitally

On 5 March 2022, Alexandra Milyakina, PhD, will present on “Reading and Teaching Literature Digitally: A Cultural Semiotic Perspective” at 10am ET/3pm UTC (check event times around the world here). Dr. Milyakina is a researcher at the Department of Semiotics in the University of Tartu, Estonia. The topic of PhD thesis is Digitalization of literary […]

Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human

This lecture explores Percy’s argument and its background in the thought of Descartes and Peirce, and provides an assessment of this final public articulation by Percy concerning the issues that preoccupied him as a writer: the contemporary predicament of the human being, lost in the cosmos that it understands more and more, while understanding itself less and less.

Lectio Commedia: Dante, Poet of Hope

Beginning October 6th, every other Wednesday Dr. Mark McCullough (PhD in Humanities from the City University of New York) will facilitate a 45-minute discussion on one canto of Dante Alighieri’s masterwork The Divine Comedy at 12pm ET: the Lectio Commedia: Dante, Poet of Hope. This will be preceded by a reading of the canto with […]

Beyond the University

Beyond the University exists because the modern university, even where it succeeds, has become inadequate to the true tasks of education.  Education is not the transmission of information or preparation for employment, but the formation of good intellectual habits.  These aims no longer fit comfortably within institutions ordered primarily toward efficiency, expansion, and measurable outcomes.  The Lyceum Institute was founded to provide a genuinely different institutional form—one ordered toward education as an integral part of life rather than as a credentialing process.

The Lyceum cultivates enduring intellectual habits of inquiry, order, and memory through rigorous seminars, focused studies of the Trivium, classical languages, guided reading, and sustained inquisitive conversation.  By supporting the Lyceum Institute, you help sustain an independent public institution devoted to education ordered toward truth, continuity, and long-term intellectual formation.  Your gift ensures that this alternative remains available—not only for today’s students, but for generations to come.

This year (2026), we are seeking to raise $48,000

Join us in bringing new life to education!

Donors who give $4,000+ will receive a special gift.

Support Our Campaign

Subscribe

Subscribe to News & Updates

Enter your email address to subscribe and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 95 other subscribers