In this conversation, Dr. Jacob Joseph Andrews discusses his journey into the intellectual life, emphasizing the importance of personal development, moral formation, and the role of classical education. He highlights the significance of language study, particularly Latin, in understanding culture and fostering intellectual habits. Andrews also reflects on the value of specialized study and the […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on distinctions, the doctrine of their kinds, and the importance making them correctly. The failure to make good distinctions characterizes the stupidity of our age.  Observe the social networks and see how few distinctions are proposed, how unquestioning the categories, how obstinate every adherent to his or her ideology!  How many […]

Announcement of our Fall 2025 seminar, “What Kind of Certainty?: Steps Toward Dialectical Logic”—have we overlooked an important Aristotelian text and tradition in our understanding of reasoning? Description Details All Lyceum Institute seminars include weekly readings, lectures, and live discussion sessions. The discussion sessions are recorded. This seminar includes extensive readings, but does not require […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the cognitive threats we face in an increasingly interconnected and digital world—and the possible solutions or approaches to them (the “security”). It is mid-2020 and you cannot shake the feeling that you are not getting the whole story.  We are told that a lethal virus is raging across the global.  […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the ways in which passion may capture and distort our exercise of reason—or, in proper subordination, affect a coherence of our persons Thinking clearly.  It seems a vanishingly rare virtue.  Ours is a reactionary time.  Reaction, however, seldom comes from the clear light of reason—but rather from the murky vapors […]

What is pragmatism—according to the man who coined the term, Charles Sanders Peirce? In 1903, C.S. Peirce (1839–1914) was invited by his friend, William James, to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism at Harvard University. As the editors of The Essential Peirce, vol.2 write, in these lectures, “Peirce sought to build a case for […]

We have completed our 2025 catalog and preliminary schedule for all seminars and courses!  While the unpredictability of life means these offerings are subject to change, we nevertheless have a very exciting line-up to offer: Seminar Catalog winter (q1 1/11–3/8) » Ethics: The Good Life [Registration open!] » Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely […]

Few persons who have completed high school are entirely incapable of writing. But it is one thing to possess an elementary capacity for writing and another to write with skill. Learning the skill of writing—or what we might term the art of composition—requires not only practice, but careful habits of thinking. These habits, in order […]

Join us on an intellectually rigorous journey through Aristotle’s conception of physics as a scientific discipline in our upcoming Lyceum Institute Seminar. Why study the physics of an ancient thinker? One might think (and many do) Aristotle’s scientific work obsolesced by the discoveries of modernity. In truth, while he may have been mistaken in particular […]

Oftentimes, a student beginning in logic believes that this study will enable him or her to win arguments, convincing interlocutor and audience alike. But even after a great deal of study and many attempts, expectations and reality remain far apart. Others, particularly in this “post-truth” world where facts seem to account for little but favorable […]