meaning
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Retrospect: On Questioning
Our Philosophical Happy Hour (2 September 2026) focused on the art of questioning—and precisely how we have come, wrongly, to expect answers today. Here is a reflection on what was discussed. These brief reflections are structured principally around four questions asked: first, concerning the evaluation of propositions the content of which are not immediately evident…
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Literature, Writing, and the Recovery of Man
A Philosophical Happy Hour inquiring into the virtues of the written word—on literature, writing, and the possibility of meaningful truths amidst a flood of meaningless words. Walker Percy’s brief meditation, titled “From Facts to Fiction” begins autobiographically: a physician trained in the beauty, rigor, and explanatory power of science finds himself forced by illness into…
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On the Necessity of Friendship for Discovering the Good
A Philosophical Happy Hour focused on the question of friendship: its nature, deepening, and the necessity of others with whom we share the search for the good. I have spent much of my life alone. The youngest in my family, I began homeschooling in fourth grade, and continued until I started community college, before transitioning…
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On the Univocal and the Analogical
A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the principles and aims of language through univocal and analogical predication. What is the meaning or the significance of a word? This question may operate on two levels: first, concerning a specific word’s meaning—“tree” or “justice”, “fruit” or “truth”; or, second, concerning the relationship between meaning in general and words…
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On the Shifting Sands of Language
A Philosophical Happy Hour on Owen Barfield’s “Philology and the Incarnation”, wherein we will think about meaning and metaphor in language. For this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour, we will again take up a specific short text to read and discuss: this time, Owen Barfield’s short article, “Philology and the Incarnation”, available in this attached PDF. …
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On Memory and its Training
A Philosophical Happy Hour on the nature, operations, and training of the memory. “This invention [of writing]”, says the Egyptian King Thamus, in Plato’s Phaedrus, “will produce forgetfulness in the souls who have learned it.” It perhaps shocks us, slightly at least, to read this condemnation of writing. But let us consider the rest of…
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On the Problem of Education
A Philosophical Happy Hour concerning the problem of universal education: should we educate everyone? To what extent? How? Why (not)? If we look today at the results of universal education, particularly over the past century, we may think that its institution was a mistake. The results are those of decline. High test scores in a…
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Discovering Meaning in the Cosmos
A Philosophical Happy Hour on the struggle against nihilism—cosmological and psychological—and inadequate methods to assure ourselves of meaning in the cosmos. What is meaning? What do we mean when we say the word? What does the word signify? It is one of those funny words that everyone seemingly believes himself to know and yet which…