It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects (whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially) or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between […]

Over the next several months we will highlight a few of our Columbanus Fellows, bringing to light the character of students engaged in our program! These fellows are engaged in a rigorous and deep inquiry into the Western intellectual tradition, seeking both to retrieve lost wisdom and to further its presence in our society today. Lance […]

Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness.  Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history.  Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which […]

Why do we call a thing “good”?  We have been calling things good since childhood, but, as with any conception so fundamental, it is challenging to unfold its meaning.  Given the multifarious use of this name, “good”, is there even a unity of meaning to discover?  Is it just that we call anything good merely […]

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: […]

With discussion sessions beginning this coming Saturday (9/23), I would be remiss if I did not put out a final call for registration in our Fall seminars. We have three provocative offerings, each of which promises to confront the errors of modernity in radically differing ways. An Encounter with the Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Excerpt […]

Law: the word, to many, conjures images of the courtroom or a legislature—ponderous tomes of tediously-written jargon rendering a complex web of oft-arbitrary-seeming stipulations and impingements.  So prevalent is this imagery that to speak of the “natural law” sounds often like a mere metaphor.  Exacerbating this “metaphorical” tenor of the phrase has been its use […]

“Nothing properly signifies itself.” To signify: this is to convey something other, to something other. Signification thereby contrasts with representation by their respective extensions, which can be either “other-representation” or “self-representation”. When you see a portrait, this represents something other than itself, namely, the person portrayed. When you see that person herself, her visible being […]

It has often been suggested, and not without ample reason and evidence, that the importance of a great thinker never finds itself as potently realized during the thinker’s own lifetime. The significance of truly great thoughts, that is, take not only decades but centuries to unfold. Thus, when it is claimed that John Henry Newman […]

Quid est veritas? A question, doubtless, familiar to many: “What is truth?” Today, whether put into those exact words or others like them, we witness a similar disdain for beliefs that there exists a truth and that we may know it. Seldom, however does this scorn rise from genuine intellectual conviction in the posit of […]