Technology is often discussed and conceived in extreme terms: triumphant progress, mastering nature; or self-inflicted catastrophic destruction. But rarely is the question asked—and even more rarely answered well—what is technology? How are we affected in ourselves by our technologies? The 2024 Difficulties of Technology seminar, conducted within the multiyear Humanitas Technica project, asked these and […]

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 […]

Announcement of our Fall 2025 seminar, “The Opportunities of Technology”—how can we redeem the technological from its current abused status? 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 advanced philosophical knowledge (nor does it have […]

What does it mean to care for creation? In an age dominated by climate rhetoric and ecological anxiety, conversations about the environment often drift into extremes: either sentimental reverence for nature or technocratic management of “resources.” But what if there were another way—one rooted in a deeper understanding of nature, of the human person, and […]

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 advanced philosophical knowledge. All required texts will be provided in PDF format. Priced from $60 per person. Discussion sessions occur on Saturdays at 1:45pm–2:45pm ET (see world […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour against the Inversion of our Knowledge What does it mean for something to be natural?  We find the word ubiquitous in today’s marketing: all natural bug spray, dog treats, body wash, shampoo, deodorant, laundry detergent, toothpaste, sunscreen.  Ironically, of course, none of these products occur by nature.  Each is a product […]

Unless you have been living under a rock—which might in fact be quite an enviable place to live, these days—I should not need to point out that masculinity has been a controversial topic over the past decade.  I could argue here against the various claims that have been made against something like a “traditional” concept […]

As soon as the soul arrives at self-consciousness, it is no longer merely the form, the end or even the principle of organization; a world opens within it that increasingly separates and detaches itself from the life of the body, and in which the soul has its own life, its own destiny, and its own […]

Semiotics—toward which human beings took their first explicit steps in the beginning of the Latin Age of philosophy, in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo (350–430AD), an age that culminated in the thinking of John Poinsot (1589–1644)—is that by which we begin in a true postmodernism. This is one of the key and perhaps […]

How can semiotics help us to understand culture? Simply put: through understanding the causality of the sign in conjunction with the reality of the specifically-human world. This demands, of course, that we understand what we mean by reality. Is it just those things that exist independently of our minds? Or does it have a broader, […]