ontology

  • On Angelic Beings

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on why we should care about angelic beings and seek understanding of their existence. Nearly every culture in human history has voiced belief in supernatural beings—forces beyond our reckoning that possess powers to shape and change the world.  Indeed, any honest inquiry into the world, the cosmos, shows us wonders beyond…

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  • On What Could Be

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on the distinction of potentiality and possibility in both being and knowing. When we speak about what “could be”, we often unthinkingly use the words “possible” and “potential” as though they were interchangeable.  Yet beneath this ordinary use lies a subtle but nevertheless important distinction: a distinction that reaches into the…

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  • 2024 Spring: Metaphysics – Discovery of Ens inquantum Ens

    “Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the world ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being.” With these words, published in 1927, Martin Heidegger reignited a question—tamped down by modern thought for…

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  • Why “Epistemology” is not a Science

    In a certain way, writing this title and essay pains me: I first fell in love with philosophy in an undergraduate course titled “epistemology”. It was a difficult course to take in my sophomore year. We spent the first half of it reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, on which we had to write…

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  • The singularity of relation and the threads of communication | by Paul Bains

    This event is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent…

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  • [2021 Fall] Metaphysics: The Existence, Nature, and Intelligibility of God

    The fourteen questions which we will read in this seminar, comprising eighty-five articles, will explore the existence, nature, and intelligibility of God.  The existential demonstration—the famous “five ways” of Aquinas—will be covered quickly: for their intelligibility grows the better we understand the rest of the questions, and we will be better equipped for grasping their…

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