Listen to Dr. Kirk Kanzelberger as he relates his intellectual journey through life—the continuous thread of learning—from young tragedy and early literacy, through music, moral formation through the literature of Tolkien, work in science, technology, semiotics, philosophy, and more. An enlightening and moving conversation that sheds great light on what it means to pursue knowledge […]

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 […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on theories of perception and their influence on our understanding of reality. What if the world you believe yourself to see, to hear, and to touch isn’t the world at all, but only a clever illusion fabricated by your brain?  The familiar colors, sounds, and textures that feel so immediate—it has […]

New! The second, greatly expanded edition—for those who seek not mere correctness, but understanding. In a world that ignores education in grammar—first, reducing it to mere “correctness” and, second, outsourcing the verification of that correctness to digital technologies—Linguistic Signification offers something far more substantial: an integrated education in the principles of language itself. This text […]

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 […]

The following is an excerpt from the lectures for the Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely seminar offered at the Lyceum Institute. This seminar will be offered again in January (Q1) of 2025. Sign up for our Newsletter to be notified of when to register! Few truths elude our awareness, let alone our full […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the role of semiotics in consensus and community. Across many fields, industries, and academia, it has become a popular claim that we must “build consensus”.  The Harvard Law Program on Negotiation states: “Consensus building is a process involving a good-faith effort to meet the interests of all stakeholders and seek a unanimous […]

An intellectually vigorous soul does not seek justification of its conclusions, but the truth of the matter. All too often, however, our reasoning is applied not to the discovery of inquiry’s foundations but thrown into the midst of a battle. This today is what we face: either you are with or against, an ally or […]

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 […]

In a famous set of scenes in the 2004 classic movie Mean Girls one of the main protagonists, Gretchen Wieners, attempts to introduce a novel expression into the discourse with her friends, insisting upon ending every conversation with the exclamation, “That is so fetch!” After failing to have the terminology catch on for so long, […]