I have, relative to my own age and experience, long been a critic of academia. Just the other week, a friend reminded me of a late-night frustrated rant delivered in graduate school about the seeming hopeless prospects laid before us. Not only our chances to find meaningful employment, I claimed, but the whole structure is […]

An excerpt from Edward P.J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student on the value of rhetoric as needed in the modern age, accompanied by a brief commentary. Selection from the Text: Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the three arts of language. Skill in the language arts is more important today than it used to […]

Musings derived from recent Lyceum Institute conversations concerning language. It is an oft-stated distinction, and with good cause, that “freedom” may be said in two ways: either a kind of negative freedom, that is, a freedom belonging to self-determining agents in the absence of restraint (“freedom from”); or a kind of positive freedom, namely, the […]

On 2 December 2022 (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Massimo Leone will present on “The Semiotics of Religion in the Digital Era”. Leone is Tenured Full Professor (“Professore Ordinario”) of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University […]

Within current philosophy, David Clarke has made a belated attempted to define semiotic itself in the restrictive terms already established as proper to semiology: an “attempt to extend analogically features initially arrived at by examining language use to more primitive signs, with logical features of language becoming the archetype on which analysis of these latter […]

The following is a summary of key points raised in our weekly Philosophical Happy Hour discussion of 9 November 2022 during which we discussed the lacking vision of the good in our contemporary society. Ideologies and False Idols Why do left-leaning progressive politics seem ascendant in the Western world? One does not need to dig […]

Dear all, Due to unforeseen yet gratifying work commitments, Professor Doctor Javier Clavere requested a postponement of the lecture entitled “Anthroposemiosis, Augustine, Poinsot, Peirce and Deely and the Production of Human Knowledge and Experience”, the date of which shall be made public as soon as possible. To all of you we beg for understanding, and […]

On 29 October 2022 at 11am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos will present on “Philosophy as expressed in urban space: the case of ancient Greece”. Commentary will be provided by Olga Lavrenova. Alexandros Lagopoulos is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Aristotle University […]

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 […]

…the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among them for ascendancy.  Ancient grammar was at odds with the dialectics of Plato and, especially, of Aristotle, as the art of interpreting phenomena.  As the method of patristic theology, grammar enjoyed uninterrupted ascendancy until the revival of dialectics by Gerbert, Roscellinus, and […]