A Philosophical Happy Hour concerning the present conditions, future prospects, and most promising directions for the pursuit of higher education Every reality which exists only in the concrete, corporeal world—and especially those that exist only or primarily within the socially-constructed realities of human interaction—has a natural lifespan.  They are born, they mature, and, eventually, they […]

Though a single language, Latin finds diverse expression across the centuries of its use. The student familiar with Cicero and Seneca will different modes of expression in Abelard and Aquinas. But Scholastic Latin, albeit less rhetorically fluid than many of the great classical authors, has a beauty all its own—a spiritual depth and a philosophical […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on… whatever! The third installment in our Felictates de Quodlibet series for 2025, in which we talk about whatever we want, so long as it is interesting, and for as long as we are interested. Or, to put this otherwise: do you have a philosophical question—any question whatsoever—you want seriously to […]

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 […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the relationship between self-awareness, morality, and machine technologies What is the relationship between self-awareness and our moral convictions?  How do our technologies affect this relationship?  This week’s Philosophical Happy Hour takes up these questions and more.  But let us set the stage for our conversation. A member brought this article […]

Help Us Build the Future It’s the last week of our Spring fundraiser! To date, we have raised $9,422. This is $15,578 short of our goal of $25,000. To get us as close to this goal as we can, we are asking for your help in this final week! Any donations, large or small, are […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the struggle to study unfamiliar topics, subjects, texts, and skills—and the necessity of that discomfort Atop my bookcases—visible just over my computer monitors, reminding me of its presence nearly every day—sits a nice four-volume hardcover set titled The World of Mathematics.  This set intimidates me.  Though I have a PhD […]

Last year, the Lyceum Institute hosted Dr. Daniel De Haan (Frederick Copleston Senior Research Fellow & Lecturer in Philosophy & Theology in the Catholic Tradition Blackfriars and Campion Hall / Research Fellow, Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford) for a colloquium presentation on “The Centrality of […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the nature, operations, and training of the memory. “This invention [of writing]”, says the Egyptian King Thamus, in Plato’s Phaedrus, “will produce forgetfulness in the souls who have learned it.”  It perhaps shocks us, slightly at least, to read this condemnation of writing.  But let us consider the rest of […]

Wisdom and Dignity This [ability to know things as they truly are], then, is that dignity of our nature which all naturally possess in equal measure, but which all do not equally understand. For the mind, stupefied by bodily sensations and enticed out of itself by sensuous forms, has forgotten what it was, and, because […]