We have completed our 2025 catalog and preliminary schedule for all seminars and courses!  While the unpredictability of life means these offerings are subject to change, we nevertheless have a very exciting line-up to offer: Seminar Catalog winter (q1 1/11–3/8) » Ethics: The Good Life [Registration open!] » Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely […]

Lyceum Institute Faculty Fellow John Boyer gave a lecture for the Thomistic Institute on 18 July 2024 of this year concerning the “Ontological Status of Light and Color in St. Thomas Aquinas”. Prof. Boyer’s discussion focuses on the role of light in the operations of vision. While many might discard the physical theories of antiquity […]

Often we have been told that the universe revealed to us by our eyes and ears, our taste and touch, gives a false presentation to the underlying reality: that, beneath the sensory lies a reality discerned through specialized instrumentation and intelligible only at the mathematical level. Sir Arthur Eddington quite famously proposed that there is […]

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 […]

Join us on an intellectually rigorous journey through Aristotle’s conception of physics as a scientific discipline in our upcoming Lyceum Institute Seminar. Why study the physics of an ancient thinker? One might think (and many do) Aristotle’s scientific work obsolesced by the discoveries of modernity. In truth, while he may have been mistaken in particular […]

We have completed our 2024 catalog and preliminary schedule for all seminars and courses!  While these are, of course, always subject to change (life being ever-unpredictable), I am happy to announce this very exciting slate of philosophy seminars for the upcoming year: Seminar Catalog 2024 Winter (Q1) Introduction to Philosophical Thinking – Brian Kemple Phenomenology: […]

What is time? Many a philosopher has wrestled with this question, resulting in rather diverse results. Famous is Aristotle’s definition, which can be stated most simply as, “the measure of motion” (though, in truth, his claims are more complex than this). Famous also are the struggles to understand time in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions […]

Philosophy—real, true philosophy—is transformative. It will not make you successful in the world, but it will answer a question that all the success and security never can: what is the good of being alive?

Traditional philosophical disciplines crystallized over time into a list that goes something like this: logic, cosmology, phil. anthropology, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and aesthetics—and, in the modern age, the hybrid and rather imperialistic enquiry known as epistemology.  Still, additional attention was demanded by issues lying both between or beyond these well-defined areas.  Thus was generated […]

…to view Aquinas strictly through the anachronistic and explicitly semiotic lens of the present—or of any thinker who succeeded him—mistakes the crucial role that his thought plays in the development of a doctrina signorum.  On 16 April 2022, Brian Kemple will present on “Aquinas: The (Meta)Physics behind Semiosis” at 11am ET (see event times around […]