politics

  • Complete Lyceum Catalog – 2024

    We have completed our 2024 catalog and preliminary schedule for all seminars and courses! ย 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 โ€“ Brian Kemple Phenomenology:…

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  • On the โ€œCulture Warโ€ and Formal Causality

    The term kulturkampf, literally โ€œculture struggleโ€, has long-since been translated into English as โ€œculture warโ€.ย  I have no desire to participate in a โ€œculture warโ€.ย  Indeed, as I will argue here, the very notion of the โ€œculture warโ€ is not only misguided but harmful.ย  But as someone living within a culture, however, I do believe…

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  • Connection of the Philosophical and the Pragmatic

    One could argueโ€”and I have myself many a timeโ€”that never before in human history has there been greater need for the presence of philosophical habit and the realization of philosophical wisdom. We find ourselves engaged in constant communication. Therefore, we find ourselves also immersed ever more in ideas. A theoretical grasp of those ideas seems…

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  • Political Philosophy: A Thomistic Defense of Democracy

    This seminar has been cancelled and will be offered instead at a later date TBD. Can we have a democratic government in an increasingly post-liberal world?  Must we return to a strict hierarchy if we are to abandon the โ€œliberal experimentโ€ that has rendered increasing ailment in recent decades?  These are not questions with simple…

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  • The Practice of Philosophy in a Time of Loneliness

    Brian Jones (PhD candidate, University of St. Thomas, TX) delivers a thoughtful lecture on how the practice of philosophy in our time of loneliness can sustain and elevate us throughout the present crisis and the threat it poses to the world. Jones draws on the thought of Alexis De Tocqueville, Byung-Chul Han, James V. Schall,…

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  • Solzhenitsyn on Ideology

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918โ€”2008 August 3) was a prolific author, primarily of fiction, whose account of suppression, corruption, and evil in the USSRโ€™s prison systemโ€”the Gulag, through which uncountable millions were moved over the decadesโ€”exposed the deep rot at the core of socialist thinking. Here we present an excerpt from the first of three…

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  • [2022 Summer] An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture

    As the world grew into and through modernity, and technology shrank the distances between centers of civilization, the very nature of culture itself became an explicit philosophical question: most especially when technology produced in the wider reaches of communication something akin to a “global consciousness”: an awareness of people and their cultures all across the…

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  • The Practice of Philosophy in a Time of Loneliness

    In the first Lyceum Institute Colloquia of 2022, we present Brian Jones, PhD Candidate at the University of St. Thomas, TX, who brings us a challenging, interesting, and thought-provoking discussion of what it means to practice philosophy in a time of loneliness and political turmoil. ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic and the destructive mitigation responses to…

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  • The Breakdown of Secular Democracy and the Need for a Christian Order

    The question has been raised as to whether or not secular liberalism can sustain itself, especially as it seems to be breaking down in our present time, both from the perspective of anti-modernists who uphold tradition, but also from modernists themselves who have fallen into totalitarian ideologies, Marxism being the most common among them.

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  • This Week [5/9-5/15]

    Updates on seminars, Paradise Lost, research endeavors, and more!

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