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 […]

Cursus PHILOSOPHICUS John Poinsot, O.P., also known as Joannes a Sancto Thoma (1589–1644) wrote two major works in his lifetime: the Cursus Theologicus, on which incomplete text he worked from 1635 until 1643, when he was requested to become counselor and Royal Confessor to King Philip IV of Spain.  While attending to this new duty, […]

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 […]

“…it is strange if it is a shameful thing not to be able to come to one’s own aid with one’s body but not a shameful thing to do so by means of argument, which is to a greater degree a human being’s own than is the use of the body.” Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Questions concerning the nature of evolution—questions which find their way into discourse time and again—have cropped up yet again. This post will make an effort to outline some of these issues, with view to fostering a fruitful discussion for our Philosophical Happy Hour (24 April 2024) on how we ought to think of evolution. It […]

Positivism and Science A difficult and complex question in philosophy today concerns the discussion regarding the intersection and “boundaries” of the harder empirical sciences and the distinct activity of philosophical enquiry.  Given the success of scientific discovery, one temptation in the early 20th century was to claim that disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and […]

In the forthcoming seminar, we present an in-depth philosophical examination of history, inspired by Etienne Gilson’s proposition that the History of Philosophy is analogous to a laboratory for chemists and biologists. The seminar proposes an exploration into the idea that history is not merely a chronological record but a spatial and present reality, as exemplified […]