Semiotics
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Signs and Obfuscations: Can the Weather Lie?
The forecast calls for rain, but it remains dry. Someone smiles cheerfully at you, while plotting your downfall. You’ve got a fever—but the only cure is more cowbell. Our Philosophical Happy Hour takes up the question of signs, obfuscation, obscurity, and the signs by which truth and falsity are known. Nobody—or almost nobody—expects a career…
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Felicitates de Quodlibet, III.5
A Philosophical Happy Hour on the art of questioning. A unique fifth installment in our Felictates de Quodlibet series for 2026. In this installment, we ask: do you have a serious question—any serious question whatsoever—which troubles your mind? What is that question? Do we really know what it is what we are seeking? The Lyceum’s…
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Retrospect: the Nature of Culture
Our Philosophical Happy Hour (26 August 2026) inquired into the nature of culture. Here is a brief retrospective survey of our discussion. The word “culture” remains laden with confused significations. Sorting out its meaning, organizing the uses of it, and identifying the proper phenomenon it names proves no easy task. Yet even a relatively short…
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On the Nature of Culture
The title might seem like a paradox. Are not “nature” and “culture” radically distinct, even opposed to each other? To answer this we must ask: what do we mean by “nature” and what do we mean by “culture”? Our Philosophical Happy Hour takes up these questions. I have often said, with only a part of…
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Conference Program
Friends, attendees, and anyone interested in the future of human education: we have added the program for our upcoming first-ever live event, Human Formation in the Digital Age. This conference will embrace the biggest challenges facing education today: challenges wrought by our technologies but resolved only through a deeper understanding of what it means to…
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What Does AI Use Do To Us?
As AI use becomes increasingly widespread in the world, it becomes a pressing question to ask not only what effects it might produce in the world, but what consequences it has for users and their habits—and for the environment of thinking as a whole. Introducing SEPPUAI: A Semioethical Framework for Artificial Intelligence The Lyceum Institute…
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…Finishing Our Sentences?
…Finishing Our Sentences? Language and the Habits of Thought in the Age of Generative AI Most discussion about artificial intelligence today tends toward either hype or panic. Optimists see in it a miraculous tool, the future of scientific advancement, and a development not only to rival the industrial revolution in its transformative power, but—perhaps—one that…