technology

  • Culture as a Technology

    โ€œCultureโ€.ย  We hear the word all the time: the culture is in decline, we are losing our culture, we are fighting a culture war.ย  But ask someone to define culture, and you will likely receive many different answersโ€”answers which consist primarily in listing what kinds of thing belong to culture: language, art, movies, music, politics,…

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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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  • Technologizing Our Bodies

    Commonly, we find the human body today treated as a possession, a something-other which is distinct from the self.  This opposition of the โ€œselfโ€ to the body may result in various forms of neglect or abuse of the latter.  But it may also, in recognizing the importance of the body for life even as it…

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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 habitsโ€”and for the environment of thinking as a whole. Introducing SEPPUAI: A Semioethical Framework for Artificial Intelligence The Lyceum Institute…

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  • Technologyโ€™s Effects on Nature

    Commonly, we presume an opposition between the โ€œnaturalโ€ and the โ€œartificialโ€.ย  Usually, we assume the โ€œnaturalโ€ to be everything untouched by human hands, whereas the โ€œartificialโ€ is that which we have ourselves brought into being.ย  But this division not only ends up positing as irreconcilable the objects of our experience, it reinforces a false anthropological…

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  • Psychological Effects of Technology

    That technology use has effects on our psychological well-being has become, by this point, well-known and widely recognized.  But the concern is ordinarily limited to the distraction, anxiety, addiction, overstimulation, or other faults in control that appear downstream of specific technological devices or frameworks, such as smartphones, social media, or LLMs.  These are real problems,…

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  • Second Plenary Speaker – Human Formation in the Digital Age

    From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our…

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  • First Plenary Speaker – Human Formation in the Digital Age

    From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our…

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  • The Problem with Solving Technology

    Everyone knows that technology troubles our lives in the twenty-first century.  It distracts us, surveils us, accelerates us, isolates us, weakens our habits of attention, alters the demands and means of education, and increasingly mediates in our relations to both one another and to reality itself.  The natural response is to ask: how do we…

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  • Retrospect: Resolving the Difficulties of Consciousness

    A retrospective reflection on our Philosophical Happy Hour on Consciousness. Many of these themes will be discussed in depth at our upcoming conference in September. Learn more here. Our Philosophical Happy Hour conversation concerning โ€œconsciousnessโ€ (held 10 June 2026) and spanning more than two hours covered a great many particular topics: the distinction between โ€œbeing…

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