thomas aquinas

  • Ethics: The Good Life [Winter 2025]

    Description This is an introductory seminar which provides an entryway into the practice of philosophical reflection. Participants should be able to dedicate a minimum of one hour per day to its study. Details All Lyceum Institute seminars include weekly readings, lectures, and live discussion sessions. The discussion sessions are recorded. This seminar includes a range…

    Read →

  • Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely [Winter 2025]

    Description To understand and affect this maturation into postmodernity, we will turn our attention in this seminar to the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely: the proto-semiotic history, an expanded doctrine of causality,  the retrieved and clarified notion of relation, the concept of physiosemiosis, the continuity of culture and nature, the notion of purely objective reality, and the real interdisciplinarity which semiotics fosters. This is…

    Read →

  • Jefferson, Natural Rights, and the Sources of the Declaration of Independence

    Presenting the fifth in our Colloquium series for the year 2024, Dr. John Pinheiro (PhD in History, Director of Research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty), challenges the common narrative that reduces Thomas Jefferson’s thought in writing the Declaration to the philosophy of John Locke.  Dr. Pinheiro was previously professor…

    Read →

  • The Ontological Status of Light and Color in St. Thomas Aquinas

    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…

    Read →

  • Interview: On Being as First Known

    St. Thomas Aquinas presents in the corpus of his work (at, e.g., De veritate q.1, a.1, Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae, q.94, a.2, and In Metaphysicorum, lib.4, lec.3, n.605) the claim that what the intellect first conceives is being and that the intellect further resolves all conceptions into being. Illud autem quod primo intellectus concipit quasi notissimum,…

    Read →

  • Maritain Musings – Podcast on Signs and Symbols

    Our friends at the American Maritain Association have recently launched a podcast series, “Maritain Musings”, in which Lyceum Faculty Fellow Dr. Matthew K. Minerd is joined by guests to discuss different works of Jacques Maritain. For the fourth episode, the Lyceum’s Executive Director, Dr. Brian Kemple, joined Matthew to discuss Maritain’s essay, “Sign and Symbol”.…

    Read →

  • Do You Trust Me?

    A Philosophical Happy Hour on the reasons for and nature of trust, distrust, and the consequences of breaking it. Image: Christopher Plummer as Iago and James Earl Jones as Othello (Requiescant in Pace). Trust today seems a quality lacking and, yet for which there is great desire.  We do not trust our politicians and often…

    Read →

  • Seminar: Maritain’s Hope for an “Existential Epistemology” [Fall 2024]

    Description Details All Lyceum Institute seminars include weekly readings, lectures, and live discussion sessions. The discussion sessions are recorded. This seminar includes focused readings of Maritain’s work. Participants are required to purchase Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge and Untrammeled Approaches. Priced from $60 per person. Discussion sessions occur on Saturdays at 10:00am–11:00am ET (see world times…

    Read →

  • Lying and Truth as Accomplishments

    The following is excerpted from a presentation given by John Deely on 1 March 2014 at the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Maritain Association. What Makes Possible both Lying and Truth as Human Accomplishments Comment “Listening to Maritain on the subject of sign as treated by Poinsot…” We should, in fact, listen to John…

    Read →

  • Self-Sufficiency of Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics

    Our Colloquium series for the year 2024 continues with a thoughtful interpretation of a perennial difficulty in interpreting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, presented by Joseph M. Cherny, PhD Candidate at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. Mr. Cherny asks: how is happiness self-sufficient? Does it find fulfillment in…

    Read →