thomas aquinas

  • Aquinas: De Veritate [Part I]

    Quid est veritas? A question, doubtless, familiar to many: “What is truth?” Today, whether put into those exact words or others like them, we witness a similar disdain for beliefs that there exists a truth and that we may know it. Seldom, however does this scorn rise from genuine intellectual conviction in the posit of…

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  • Semiotics: The Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot

    What is a sign? It is a deceptively difficult question—deceptive because we think we know when we have never bothered truly to ask the question. We believe that we see and hear signs everywhere: guiding our use of streets, telling us where to exit, the location of the bathroom, what dangers might lie ahead, and…

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  • On Analogy

    A Brief Primer on the Doctrine’s Confusion Few topics have brought as much consternation to Thomists than that of analogy; not only those living and writing in the contemporary period (subsequent, that is, to the Leonine revival initiated in 1879), but stretching back to the first fluorescence of Thomism begun in the late fourteenth century,…

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  • [2023 Winter] Aquinas’ Cosmological Vision

    All of us, it seems, today bear a heavy burden of being. Increasingly, we may find it difficult to rise from our beds and confront the day: indeed, even for those who persevere, it is a perseverance, it is a confrontation. The world challenges our fortitude. But why? We might assign, and justly, many different…

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  • [2023 Winter] Ethics: Virtue

    What does it mean to be good as a human being? Modernity, all too often, has treated this as a problem to be solved. That is, we tend to view moral failings as simply in need of the right solution, the right education, the right program. Morality, however, is something that belongs to the individual.…

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  • Seminar Catalog for 2023

    The year 2022 saw the Lyceum offer a spate of diverse and fascinating seminars. so how can we top this wonderful past year of seminars? Why, with a new year of wonderful seminars, of course! We are covering a broad range of thinkers and ideas this year: Aristotle, Aquinas, John Henry Newman, John Poinsot, Yves…

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  • ⚘ Poinsot: The Essence of the Sign | Brian Kemple

    On 26 November 2022 at 11am ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here), Dr. Brian Kemple will present on “Poinsot: The Essence of the Sign”. Dr. Kemple holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas, in Houston TX, where he wrote his dissertation under the…

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  • Why “Epistemology” is not a Science

    In a certain way, writing this title and essay pains me: I first fell in love with philosophy in an undergraduate course titled “epistemology”. It was a difficult course to take in my sophomore year. We spent the first half of it reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, on which we had to write…

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  • Fall Seminar Previews

    METAPHYSICS: THE DEPTHS OF ACT & POTENCY “In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could perceive…

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  • [Fall 2022] Metaphysics: The Depths of Act & Potency

    “In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could perceive no sign in the sea.  But suddenly…

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